Algorithmic Language - Cuba
Description
Rodrigo Ochigame:
"Both the revolutionaries and their enemies recognized that information technology would be a strategic priority for the new Cuba. A former IBM executive recalls that “all of the foreign enterprises had been nationalized except for IBM Cuba,” since the “Castro government and most of the nationalized companies were users of IBM equipment and services.” But from 1961–62, IBM closed its Cuban branch, and the US government imposed a trade embargo that prevented Cuba from acquiring computer equipment. This meant that Cuba would be forced to develop its own computing industry, with help from other socialist countries in the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon).
Between 1969 and 1970, a team at the University of Havana created a prototype of a digital computer, the CID-201, as well as an assembly language named LEAL, short for “Lenguaje Algorítmico” (Algorithmic Language), an acronym that also means “loyal.” The design of the CID-201 was based on the schematics found in the manual of the PDP-1, a computer manufactured by the US-based Digital Equipment Corporation. Because of the US-imposed trade embargo, the team could not buy the necessary electronic components in Europe, but eventually succeeded—with the help of a Cuban man of Japanese descent who worked as a merchant in Tokyo—in bringing the components from Japan inside more than ten briefcases.
Cuban mathematicians also wrote a computer program in LEAL for playing chess; one of the CID-201’s engineers recounts that the computer even played—and lost—a game against Fidel Castro. Starting in the 1970s, Cuba manufactured thousands of digital computers, and even exported some computer parts to other Comecon countries.
The rise of digital computing transformed Cuban librarianship. Freyre de Andrade welcomed the digital age, paraphrasing Marx and Engels to analogize computing to communism: “a specter is haunting the informational world, the specter of the computer; and let’s be pleased that this circumstance has come to move our field [of librarianship], giving us a challenge that makes [the field] even more interesting than it already was by itself.” Cubans studied the techniques of informatics mostly with Soviet textbooks translated into Spanish. They combined the computational methods they learned from these books with the revolutionary ideals of Cuban librarianship. This synthesis produced distinctive theories and practices that diverged substantially from those of both Western and Soviet informatics." (https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/?)