Cubans Lucky Without WhatsApp

Alfredo Fernandez

HAVANA TIMES, Feb 14 — “Anyone who doesn’t have WhatsApp is technologically backwards,” insisted the writer of a magazine article for El Pais Semanal a couple weeks ago.

Nonetheless, Cubans here on the island are true examples of technological indifference. We’re something like an endangered species because we we’re not interested in connecting to the Internet.

Nor do we really even use cell phones (other than for sending text messages or for serving as beepers to prompt us to use a much a cheaper landline to return a call).

Few populations on the planet are as lucky as Cubans to have leaders who so zealously protect us from the grave dangers of Information Technology (IT).

That’s why it would be unfair to forget that our beloved ex-minister of Informatics and Communications, Ramiro Valdes, once expressed the now famous phrase: “The Internet is a wild horse yet to be tamed.”

All of this makes me proud as well as thankful for the vision of our octogenarian leaders. They’ve succeeded in sparing us from those services that enslave human beings. What’s more, they’ve done this against all the predictions of postmodern thought.

Cuba and its sister nation of the Democratic Republic of North Korea are two countries with the tremendous fortune of having leaders who have saved their peoples from the slave-like conditions represented by the use of IT, a form of bondage that that has subjugated most of the planet’s inhabitants.

One brief example of this slavery is the increased use of the WhatsApp application – a free messaging service whose use invariably requires a smartphone.

Sending a message via Whatsaap demands Internet access to write to other people that one wishes to contact. And again, all messages sent by WhatsApp are absolutely free.

The use of this enslaving application has already gained the upper hand over hundreds of millions of people (or should we say slaves) around the world.

We eleven million Cubans — with our almost unique indifference to technology — have been wisely guided to remain not only unfamiliar with the advantages of a service like WhatsApp, but this shepherding has also prevented a major problem for us.

All of the money that falls into our hands — absolutely all of it — goes towards spending on food, and rarely, very rarely, on stupid and very capitalistic things like IT.