Cuban homemade tools and technological disobedience

[Jon]

Cuba's economy was bottoming out in the early '90s. Due to long-term embargos, their allowed imports were largely limited to essentials like food and medicine. Much of the world was mad at them for various misbehavior throughout the years, including failure to pay international debts, Cuban government seizures of foreign private businesses, and their chumminess with the Russians and their extra nuclear missiles. Once Russia collapsed, Cuba hit deep economic depression, entering a period of time that their government called "The Special Period in the Time of Peace".

Fidel Castro and Nikita Kruschev in better times:


Petroleum was immediately limited, which paralyzed the transport, industrial, and agricultural systems. Food was so severely rationed that zoo animals and stray cats started disappearing. The Cuban Army, fearing invasion by the North Americans, published a book called "The Book for the Family". The book was a collection of appliance fixing tricks, home medical remedies, plans for survival tools, and copy-pasted back issues of magazines like Popular Mechanics. A movement of Cuban DIYers was spawned, called the National Association of Innovators and Rationalists.

Two years later, they published another book, composed of DIY ideas that Cubans had contributed, called "With Our Own Efforts". The ideas included things like clothes, furniture, and a now-famous Cuban recipe for grapefruit rind "steak" made from de-bittered and marinated grapefruit rinds. The book was also a goldmine of what history calls "DIY inventions", but what we know as homemade tools.

All I could find online was a grainy original scanned copy of the book, here: Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos. There are some efforts to crowdsource an English translation of the book, but I don't believe a translation has yet materialized.






Around this time, Ernesto Oroza was a young Cuban graduate of industrial design school. Oroza was a new industrial designer, but his country had no industry. He traveled the country documenting and collecting the peoples' homemade tools and machines. He characterizes the resultant DIY culture as something he calls "technological disobedience":

People think beyond the normal capabilities of an object, and try to surpass the limitations it imposes on itself.

This kind of object imposes a limit on the user, because it comes with an established technological code, which hardly ever satisfies all of the user's needs, and sometimes he exceeds those needs. He manages to go beyond the object's capabilities. - Ernesto Oroza

This is the rare video I watched twice. Oroza really strikes me when he talks about the "established technological code", and how contemporary ready-made objects exert authority around their intended use. It's reasonably apparent in things like the desire to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone. But Oroza also recognizes the false belief that the tools we're given are the only tools we need, and he realizes that a machine is just an amalgamation of "all of the symbols that unify an object". When Cubans' needs changed, they changed their tools.