So there’s been much buzz of late that Raul Castro has “allowed” Cubans to buy and own personal computers.
I’ll refrain from stating the obvious. It’s a sick and twisted society when one man can dictate what things the citizens are and aren’t allowed to do/buy/be.
The interesting part about the story to me is that Raul still hasn’t seen fit to allow the citizens of Cuba to hook their computers to the internet.
This reminds me of the pre-internet days of personal computers. For years, I ran a node on the FidoNet BBS systems. This was a message passing network, kind of like Internet news groups but the machines in the FidoNet dialed up each other and exchange messages. It was slow, but it worked.
I wonder how long it will take Cubans to discover the joys of FidoNet and I wonder how long it will be before ol’ Raul will realize he’s let the genie out of the bottle.