There are tons of people that will be glad to collaborate and participate in such meetups here in Cuba.
How do you plan to help with those who are involved ?
btw, i write you guys at the contact form two days ago.
I born and live in Cuba.
I will give some insights from a tech/developer perspective.
I'm a young rails and ios developer who works mainly as a freelance, consultancy and lately running a local startup.
Being a cuban developer isn't an easy task mainly by the following reasons, all of those due to the embargo (yeahh, i agree with the argument that this is a "convenient excuse for its (our) poor economy" but "Unfortunately, it's a pretty good excuse") and this is why for the most part:
- A lot of services are blocked too Cuba due to the Embargo (Google, Paypal and a lot of other companies services). I know that they can't do too much about that, only follow the law. For example this image is almost a day to day thing http://imgur.com/8l5rmxt
Hopefully a lot of this stuffs can be solved using a VPN.
- Is extremely difficult to access paid services like rent hosting, buy domains, etc. Most of the time i ask for favors to friends of mine who lives in other countries to help me to paid those kind of premium services.
- The internet connection is extremely slow and in most cases limited by very restrictive firewalls. To put in perspective, 56 Kbps dial-up connections are still a very popular kind of connection here. Until the arrive of the optical fiber cable our main channel of international communications was a really expensive satellite link with a very limited bandwidth. Recently with the optic fiber cable arrive things are becoming much more easy but still very far from the ideal scenario.
As you can see, this thread-off, if not impossible to solve it means a huge competitive disadvantage if you are running a tech business, not to mention if you are going international. Even when i work as a freelance is difficult to explain to my employees that two or three days without internet can be a thing in some moment.
To be even more illustrative and pragmatic i will give some insight of my recent startup.
I'm the co-founder and main developer at Isladentro http://isladentro.net . This is a mobile-first startup to promote and emerging sector of self-employee workers and local business (think of it as a cuban yelp). So far we have gained a lot of traction and have a lot of happy customers which by the way paid for the service, is a premium service.
We have a lot to improve (yeahh is a crappy website but that was a MVP) and recently our customers ask to see their business on the web.
Ohhh boy, what a difficult task. We need to run the most that we can using free services, the only paid thing is the domain name due to a favor.
For the most part this our stack at the web.
- Running a Heroku free dyno instance that supports the app. For the data we are using the free postgres plan with give us a very fair numbers of rows at the database.
- To avoid the dyno idle we use Pingdom to send a ping every 30 minutes. (Which by the way i can't use anymore because they send me an email two days ago that due to the embargo they are closing my account)
- To store the assets we are using Github Pages as our CDN. We store there all of our images and download links. Yes, i know that github isn't optimized for CDN performance and probably we are abusing their amazing service but this is the best that we can get and so far is running pretty good.
As you can see there are a lot of trade-off but non of this stop us. We are even planning a big re-write in the entire platform and mobiles apps and the business is generating revenue.
Hope that you gain the big picture of the trade-off a being a developer under the embargo.
Sorry by any misspell that i made.
If some of you have any tech (yes, only tech ones please) related question about anything you can find me on twitter @cadizjavier