On April 2009, I decided to stop working for cuban State. This decision emerged with the increasing feeling of repression experimented when one, as system administrator, isn't agree with the restrictions impossed by cuban State and tries to find an alternative way to express oneself differently. In this environment, one can realize that the cuban political system lacks of such independent alternatives for cubans to use. I don't pretend to use this book to detail the political system I live on, but I do want to say that the more I got involved with the cuban political system the more distance I felt between the most pure of myself and the actions the system expected from me to do as system administrator. Nevertheless, it is motivating to see how we are able to realize about such things thank to bright minds like Richard Stallman with his philosophy about freedom and an immense free software community under constant development which provides the medium to express the free software philosophy as a way of living. In these last years (2009-2011), the cuban State has shown signs to start using free software distributions with the idea of reaching a technology independency which is quiet contradictory to me. What independency we are talking about here? Independency for whom, and from whom? The only way I see the cuban State will be able to reach such independency (as long as I understand its political system) would be creating and maintaining an entire technical infrastructure (e.g., computers, network devices, operating systems written from scratch, etc.) inside its political boundaries without any intervention from the outside. Otherwise, the cuban State would be inevitably attached to someone that can differ from it and, that would be something unacceptable for cuban State, because it would compromise the former idea it has about independency. The cuban State is misunderstanding or trying to distort the real meaning of free software and the philosophy behind it. The free software is built by people and dedicated to people whom might be in need of it, with the hope of being useful and garantee the freedom of computer users paying a monetary price or not for it. The cuban State, on the other hand, introduces free software at convenience because there are entire operating systems free of charge one can study and change as needed, not in the sense of the freedom it provides to people. The cuban State uses free software as another impositions to control what software does people use and which one doesn't. When I was working in the health sector of cuban State, my superior told me once that I couldn't keep using &TCD; on servers any longer, because system administrators at central level stopped using Red Hat related distribution and started to use Debian. I don't want to enter in a debate why one or another distribution, that's not the point. But I do want to mentione that this decision couldn't be taken from one day to another without any consideration about all the time people spent studying (and working for) one specific GNU/Linux distribution. My opinion was rejected and they kept themselves showing me that it was a politics to follow, no matter what I thought about it. I couldn't accept that and fired up myself. I cannot change from one operating system to another just because someone wants to. Some people might see that it is free software anyway, but think that again: Shouldn't you have the freedom to decide what free software to use, and also what community you join to? No one must impose you anything about which social community you participate in, that is a decision you need to take yourself, not someone else. Sadly for cuban people, the medium where such free software communities live in (i.e., Internet) is only available for institutions related to cuban State, making it very difficult for cubans without any political relation with the cuban State to make decitions like that and integrate any free software community at all. I strongly beleive that for the free software philosophy to touch the heart of cubans, the free software communities must be accessable to all cubans. However, while the cuban State keeps itself being inbetween, controlling how the cubans can or cannot integrate any specific way of living, there will not be free software in Cuba, nor any freedom for cubans to make use of. Another popular affair frequently mentioned by the cuban State information media is the migration from privative to free software. The migration from privative software to free software must be initiated from people deepest comprehension of what they are doing, not from impositions of another inquestionable order everybody need to comply with. So, cubans need to feel what freedom is and express it in order to perceive a deep impact of free software in cuban society. We cannot pretend that cubans use free software based on a lie or a distorted idea of the freedom it provides, that idea won't last much before it falls itself into pieces. People need a way of identifying themselves apart from any social or political system in order for them to be able of decide whether or not to be part of one. It is impossible to truly defend freedom if one doesn't have felt what it is. The cuban State never talks (at least on its information media) of introducing free software for freeing the cuban society of privative software. In fact, if you compare the privative software and the way cuban State restricts information, See resolution 129 emitted by the cuban Ministerium of Informatics and Telecommunications (MIT). you may find them very similar. The resolutions emitted by cuban State are specific to statal instituions when using computers to share information. I don't know of any legal estipulation about using information and communication technologies by nautural people outside the statal sector and spite of it, I've heard of people that has been called by the cuban State security departament to explain why they built a computer network in the neighbourhood to share information (isn't that obvious) and finally they were intimidated to stop doing so. There isn't a legal instrument in either direction that one can use as pattern to act legally. The cuban State has all the legal power to condemn you as cuban, but you are completly naked against it. Internet access is another obscured issue inside Cuba. Around 2008, Cuba and Venezuela signed up an agreement to connect each nation with a trasatlantic fiber optic cable for high speed Internet access. In 2011 the cuban State announced the cable had been touched the cuban territory, but nothing more has been mentioned so far. There is a terrible silence about it. Some people are woundering why to spend so much money on that if no cuban can use it, others prefer to think that the entire project failed. It is difficult to know what happend exactly because, again, there is no alternative way of communication but those provided and controlled by the cuban State. The fact is that there isn't a way for cubans to contract an Internet service at home, nor a viable way to acquire a fixed telephone line at home either. However, the same isn't true for extrangers coming from other countries to visit Cuba or stay inhere as residents. The cuban State permits these persons to pay the Internet service, in offices called Telepuntos or for accessing it at home using different fees. Some cubans cannot understand this, nor the logic behind it either. In Cuba there is only one telecommunication organization named ETECSA. This organization is very tied to cuban State and controls everything related to telephone networks and dedicated links for data transmistion in the island. I heard of a case where someone tried to establish an independent connection from Cuba to another country using the air as phisical medium for data trasmission and that person is pressently suffering years in cuban prisons for doing that. The cuban State considered such action as a risk for national security. At this moment I have no more information about this case. It is very difficult to be accurate about such things without an alternative information medium, apart from those under cuban State control. Based on the fact that the telephone network is the only communication medium most cubans have direct access to, our attention is centered on it, as phisical medium to exchange data using computers. It is important to remark that, when using the telephone network as medium for data transmission, there are limitations in the number of simultaneous connections it is possible to phisically establish between computers, it could be difficult to obtain the required communication devices inside the island, and it could be too much expencive to make international calls in order to exchange information with public services available on different networks outside Cuba's political boundaries. Besides all these restrictions, the telephone network has a national scope that can be efficiently used by computers to transfer data all over the island at a cost of national telephone calls. I beleive that most of problems the cubans presently have are caused by a lack of information we need to face in order to understand what we are and where we are going to, in the sense of an interdependent human being's society. To face the information problem, it is needed to make available independent ways for cubans to express themselves in freedom and provide, this way, the routes needed to work out the problems we face today. That's my goal with this work: educating myself in the compromise of providing an independent space for cubans to discuss and coordinate how to create collaborative networks using the cuban telephone network Considering that I and most cubans haven't Internet access at present time. as phisical medium to transmit information using computers in freedom. The motivation for this work was taken from the free software philosophy exposed by Richard Stallman in his book Free Sofware Free Society and my personal experience from 2003 to 2009 as active member inside &TCP; international community.