Cuba has an established electronics manufacturing industry. Semiconductors, radios, televisions, and Cuban-designed computers are assembled with foreign parts. Computer youth clubs are springing up everywhere. A club in Havana has work stations with modern Pentium computers on the ground floor, used by young Web designers looking like dotcommies from a Silicon Valley start-up. The walls are emblazoned with slogans and posters - but not quite the ones expected in a club owned and operated by the Cuban Communist Party.
Posters advertise courses in software programming, multimedia, computer repair, and e-commerce.
Classes upstairs are packed with serious teenagers learning HTML and Microsoft Office. Students swap copies of Giga, a slick Cuban computer magazine. Recent topics include Internet security and a review of new hotel-reservations software developed by the Cuban firm Softur. Despite the embargo, Giga carries ads for US brands such as Microsoft, IBM, Macintosh, and Oracle. Cuba is ideally positioned to be a digital hub.