Radio Havana Cuba's Science and Technology Program:
BREAKTHROUGHFor broadcast Sunday, 26 September and Thursday, 30 September 1999
Written and narrated by Arnaldo "Arnie" Coro, RHC's Science Editor
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Voice: ( Coro ) Welcome to another edition of Breakthrough, Radio Havana Cuba's Science, Technology and the Environment update. I am Arnaldo Arnie Coro, RHC's Science editor. It's my pleasure to share with you about five minutes of air time here today. The topic is: More computers for cuban universities...
Cuba's universities have just started the academic year in early September. This year students will be able to have more hands on experience working with the latest generation computers, thanks to a big effort of the educational authorities to bring into the system about one thousand machines. The computers are assembled here in Cuba, in order to save labor costs, and they are designed specifically for each application, something that helps save resources too. The one thousand machines are state of the art, running high speed CPU's, large capacity hard drives, high resolution monitors, and the required peripherals like scanners and external modems. The US blockade against Cuba hits our higher education institutions really hard in many different aspects, from the extreme difficulties in obtaining bibliography for students' theses, to the limited bandwidth connection to the INTERNET, a consequence of the poor telecommunications facilities available between the two countries, and which can not be upgraded precisely because of the US blockade restrictions against Cuba. But, Cuba's ingenuity is proverbial, and somehow, the managers of the higher education system have found the way to provide their students with more and better computers for this academic year. The 46 universities now own a total of about three thousand machines, given a per capita for last year's last semester of one computer for each 18 students. This year, that per capita will improve.. as the new one thousand machines will move it to one computer for each 14 students... still not enough at all by today standards, but certainly an improvement.
In those areas which rely heavily on computers like mathematics, information sciences and engineering, the ratio of students to machines is now a much better five students per computer. Managing limited resources for education is not an easy task to accomplish, but cubans have developed some very interesting ways of doing things... for example, computers are kept in operation by students far many more hours than at other similar educational institutions around the world. As Josue, a recently graduated electrical engineer told me, "printing my thesis was my problem, so I did the job after eleven pm, keeping that computer working for several days until early morning... After all Arnie", he told me, "computers don't get tired and they can work 24 hours per day." So that's exactly what students and professors are doing... increasing the number of hours per day that the machines are used, both for direct teaching, or for the students themselves to do their homework.
According to a spokesperson of the Ministry for Higher Education, at this moment only two cuban universities have a direct connection to INTERNET, although all of them have e-mail. INTERNET connections will be expanded to all the other higher education organizations during the rest of 1999 and year 2000... And one final note: They are going to keep using non-Y2K compliant machines in many training applications in which, as a senior computer sciences professor told me, it won't matter at all if the machine is or is not Y2K compliant. He added that those non-Y2K machines will be kept as long as they are operational, saving the nation funds that can be dedicated to buying other equipment...
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VOICE: ( Coro ) And this was Breakthrough for today amigos... How cuban universitites are receiving this year one thousand new high speed computers to improve their machine-to-student ratio. I'll be back next week with another Science, Technology and the Environment topic here at Breakthrough. I am Arnaldo, Arnie, Coro, RHC's Science editor, inviting you to keep listening to Radio Havana Cuba, the station that has YOU, the short wave listener, as the number one priority ...
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"Breakthrough"
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Via e-mail: arnie@radiohc.org
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