Translator: Unstated, Yoani Sánchez
For that mess of cables and circuits to come to life and become my first
computer, all I was lacking was the small pump that blows air over the
red hot microprocessor. But how to find that in the Havana of 1994,
completely submerged in the miseries of the Special Period.* Without
that whirring mechanism of blades, the Frankenstein I'd spent half a
year assembling would get too hot and suddenly switch off. During those
days I thought constantly of Steve Jobs in the garage of his adoptive
parents where he created Apple Computer. His inspired genius led me to
understand that innovation is more enjoyable than the tacit consumption
of something invented by others. A few days later, a combination of a
household fan and aluminum heat-sinks allowed me to write in WordPerfect
5.1 and create a university newsletter called Letter by Letter. Hundreds
of miles from my improvised workshop, the NeXT hardware division had
just closed down and it was still a few months before the Pixar film Toy
Story would be released.
Since that time, the evocation of Jobs has accompanied me on all the
risky computer adventures to which curiosity and need have propelled me.
All around me were many people like the restless Steve, ingenious
teenagers who, lacking space — even a garage — and the legal possibility
of founding a company, took the road of emigration and ended up taking
their talent and their ideas far from here. Despite this massive
stampede, here, among various friends, we continued to feed the cult of
the guru in black shirt and faded jeans, longing to be a bit like him:
bright, clever, understood. When the mediocrity of technological
censorship touched us, we projected ourselves onto that adopted boy who
became a frame of reference for the world, with his genius impulses and
white earbud headphones. He probably didn't know that we Cubans would
have to wait more than a decade to be able to legally buy a computer in
a store.
Yesterday, the student who never graduated from Reed College in
Portland, Oregon, died at age 56. He left us a bitten apple painted on a
host of technological gadgets, and wondering how many more he could have
created if pancreatic cancer hadn't taken him so early. To those of us
who never exchanged a word with him, nor withstood the harangues of this
CEO, we are left with the myth, the sweet legend of his genius. It
comforts me to think that my laughable Frankenstein — built 18 years ago
— would have overheated even more without the fresh and inspiring air
that Steve Jobs radiated over us all.
*Translator's note:
The Special Period: In a January 1990 speech, two months before the fall
of the Berlin wall, Fidel Castro warned of coming hardships and first
used the phrase "a special period in a time of peace." When the Soviet
Union collapsed in 1991, its 30 years of subsidies to Cuba came to an
abrupt end. Oil imports dropped 90%, industry was paralyzed, agriculture
shifted from machines to manual labor, food rations sank precipitously
and hunger became widespread, followed inevitably by the diseases of
malnutrition.
6 October 2011
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