ABSTRACT
Before 1959, Cuba was one of the leading Latin American countries in the introduction of electro-mechanical devices for data processing, as it was in mass media and telephone density. It was therefore only natural that, in the 1930s, IBM opened its regional branch office for the Caribbean and Central America in Havana (Altet Casas 2001:12). After the Revolution, IBM had to abandon the island like any other U.S. American company. But unlike its attitudes toward the telephone system, the revolutionary leadership from the very beginning pinned high hopes on computer technology. At the beginning of 1960, the Cuban government acquired two first generation mainframe computers of Western technology, followed by a second generation British computer in 1963, destined for the National Center for Scientific Research (CNIC)—and marking the beginning of the study of computer science as a professional discipline in Cuba (Casacó 2002).
