#VOX VIDEOS CUBA OFFLINE#

That “ Street Network” takes in all of Havana and, I’ve been told, even connects outlying cities. It was two gamers who, wanting to play a video game with each other, built the first local, unofficial network with a bit of cable. Of doing the impossible, and nowhere is that more evident than in the country’s embrace of technology and gaming.ĭespite long-held embargoes, an average monthly salary of $25 and a government restriction on all but official media, Cubans still find a way to watch the latest American TV and movies and play video games. That is Cuba the land, the island, the culture, not necessarily Cuba the government.Ĭuba is the land of making do. There is a great pride in the Cuban people for Cuba. Viewed through the pictures found in travel magazines, or the conversations I had with smiling, sun-burnt tourists over a dinner, Cuba was a place lost to time, a relic of communism and 1950s America.īut in talking to today’s generation of Cubans, the growing pool of 20-somethings that will one day inherit this island nation, Cuba is much more an idea than a collection of meticulously cared for aging Buicks, rum distilleries and sugar cane fields. It gave my short stay in Cuba, already stripped of free time, time to think, time to relax, a sense of almost magic realism. In spending a week wandering the streets of Havana and its suburbs on the hunt for Cuba’s video gaming generation, I kept stumbling across this sort of low-tech meets high-tech fabulism.

#VOX VIDEOS CUBA OFFLINE#

It’s the bilinearity of capitalism and commercialism, rum and coke, offline and on, that takes two opposing ideas and turns them into some different, often wondrous thing. Cuba is like the memory of somewhere you’ve never been.

Vox videos cuba