Digging a bit more I got to know that visitors were also at the Superior Polytechnic Institute José Antonio Echevarría (ISPJAE) and facilities of the Computation Young´s Club.
In an exchange between Google executives and professors and students or the UCI came to light that despite the release of products like Google Play for Cuba, yet there are no applications available for the Island; services such as Google Earth, Google Developers and Google Code, fundamental for the development of software, which remain inaccessible from Cuban IPs.
They also talked about whether Google would be willing, through Google Play, selling mobile games developed in the UCI, which those of Google said at the moment is not possible.
Teachers also proposed UCI collaborative games for visual functions rehabilitation and a simulator to train doctors against Ebola disease that could be developed further with the Google Glass tool, but got no concrete response from visitors about it.
There was positive response from an invitation of the UCI to a conference of a Google technician at a free software event in the University next year. A professor at the UCI asked how to participate in scientific events that calls Google but did not get a straight answer; a contradiction with the fact that visitors praised the quality of the graduates of the UCI and IPSJAE, and even said they have been working in several occasions with some graduates from both universities.
In the group of visitors was Brett Pelmuter, who accompanied Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, on his visit to Cuba last summer the rest of the delegation belong to the Google Ideas division headed by Jared Cohen, who was also in Havana at that time, but not this one. Now, the most important visitor is Scott Carpenter, Deputy Director of Google Ideas.
Google Ideas describes itself as follows: “Explore how technology can enable people to cope with the threats in the face of conflict, instability and repression.”
Google Ideas convened on March 21, 2012 a government headed by Jared Cohen in the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington DC event entitled “Cuba Needs a (Technological) Revolution: How the Internet Can an Island Thaw Frozen in Time” in which only intervened known enemies of the Cuban Revolution as Senator from Florida Marco Rubio, former Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, the director of Radio and TV Martí, Carlos García Pérez, Co-Director of the Cuba Study Group, Carlos Saladrigas, the Executive Director George W. Bush Institute, James Glassman and Mauricio Claver Carone, director of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC.
That conference was chaired by Jared Cohen, who served as an advisor to both the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as Hillary Clinton
Without knowing the content of their activities in Cuba cannot have clear objectives of this visit, but judging by the exchange in the UCI, where apparently there was more initiative of the Cuban part than the American, can we hold the hope that this time Google has brought new ideas during his visit to Cuba and are not the same as Jared Cohen suggested to his guests at the Heritage Foundation illustrious obsessed with “Revolution” that Cuba needs?
In any case, today the assertions of the First Cuban Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel at the close of the First National Workshop on Cyber security Informatization are certain:
“The blockade of Cuba, although some may not want to consider, has limited access to financing technology system, infrastructure, software and applications. The recognition of his failure as a policy by President Obama and the announcement of investments in the telecommunications sector for the Cuban people can access is recognition of that. The change in tactics, but not the objectives of government policy toward Cub, United States, emphasizes the need to move forward in the process of Cuban computerization”.
