Science and Technology

Abstract

Greyhound racing arrived in Havana during the decadent 1950s. In 1951, the Havana Greyhound Kennel Club opened a track for dog races in Mariano, near the Havana Yacht Club, to provide gamblers with evening entertainment once the horse races had packed up for the day. With the races came the first basic computer, a totalisator — a mechanical system running pari-mutuel betting, calculating and displaying payoff odds and producing tickets based on incoming bets.¹ When the revolutionaries seized power in January 1959, this greyhound betting machine was the only computer in Cuba. A second computer was imported from England in the early 1960s, an Elliot 803, and used by the Ministry of Industries (MININD). The big US corporations in Cuba, including the oil refi neries, had IBM punch machines, but not computers. Eugenio Busott, MININD’s director of General Services, recalled his last conversation with Guevara in 1965:

I was in the foyer of the Ministry next to an IBM machine, the old type that used punch cards. Che came by and we started to talk. He said to me: ‘What do you think about making one of these machines?’ I said: ‘OK comandante, we will start working on it.’ He was really enthusiastic, and I was very enthusiastic. But that never materialised because he left.²