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A glance at the Cuban culture through its cultural portals
Carlos A. Más Zabala, Idelsis Gallardo Rodríguez, Indira Izquierdo
Rodríguez, Raúl Colón Rodríguez, Yadnara Martínez Fresneda,
Dunieska Cstañeda Vega, Yaimara Camacho González
Cuban culture on the Internet
The contemporary technological revolution is having a profound impact upon ways
of working and communicating, changing and developing all the spheres of human
activity. Its overwhelming impact has been reflected in the fact that it gives a name to
a momentum in contemporary modern society – i.e. information society or
information and communications technologies (ICT) era. The fast pace of
development in modern society, facilitated greatly by the new technologies, has an
effect on the way we live and many forms of cultural expressions have been rapidly
disappearing thus diminishing the wealth of our cultural diversity.
This new context implies serious challenges for today’s cultures and proposes
different perspectives for culture. Culture can be viewed as a process of human
creation, supported by the new information and communications technologies; it can
be looked at from a historical, national and regional prism, as well as from the
globalization perspective – which goes hand in hand with the technological
revolution – and is imposing certain stereotypes that affect the cultural heritage and
the existing linguistic diversity.
Cuban Internet access and possibilities for development of digital culture are
defined on the one hand by the country’s economic difficulties and the economic
blockade that the United States imposed on Cuba, 1 which hampered Cuban access to
the Internet until 1996 and still hampers Cuba’s access to submarine fibre optic
cables, making the country dependent on satellites for linking to the Internet – a fact
1 http://www.cubaminrex.cu/bloqueo/inicio.htm
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