CubaTrade-April2017-FLIPBOOK

Photo by David Ramos Casin
Photo by Thos Robinson
Working with less: Software programmers are the latest Cuban entrepreneur Connecting through the Catholic church: John McIntire, chairman of the Cuba Emprende Foundation
Cuba,” said Matusky. “That’s sort of our dream.”
Innovadores is now in the third year of its internship exchange
program, which brings Cuban high school and university
students to work with the NYC-based accelerator Grand Central
Tech. Down the road they hope to create a full incubator program
on the ground in Havana, which will provide interns with
access to resources like the internet, software, computers, mentorship,
and a co-working space.
Much like any foreign organization or business hoping to
establish a presence on the island, the Innovadores Foundation
has been in talks with government officials for years, and still
awaits approval from the Ministry of Culture. “We got in at a
nice time, and because we have a good partner down there, it
was going well,” said Matusky, referring to the Ludwig Foundation
of Cuba (LFC). But after an uncertain year, the government
has begun hitting the breaks on international projects.
“There was a Rolling Stones concert, Chanel show, all these
big international projects,” Matusky said. “I think the government
felt like they weren’t sure if everything that was happening was
what they wanted in terms of the cultural standpoint. So they
sort of froze a lot of approvals for international [projects] under
the Ministry of Culture.”
Then, of course, came Donald Trump’s election, and Fidel’s
death. “The government is not taking any big risks right now, so
we’re just being patient, and doing what we can in the meantime.”
While they wait for the green light to open their Havana incubator,
Innovadores is still able to provide mentorship and other
non-material support to local cuentapropistas—licensed workers
in the private sector—such as connecting one young designer to
New York fashion insiders, and helping an artist-programmer duo
run an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for their video game.
Matusky, himself an engineer and the co-founder of a gluten-free
microbrewery in Pittsburgh, refers to the young Cuban
entrepreneurs as “teams” even though legally, they work as individual
cuentapropistas under either a programmer’s or artist’s license.
Right now, there are two ways these innovators can work
together on projects. “There’s the one model where it’s a team
of equal developers,” said Matusky “and they’re sort of sharing
things, and doing it without a contract, based on trust.” The
other model is that of sole proprietorship, where one designer or
programmer owns a business, and hires other licensed entrepreneurs
who “are basically contractors, if you look at it from a U.S.
[perspective].”
For the Innovadores incubator—and for the native tech
industry as a whole—internet access remains the sticking point.
“We could do almost everything we wanted to do right now
without approval from the government,” Matusky told Cuba
Trade. “We could rent a space. We could invite different people to
come and work there. But as soon as you want to provide internet
access, that’s where you really run into difficulty… You have to
have explicit approval from the government, and then they want
to know what you’re doing.”
The Talent Pool Awaits
Although the introduction of wifi hotspots and cuentapropista
licenses have made it possible for a small entrepreneurial tech
scene to exist in Cuba, the government’s cautious steps forward
have not been enough to counter the global demand for skilled
IT workers, which has lured talented computer scientists off the
island for decades.
In a conversation with Cuba Trade earlier this year, John
McIntire, chairman of the Cuba Emprende Foundation, said
that “a disproportionate number of people who have left in the
last few years are people in their 20s and 30s who are computer
programmers. They know their skills are employable, and they
can earn a lot more money outside of Cuba.”
McIntire’s Cuba Emprende Foundation has for years been
raising money to support the Catholic Church of Cuba’s Proyecto
Cuba Emprende, which trains potential entrepreneurs with
the skills they need to run private businesses. So far more than
2,000 students have gone through programs administered via
the church, including many in the high-tech sector, with an eye
toward remaining in Cuba.
One U.S. employer who runs a small development team
in Cuba describes a desperate “war for talented programmers”
among the most advanced technological companies around the
world. He believes Cuba’s pool of skilled techies is waiting to
be discovered. “If you have a place like Cuba where there are
talented people, the companies that could potentially hire them
are going to find them.”
The biggest concern, he says, is the lure of higher wages off
island. “It’s bad there right now,” he added. “There’s a big gulf
between the cost of living and wages. How much longer is it
sustainable to pay people a dollar a day?”
A History of High Tech
Cuba’s private tech sector may be nascent, but it’s state tech sector
is not. The government has a long history of training coders
that goes back to the 1970s, when developers were busy creating
programs for the sugar industry. At the time, Cuba hoped to improve
its centrally run economy through cybernetics—the science
of communications and automatic control systems—the same
degree that young Innovadores interns are graduating with today.
The severe economic collapse of the late 1980s left few
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