Despite high price tags Cubans line-up to purchase first legal computers

Posted May 4, 2008 at 07:04 PM by Robert Nelson

Section: News, Computers, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle

It was just a little over a month ago now that the Cuban Government decided to begin easing up on restrictions with electronics, namely computers, and as we have already seen Cuba citizens lining up for cell phones, the same is happening with computers.

Reports of “more than a dozen prospective buyers” began to line up when they first went on sale. While “just” a dozen people may not sound like a lot, you also must consider that these computers are not coming cheap. Havana’s Carlos III shopping center began to sell the Qtech PC along with a CRT monitor for $780. Sounds expensive enough already, but consider further that these PC’s are not exactly high powered either, they are featuring Intel Celeron processors with 80GB hard drives, 512MB of RAM and running Windows XP.

While the availability is nice, they are very expensive considering the low average salary of a Cuban worker. In addition, the computers may be available, but the Internet access is not, any access is limited to trusted officials and state journalists. Which means the regular citizens will remain with their local network and email service or find a black market dial up account to connect freely with the rest of the world. Hopefully with time the Internet access restrictions will begin to ease up as well.

Read [CNET]