Officials are at least giving lip service to the educational, research, and business activities required for an internationally competitive software industry. At Informatica '92, Centersoft sponsored an announcement for some PC-based multimedia software products as part of a joint venture with an Italian firm. As is common in such undertakings, the partner from the more developed country supplies capital, equipment and marketing skills, while the less developed partner supplies cheap labor. Cuba is also seeking to host official international centers. Perhaps the least of these problems, but by no means an insignificant problem for Cuba, is a poor technological infrastructure.
Telecommunications is an important example.
We found, for instance, that making phone calls from one side of Havana to the other often required several attempts, taking the better part of an hour simply to complete a call. International telecommunications is even more problematic. As in most developing countries, infrastructure drops off sharply outside of the capital. Cuban domestic organizations are neither as information intensive nor as flexible as those in many more developed non-communist economies. Consequently there is no user community with the size, sophistication, and quality of demand to drive an internationally competitive software industry.