At A Manhattan Incubator, Cuban STEM Students Embrace Tech Startups

Gabriela Isabel Rodríguez Campo, a 19-year-old native of Havana, arrived at the city’s airport, carrying $300 in cash for plane fare mailed to her from a donor in the U.S. Nothing would have stopped her from pocketing the money, which was more than three months of the average Cuban’s salary. But instead, she used it to buy a plane ticket to New York City. “My dad said, ‘I knew something like this would happen to you someday,’” she recalls. No one in Campo’s family had ever left the island – but with the recent reestablishment of U.S.-Cuban ties, that may soon change.

Campo was selected to participate in the “Innovadores” program sponsored by the C.A.A., a privately funded, not-for-profit foundation based in Greenwich, Conn., bringing four high-performing Cuban students to American startup incubators. Studying at La Universidad de la Habana, she is one of two women in her 30-person computer science concentration. She arrived in the U.S. on July 17, but by last Tuesday she had already begun to assimilate, eating a burger from Shake Shack in the 15,000-square-foot offices of the Grand Central Tech incubator, the former site of Facebook’s Manhattan headquarters.

The Innovadores program pairs each student with one of the 19 startups housed at the incubator for the summer. Campo is interning for Maven, a health technology platform connecting women with medical professionals through Internet video calls. Amid Grand Central Tech’s white-washed walls, long wood desks outfitted with Apple desktops and natural light streaming through almost floor-to-ceiling windows, she dares to dream: “I want to own my own company,” she says.

Her goal is unusual, as most Cubans “don’t really know the word, ‘entrepreneurial,’” said C.A.A. founder Miles Spencer. Cuban youth are often pushed into the arts – Campo’s older sister, for example, studies graphic design. Artists can travel outside of the country and earn royalties on their intellectual property, which can be more lucrative than earning a doctor’s salary of up to $67 per month. The same incentives do not exist for the sciences and technology – a norm that organizations like C.A.A. aim to challenge.

At Grand Central Tech, the Cuban interns will be exposed to an American brand of innovation, learning new programming languages and helping in day-to-day startup operations, says Matthew Harrigan, co-founder and managing director of the incubator. The other three students are 29-year-old Alvaro Perez Abrahantes, 16-year-old Gabriel Antonio García Leyva and 21-year-old Raúl Perera Gómez, all from Havana.

Leyva, studying at La Universidad de la Habana, is excited to finally get his hands on some new coding tutorials – he and his friends back home taught themselves C++ using a single English language tutorial they downloaded and shared amongst themselves. They started creating games and apps to share with their peers, which they hope to turn into a startup after Leyva’s experience in New York.

The Cuban government seems willing to support the growth of private enterprises like Leyva’s, particularly in the tech sector, says John Caufield, former chief of mission of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Forbes reported earlier this month that the number of licensed entrepreneurs was at a record high in 2014 at more than 471,000 among over 200 approved professions. Further, at least a fifth of Cuba’s workforce engages in private sector activity, regardless of whether they are licensed to do so. And, across the water, the U.S. Treasury Department unveiled in February new regulations that eliminated bans on exporting American technologies to Cuba, which generated interest from companies like Airbnb and Netflix . “What we’re seeing is this erosion of the controls,” Caufield adds.

Part of that erosion includes the spread of Internet access on the island. Earlier in July, the Cuban government opened its first free wifi hotspots in the center of Havana. Previously, Leyva and his friends would freeload wifi at hotels. They could also use hotel dial-up connections charging more than $7 per hour or, more recently, about 70 nationwide Internet stations charging $4 per hour – not a small fee given that the average Cuban makes $20 per month. Watchdog organization Freedom House estimated in 2011 that only 5% of Cubans could access the open Internet.

Smartphones have helped, although Cuba still has among the lowest mobile penetration rates in Latin America – only about 11% of the population in 2011, according to Freedom House. Leyva was 14 years old when he first saw a smartphone. “I held it in my hand and said, ‘How can something so little do so many things?” he remembers, still amazed. He soon became obsessed with mobile technology and constructing apps.

Spencer is in talks with the country’s foreign affairs office to build a business incubator in Cuba, promoting technology and entrepreneurship in the same way that the Ludwig Foundation for the Arts, a cultural center in Havana, has supported Cuban artistic exchanges. He has already scoped out a number of locations for the incubator, but they all exhibit a key shortcoming -- none of them have the infrastructure to offer Internet access yet. “Cuba is facing a dilemma,” says Caufield. “Everything is falling dramatically behind the rest of the world because they are denying young scientists and technologists access to information. The hope is that, over the next couple months, we will see a much more significant reduction in the barriers to Internet.”

The students will return home to a country in flux in August in the hope that they will help address these barriers. Rather than encouraging an exodus of Cuban talent to the U.S., Spencer says, “We want them to solve Cuban problems in Cuba.”

Also on Forbes: