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Cubans Allowed To Export Software and Software Services To the US
lpress writes In an effort to support Cuba's nascent private sector, the Treasury Department announced on Friday that Americans can now import goods and services produced by "independent Cuban entrepreneurs." Will the Cuban government allow that? Cuba is a communist nation, but they have a list of 201 job categories in which self-employment is permitted. Most of those jobs are goofy things like magician and pedal-taxi driver, but one is not – computer programmer. Will the Castro regime let private individuals and organizations export software and software services to the United States and the rest of the world?
Within a year or two (or maybe sooner), the price of a cuban cigar in the US will drop like a rock. I have friends who bring them in from Europe all the time.
Now... What's all this about cuban software? They have computers?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In the past, charities were sending them our old computers.
Do they have any skills or products other than maintain Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 legacy systems?
... call centre.
Bad for Americans.
I have to say this? I am in Desktop and some server support now and I deeply regret following the advice of do not code as only Indians will do it by 2010 or so. Kicking myself!
Why? College grads make $60,000 with 0 experience in the US?? I know this opinion is unpopular on Slashdot but it does add credence to maybe their is a shortage of good developers as only MBAs make this out of school.
If Cubans can do it cheaper and add freedom and prosperity to end tyranny like what happened in China then why are we agaisn't it besides protecting our own self interests
http://saveie6.com/
... I'll be forced to question their intelligence. Communism or no, exporting services means the country gets an intake of money, without this transaction resulting in the country having less resources as a result. Making additional copies of software is virtually free.
Why not just say it out loud? Call center...
Not a bad way to get the average Cuban into the 21st Century.
It worked for India, first call centers, now they OWN the US development market.
We will start seeing an influx of Cubans up here in Washington State on the Microsoft campas as soon as they can swing the politics...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Thus doing what little they can to help finance Castro's regime. Good job!
Perhaps I have fewer problems with Castro than the unrealistic and venomous wing-nut expats in Miami (where I lived for a few years before the hurricane took out Homestead AFB...).
If you want to keep living in the 1960's or the "Cold War", not much anyone can do. But many people have moved on and are looking for actual real solutions that lead to peace and normal relations.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Thus doing what little they can to help finance Castro's regime. Good job!
You're probably typing this from a PC made in China. Financing the Chinese regime... the biggest threat to America. Why do you hate America?
And every time you fill up the tank of your car, you help finance the Saudi Arabian theocratic dictatorship Good job!
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Thus doing what little they can to help finance Castro's regime. Good job!
Yeah, we shouldn't finance dictatorships such as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait... Oh wait, I should have stopped that list after Cuba.
1. wide embargos rarely hurt the regime, just the people.
2. We actively trade with worse. We have "most favored nation" status with China as far as trade, and guess where most of your clothes, electronics are made, in terrible conditions mind you. That gasoline in your car most likely comes from Saudi Arabia, and we are openly allies with other Gulf Arab states. There never was an ounce of "human rights" in the embargo, and its fairly obvious to anyone who's taken more than a glancing look.
3. Castro's regime while not great, is in no way the giant carciture its made out to be. If you tally things like deaths, torture, and mass incarceration of political victims, as far as dictatorships go, its really not that bad, once you compare for scale, especially among many US allies. Even among communist regimes it certainly does not rank with the USSR, Khmer Rouge, and Mao's China.
i cant lie, I dont know much if anything about the current ruler of cuba and how he treats his people
long story short though, having an embargo and pretty much going "bla bla bla im not listening to you" is what we have done for 60 years and what has that done for either us or them???? nothing at all
this embargo should have fell when the berlin wall fell
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
this embargo should have fell when the berlin wall fell
Because the situation in Cuba changed how?
'BUT' the Mafia wanted their casinos back and guess who had a significant role in running the US government.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
the situation in cuba only happened because of the USSR. an embargo made sense when the ussr was trying to smuggle nukes to cuba to use against us.
We trade with many countries with worse records than cuba (and i dont know the record since fidel died if his brother/son whatever is any better) like saudi arabia and china so why not lift the embargo???
the question to ask is simple. will lifting the embargo hurt americans? If the answer is no, lift it. if the answer is yes, explain it
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
FYI: Fidel isn't dead; he just gave his brother more power.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
ahh, thanks, I had thought he died a few years back, i never followed up on it, frankly could care less.
I still think they are not as bad as some countries we consider allies, as such the embargo should be lifted.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
That gasoline in your car most likely comes from Saudi Arabia, and we are openly allies with other Gulf Arab states.
I've seen this repeated a bunch of times, but it's simply not true. Canada was far and away the largest source of foreign oil to the United States. In November 2014, the USA imported an average of 3.443 million barrels per day from Canada, and only imported 1.014 million barrels from Saudi Arabia. If you add up all the gulf states, and other less friendly nations, that the total imports to the US total 2.630 Mbpd (I totalled Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iraq, Angola, Russia, Kuwait, and Algeria in that). Additionally, the United States extracts 9.020 Million barrels per day of crude.
The long and short of this is that the gasoline in your car most likely came from domestic crude, followed by Canadian crude, or crude from other friendly nations, and not from Saudi Arabia, or other less friendly nations.
Sources:
http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/i...
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pe...
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
A remarkably self-serving attitude. With such an approach, I can point at some other laws ripe for abolishing. Like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — why should American corporations be enjoined from using bribery to win foreign contracts? If the sophisticated Europeans and the even more sophisticated Chinese are free to use the tool to gain valuable business, why should America keep itself at disadvantage?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And who would that be? I can only think of North Korea, who are worse than Cuba...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And who would that be? I can only think of North Korea, who are worse than Cuba...
Countries worse then Cuba? Most Arab allies is a good start. Cuba is a far better place to live than Saudi Arabia humans rights wise, to give one obvious example. The US has had close ties to countries and dictators far worse or equal to Cuba - historically, the US has supported some pretty bad dictators in Latin America.
As far as I noticed, the embargo is making the people of Cuba even poorer. I doubt Castro family and cronies are much affected by it, money buys everything.
Did they? Some were in foreign missions doing highly qualified medical field work for peanuts in nasty and/or poor countries, and did not leave/defect out of the fear of having family back home.
there's plenty of countries that are ran worse than Cuba.
some of them are pretty near Cuba as well, some of them in the middle east and so forth..
If you seriously think Cuba is worse than Syria you're pretty unconventional or Burma and Laos for most part of their history - or even Sri Lanka. Cuba hasn't been doing wholesale genociding or discriminating at all, unlike many countries USA is giving war support.
it's just the "OMG COMMIES on our doorstep" that kept it on the embargo...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
the situation in cuba only happened because of the USSR. an embargo made sense when the ussr was trying to smuggle nukes to cuba to use against us.
The situation in cuba only happened because of the USA. The USSR had to smuggle in nukes to use against the USA because the USA had positioned nukes in Turkey, targeting Moskow. Doing the embargo against cuba was a move driven by domestic politics; it ignored cause and effect.
these portable computers. Their programmers should be able to help you with your R:Base project.
Well, it is an american embargo...as such what world view do you think I should take Mozambique?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
LOL That's "funny". So as of 2015 it is easier to sell software from Cuba to the US than it is to sell software from the EU to the EU. Praise the lord....
http://www.belastingdienst.nl/...
0x or or snor perron?!
How about Saudi Arabia ?
What about China ?
Actually... the list of US allies who have human rights records FAR worse than Cuba (including ongoing violations) is massive.
Cuba isn't actually even in the top-10, it may not be in the top-50.
The only reason you refuse to believe that is because they have a communist economy - which frankly has no BEARING on what their human rights record is. Capitalist human rights violators are NOT better.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Except of course for the bit where the major share-holders in most US energy companies, indeed some of their largest investors, are Saudi royals.
There's a reason the Bush family consider the Saudi royal family to be "members of the family".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And who would that be? I can only think of North Korea, who are worse than Cuba...
Well how about Iraq, Chili, Iran, Saudi Arabia. I bet all of them have done much more bad stuff in the past, or at least comparable. And North Korea is not an ally!
As far as I noticed, the embargo is making the people of Cuba even poorer. I doubt Castro family and cronies are much affected by it, money buys everything.
Exactly. Ever notice that in the countries where starvation is rampant, the leaders are all still fat?
I believe in the corrupting influence of prosperity. When the Cuban people (or any people) have nothing and nothing to look forward to, then they accept their lot. You have, in fact, what communism promotes - total financial equality. And, like pretty much every real-world communist worker's paradise, that means equally poor, except for the leaders, who aren't hurting at all.
On the other hand, when money starts coming in and the guy next door can afford to get new seats for his '52 Chevy, people start to get discontented. They start pushing, and even in countries where the army routinely solves discontent with mass shootings, eventually things begin to erode.
It's far more likely that the embargo helped keep Castro in power than that it hurt him. The greatest enemies of Cuban democracy appear to have been the Cubans who fled to the US and kept pressure on against lifting it.
The production cost of oil in SA is about 6-10 dollar, in Canada it is much higher due to the nature of oil extraction. The profit margin is much higher for the Saudis and its 100% staterun as well. It wouldnt suprise me if the net profit for the Saudis is higher then the Canadians
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Thanks for the comments. It remembered me of the pyramid of the needs of maslow that I first heard about in faculty. I have lived in Africa 6 years, and the scenario is exactly the same, the elites oppress the people for their own profit, and 50 years down the road, the fault is still on the former settlers. Or "settlers" on the case of South Africa (you will have to have an idea of SA history to understand why I choose to use ").
Argentina, where the President just had someone assassinated?
Pakistan, where there is still a major Taliban presence?
Israel, which used calorie counts to calculate precisely how much food aid to allow through to Gaza to keep Palestinians in a borderline starvation situation? Food too calorific? Not allowed in.
The IRBMs also weren't at all smuggled - they were shipped there on the decks of freighters and installed in plain sight, there was no attempt to pretend that there weren't IRBMs being installed.
Just like in the US now! Well, except we tend to blame unions and illegal immigrants for it.
Meanwhile the thieves at the top keep on being more equal than others.
Equality is for Communists. Bow before your Masters, peasant!
It is more probable than the iranians assassinated him than the president, as much as I dislike her... But they certainly did not protect him. Big worlwide march to commemorate him and warn the govt, on oct 18th...
I was referring to Argentina, I forgotto mention that
Nope. False — because you can leave them.
Immigrating to Saudi Arabia is the proverbial light at the end of tunnel for many, even though there is no hope of citizenship for such immigrants. When the moronic Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein in 1990-ies, Saud's response was immediate deportation of them all — as a punishment.
You would've called it "ethnic cleansing", if Israel did such a thing, and it was. But the point is, Saudi Arabia, for all its faults, is attractive to humans, whereas Cuba is a place to escape from. To risk lifeThe US has had close ties to countries and dictators far worse or equal to Cuba
Yeah, why don't name them? "Informative" my behind...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seriously??! Argentine, where a recently-elected President has just been publicly indicted over one assassination, is, in your opinion, worse than Cuba, where the decades-long dictator an his secret police have been assassinating and imprisoning hundreds for all of those decades — without any publicly-expressed disapproval?
So?..
Is that why those Arabs — both in Gaza and in West Bank — live better, than Egyptians and Jordanians across their respective borders? Marrying a Gazan is a major win for a Egyptian bride.
Yes, Israel, under whose "occupation" the population of the supposedly "borderline starved" Arabs is growing faster, than Israel's own (even among the Muslim Israelis), is certainly a nicer country than Cuba.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Not a very nice country, but still in a completely different league from Cuba.
Yes, they now have a major scandal with President accused of killing a prosecutor.
Now, can you even imagine Fidel Castro being indicted in Cuba today? Or do you not think, Fidel has ordered enough assassinations during his decades of being the Dear Leader?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nah, old Bolsheviks can't die, Lenin is alive and well...well embalmed...now we just call him Putin. Ever notice how Putin's a bit on the pasty side, he should be for a man over 150 years old.
that no one expected: http://www.homestead.afrc.af.m... ...
"For the individuals laying eyes on the base for the first time since the storm, reconciling what they were seeing seemed impossible.
"Those things that have been a part of your life for so long, I guess you take for granted that they're always going to be there," said Mr. Tom Miller, currently with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron and during Hurricane Andrew was the electrical shop chief with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron as an Air Reserve Technician. Mr. Miller was living in Cutler Bay at the time of the hurricane and weathered the storm in St. Petersburg. He's been a member of the base since 1968.
"The most vivid memories I have are when I first went back to where I lived and when I first went back to the base because that was where I lived and worked," he said. "Those are the things that you get some strength from, and then to come back and see that area was completely devastated, that really hits you. The devastation seemed insurmountable."
For those who've seen both the before and after of the storm, 20 years means different things to different people. "Sometimes it feels like it was 200 years ago and then other times it feels like it was last week," said Miller. "When I came back on base after the storm, a place where I had worked for 20 years, I just thought, 'what's the answer for this?'; 'where do we even start?' We learned a big lesson: these things can change people's lives overnight. The base has come back, and I'm glad it did.""
For another example, one week my mother was living in a nice house and was a smiling teenager. The next week, her home town looked like this due to WWII fighting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Or, as Howard Zinn said: ..."
http://www.thenation.com/artic...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
See also my other comment to a different story here on different sorts of existential societal risks and possible solutions: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Humans these days have been so blessed with so much including a relatively mild climate the past few centuries compared to the past. It is only because of that blessing that our thoughts can focus on internal conflicts of human vs. human instead of the greater eternal conflict of human vs. a capricious environment. We need to invest more in dealing with such environmental existential risks.
It is just foolish, even laughable, that the USA can, say, spend US$1 trillion a year or more on the US military including incurred future costs related to human political conflicts (many of which the USA helped create) while our infrastructure falls apart and we don't invest in, say, protecting our power grid from solar flares, or that we don't scale our medical systems to deal with possible pandemics, or we don't move to indoor or even underground agriculture faster to get it
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thank you for pointing this out. Two points:
1. There's still ~1/12 ish chance that your gasoline came from nearly all the way round the world in SA, which for a globally mostly fungible good that you can pull out of the ground almost anywhere depending how bad you want it, is something to marvel at for sure.
2. Because of that same global market, US demand absolutely props up prices for the Saudis. So yeah, I pay $60/bbl for a Canadian extracted crude (expect that to go away BTW if the price *stays* at $60/bbl). That's one barrel that somebody in China or Japan wanted at $60, that they're not going to get, so they have to pay $60 to an exporter close to them, and so on, until SA is enriched after all.
Cuba actually has one of the best health care systems in the world, for their income, and a pretty good system even without correcting for income. The New England Journal of Medicine had several articles about that. American doctors who go to Cuba rate them highly.
They sent their doctors to Sweden for training. The Cubans established their own medical school, Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM), which is the largest medical school in the world and trains doctors from Latin America and all over the world -- including the U.S. Tuition is free, and they cover all costs, for students who agree to practice in medically underserved areas (including parts of the U.S.) when they graduate.
Cuba has an infant mortality rate and life expectancy that compares favorably with the U.S., so they must be doing something right. The infant mortality and life expectancy is better than low-income parts of the U.S., like The Bronx, NY, or Louisville, KY, where people who can't afford to pay for health care are left to die after they spend all their money. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... They learn how to practice medicine without regularly using expensive equipment like CAT scans, which are actually overused (sometimes causing more harm than good) in the U.S.
Cuban doctors have done some important medical research. For example, developed a couple of new vaccines for diseases of the undeveloped world, and they even supplied them to the U.S.
Most European countries forbid bribery of foreign officials. As an example there's a recent case in the UK where two company directors have been convicted and sent to prison for bribing foreign officials.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Did they? Some were in foreign missions doing highly qualified medical field work for peanuts in nasty and/or poor countries, and did not leave/defect out of the fear of having family back home.
The U.S. probably has more doctors who are motivated primarily by money than anyplace else in the world.
In Cuba, medical school is free. The government tells them that they will get a free education, and in exchange they will serve the people. There are a a lot of people in Cuba, and around the world, who are willing to accept that deal. They have students from low-income areas in the U.S., like The Bronx and Mississippi, who want to go back and serve the people they grew up with. There are doctors who actually want to serve in those foreign missions, helping patients who wouldn't get any care otherwise.
Since medical school costs $250,000 in the U.S., a lot of people think the Cuban system is a pretty good deal.
Any Cuban doctor could get in an inner tube, paddle to Florida, and start making $150,000 a year. (A neurologist in Canada could triple her income, to $3-400,000, by moving to the U.S.)
Most of them don't. There actually are doctors who feel that their country gave them a free education, and they have an obligation to serve their country in return.
There actually are doctors who want to serve people who need them, rather than make as much money as possible.
I realize this is hard for an American to understand.
Saudi Arabia also requires exit visas to leave the country - which can only be obtained with permission from your employer. For many foreign nationals in the country, a large fraction of whom are domestic servants, it is essentially impossible to leave as a result. It's made even worse by the fact that work visas are also specific to the employer, so they can't switch jobs either. This is a country that didn't even officially outlaw slavery until after Castro's revolution, but even so they've kept slavery in all but name. (Not even going to start on their sponsorship of Salafi Islamist nutters across the globe.)
Besides, Cuba did finally allow foreign travel starting in 2013 (of course, most of its citizens are probably too poor to afford it, but the embargo certainly doesn't help). And we kept diplomatic relations and some commerce open with the Warsaw Pact at a time when they also restricted travel, which didn't stop their system from collapsing under its own weight.
Obstinate rage didn't work for 50 years. Maybe trade will bring change -- it sure works that way in the rest of the world.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You don't cite any sources, so I had to look things up myself. Yes, one needs an exit visa, but only if the leaving is permanent. Which means, you don't need it to escape a repressive regime. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia remain a very attractive destination for millions of people — and has the luxury of using deportation as punishment.
Only if you weren't a citizen and entered the country in order to work in the first place.
That — a citizen's ability to emigrate — was only one of the tell-tale signs.
Yes, and even, holding up our nose, with the USSR — because we had to. But in today's world few countries are as oppressive and bad for their own citizens as Cuba.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The USA has a long history of making friends with despicable regimes. As more despicable than Cuba, I'd put: Myanmar, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Rwanda, and Cambodia. Arguably tied with Cuba would be: Honduras, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, and Uganda.
Then, if you travel back in time, you have despicable regimes in Iran, Chile, and Argentina.
Trade is ultimately for more powerful in making positive changes in these societies.
My guess is that you come from the wingnut wing of the American political spectrum, and thus have a "four-legs-good, Cuba-bad" mentality.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Israel has NEVER restricted the supply of staple foods to Gaza and presently imposes no restrictions whatever on the supply of food to Gaza. Nor do humanitarian organizations, such as the UN, not exactly Israel's best friend, say that the blockade has caused any humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In any case, were there restrictions on the transfer of supplies from Israel, the Gazans could get them via Egypt.
You've been getting your history from Days of Future Past ... i.e. the revisionists.
The side that wanted to USE the nukes was Cuba. The USSR wasn't comfortable with it.
You mean seizing mobsters property who were destroying the country?
The US doesn't do that?
I realize it is hard to realize medical people eking out a life of 200-400 dollars/month in a mission in algeria and mozambique, while expats are doing qualified jobs earning between 10 to 50 times more, does not defect out of fear of not seeing the family back home anywhere, or worse, they being harmed. And if you think Cuba does not profit with their exploitation, you are very naive. We are not talking about rich people doing a sting out of their own good will. And I am not American, btw.
I realize it is hard to realize medical people eking out a life of 200-400 dollars/month in a mission in algeria and mozambique, while expats are doing qualified jobs earning between 10 to 50 times more, does not defect out of fear of not seeing the family back home anywhere, or worse, they being harmed. And if you think Cuba does not profit with their exploitation, you are very naive. We are not talking about rich people doing a sting out of their own good will. And I am not American, btw.
Of course Cuba profits from this "exploitation," if you want to call it that, just as the American medical schools profit by the exploitation of charging American students $1-200,000 for their education, or American health insurance companies profit by the exploitation of skimming 20% off the top of every medical expense, or American pharmaceutical companies profit by the exploitation of charging asthma patients $100 for an inhaler that costs $10 anywhere else in the world.
With the American embargo, this is one of the few ways Cuba can get hard currency.
I would rather be Cuban doctor, treating patients in Algeria or Mozambique who would never get medical care otherwise, than an American soldier in Iraq killing whole families and destroying a country and killing 150,000 innocent people.
Well me, too, but once again you are distorting the core of the discussion. Comparing rich doctors doing work pro bono and poor people being exploited is competing apples to oranges. And I won't say more, you are here for trolling than having a racional discussion.
Nope. False — because you can leave them.
Well, given that Cubans can leave Cuba, I don't see your point.