Overview
On April 2009, I decided to stop working for cuban State. This
decision emerged itself on me from an increasing feeling of
repression against system administrators by cuban State which
might be acceptable when one chooses to agree with the
limitations and play the game. When you don't agree with them
and try to find an alternative way to express yourself
differently, you'll realize that the cuban political system
lacks of such independent alternatives for anyone 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 involve with
the cuban political system the more distance I feel between
the most pure of myself and the actions the system expect from
me to do. However, it is motivating how oneself can realize
about such things thank to bright minds like Mr. 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
way of living.
In these last years, the cuban State has shown signs to start
using free software distributions with the goal 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 for the cuban State to reach the independency it looks
for (as long as I understand its political system) is creating
and maintaining an entire infrastructure (e.g., computers,
network devices, operating systems, etc.,) of its own without
any intervention from the outside. Otherwise, the cuban State
will be inevitably attached to someone that may differ from it
and that is something unacceptable because may compromise the
former idea. If you think this is what cuban State needs, I
have to say that it is one of the most nonsense idea one can
ever think of, specially when you consider the the way
international communities of free software and hardware
providers interact one another in the modern world.
The free software emerged from people who know what freedom
is. It is impossible to defend freedom if one don't feel what
it is. The cuban State never talks (at least on the public
media) of introducing free software for freeing the society of
privative software. In fact, if you compare the privative
software and the way cuban State operates the information
area, based on the resolution 149 emitted by the Minister of
Informatics and Telecomunications (MIT), you may find them
very similar. There is a very strict control over all the
information media on the country and they cannot be used to
other purposes different to those defined by the State. For
example, to reach Internet access, cuban people need to be
working for the State somehow and that way comply with the
politics impossed by it about information management. There is
no a legal way for cuban people to contract an Internet
service at home. The most one can do in Cuba to share data is
trying to resolve
a fixed telephone line at
home to gain access to the telephone network and then use it
to transmit data using computers. The telephone network most
people have access to, however, there are limitations in the
number of simultaneous connections that can be performed and
finding the Modem devices required.
Modem devices aren't available on stores. In fact, the few
computation hardware available on stores has prices that
very few people can pay for (making this another
limitation for average poeple).
The migration from privative software to free software must be
from people comprehension of what they are doing, not from the
impossition of another inquestionable order to comply with.
So, people need to feel what freedom is and express it in
order to perceive a deep impact in the society. Don't pretend
people will use a free software distribution based on a lie,
that idea won't last much before it fall into pieces. People
need a way of identify themselves apart from any political
system in order for them to decide whether or not to be part
of one.
It is also fare to mention that freedom has a cost and more if
you are living in a political system where most people cannot
make use of it to manifest themselves. I didn't find any
solution other than isolate myself from that political system
repressing my natural freedom of expression. For example,
When I closed my contract, it was very difficult to find a job
as system administrator and had to relay on my family which,
in its majority, grew up with the political system I reject
and is attached somehow to it. A terrible humilation to me,
but less humilation than a direct relation since it wasn't my
decision to come into the world nor be educated in a way I
wasn't able to take concience of. This way, I gave my first
step back into the reconstruction of myself.
The reconstruction of oneself is a painful process where care
should be taken against craziness and high blood pressures. It
is a time of loneliness and waiting one need to face
inevitably at some point of life. In that time you compress
yourself until you are able of seeing what you are, what you
are not, what you are doing, why are you doing it, and what
purpose does everything has for others once your life reaches
its end in this word. How strong you are to take the
responsability of your own existence and fight against anyone
trying to take that from you. In this process, one separates
its body from its mind and makes it to act based on a major
idea of what one has faith in. Your life, and all it brings to
you, is so yours that it is very important that everyone be
aware of that, specially in political systems that insist on
living your life for you.
After two years in this situation, Frank Sueiras (the housband
of my ant Carmen L. Delgado) retires himself from working to
cuban State and started doing jobs for third parties. In one
of those jobs, the Jesuitas church contracts him to
planificate everything related to hydraulics on a building
under construction. I went with him there and the air of
community remembered me that one experimented inside &TCP;. I
saw an opportunity therein and ask him to talk there in order
for me to work on whatever it be needed (e.g., putting glasses
on doors, helping the welder man, painting, etc.).
They didn't need a system administrator by then ;-).
This way I received a payment for living (which
was almost 4 times more than what I was receiving as system
administrator when worked for the cuban State). At nights I
keep myself reading the documentation available inside &TCD;
and writing about &TCAR; with the hope of found an Internet
access to share what I've been doing.
&TCAR; development has been the excel I've been attached to
through all this time. It has been the sence of my days, the
central place I've used to reconstruct myself and I use this
book to describe what you can do to help me develop &TCAR; in
an environment where the only independent way of transfer data
is the telephone network, motivated by the need of sharing
still in this very limited conditions.