Makeshift has a keen eye on the ground: the Caracas skyscraper squatter, the Barcelona apartment hotelier, the Kampala retailer who accepts airtime payments. This economic fringe, often outside the law, is a sandbox for the next big design, business, and policy innovations.

Leaders need transparency into these informal economies. What solutions work, and how might we improve and scale them? Makeshift is the only organization with a constant pulse on these off-the-book trends, so we’re bringing our insights to you by designing a custom magazine around subjects you choose. Talk to us about additional advisory services.

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In a resourceful twist, artisans in Naphia village began melting down decommissioned pieces of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and crafting the metal into spoons. Today, the community works with fair trade label Article 22 to make and sell a line of jewelry called peaceBOMB largely to a market where the bombs originated—the United States. Article 22’s founder, Elizabeth Suda, talks to Makeshift from the remote mountain village.

Makeshift: How did people in Naphia learn to melt the bomb metals?
ES: It’s quite mysterious. There was a man from Houaphan Province who found himself in the Naphia village in Xieng Khouang after the war. He was melting the metals and making them into spoons. Other villagers would watch the two men make the spoons, and they would take it up too. Right now, it’s being passed from one family to another, one generation to the next. On any given day you can go there and people will be doing this behind their homes. It’s such a creative solution of turning something negative and destructive into something useful and productive.

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Yet many of these tourists visit the counter as they exit the museum, loading up on banned literature to take home. During the trip back, each piece of luggage is scanned at checkpoints, and guards can tell which suitcases are crammed with books. So how to smuggle thousands of contraband pages across the border? “It’s 2015,” one museum staffer explains. “We use pre-loaded USB drives.”

Tourists tuck them in a folded pair of trousers or slip them in back pockets. In sneakernet fashion, bytes of normally inaccessible data make their way into a land of extreme censorship, where only state-trained propaganda officers can sanction historical and political information.

The Chinese government doesn’t have a list of banned book titles, per se. Instead, authorities prohibit the media from mentioning certain topics, such as the Tiananmen crackdown, the personal wealth of Chinese Communist Party leadership, and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.

But in Hong Kong, which gained relative autonomy in 1997, the same restrictions don’t apply. Publishers often use their freedom of speech to print texts that the Party leadership would deem too offensive for Mainland readers. Taiwanese publishers across the strait do the same. And the Mkshft publishers too!

The Hong Kong bookshop People’s Recreation Community has mockingly anointed Chairman Mao as the store’s official logo.

And it’s not just books. Since China’s flourishing pirated DVD shops often self-censor and keep out ‘disruptive’ materials, such as the 1995 documentary “The Gate of Heavenly Place”, people instead download films and TV shows in Hong Kong and walk the files over the border. The phenomenon has become more common in the past year since China’s ruling party launched a crusade to block the use of virtual private networks, which is the primary way residents have eluded government censorship.

Still, plenty of Chinese crave the touch of a real book page—the satisfaction of white paper and dark ink, the smell of a new tome, or the crack of a spine. So Mainland tourists also pick up contraband materials in Hong Kong’s specialty bookshops, street-side news stands, and 7-Eleven stores. If they’re caught back home, offending readers can face penalties as light as confiscation and a verbal warning or as harsh as lengthy interrogations and jail time.

People’s Recreation Community is one of the city’s best banned-book sellers. The name’s three initials mimic the acronym of the People’s Republic of China, or PRC. ‘Recreation Community’ is a sarcastic take on the communes established under Chairman Mao, the founder of Communist China.

In sneakernet fashion, bytes and pages of normally inaccessible materials make their way into a land of extreme censorship: Communist China.

Nestled in Hong Kong’s bustling shopping district of Causeway Bay, PRC’s shop windows are lined with ads for Swiss watches and lunch buffet deals. In the middle is a poster of Mao’s face emblazoned on a red backdrop—the store’s logo. With book titles like Mao Zedong and the Red Guard, Xi Jinping’s Internal Dialogue, and Princelings: Killing the Nation, PRC caters to a specific class of consumer: educated, curious, and most likely secretive about his or her political leanings. Nearly all of the store’s customers are from the Mainland.

Smuggling physical copies into China requires a more deliberate strategy. Wealthier shoppers drive the books across in their private vehicles to skip the border patrol. Other people who take trains or buses brave the lines at mandatory land-crossing checkpoints and hope they don’t get stopped. To avoid a showdown (or worse), each traveler can only take what looks harmless on the scanner’s screen: one or two books every few weeks.

This incremental approach limits the business of bookstores like People’s Recreation Community. But Paul Tang, PRC’s founder, says it doesn’t matter. “Our customers all come back in droves, and we love seeing them each time they’re back in Hong Kong.”

Slowly, volume by volume, books unseen in China trickle across the border. They are consumed voraciously, then passed from one set of hands to the next, organically growing ideas through people’s immediate circles. The effects of this secret trade can already be seen in Hong Kong, where Mainland Chinese are increasingly joining activities like Hong Kong’s annual June 4 candlelight vigil or the now-defunct Umbrella Movement protests. As banned words continue to inspire curious minds, censored ideas slowly seep past China’s borders, a flow of analog information that even the Great Firewall can’t stem.

The post Contraband Library appeared first on MKshft.org.

This is communication with North Korea: balloons equipped with GPS trackers, shortwave radio transmissions, and smuggled DVDs of South Korean soap operas. For the most part, these communications enter an information black hole with no feedback.

North Korea remains one of the most isolated countries on the planet. However, in the past five years, the flow of information in and out of the country has dramatically increased. This is, in part, due to the efforts of a myriad of civilian groups in South Korea.

“Government efforts to get in touch with average North Koreans are still quite limited,” says Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korean studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Civilian efforts are, generally speaking, more active.”

The MKSHFT groups have a variety of motives. Some overtly encourage revolution and defection. Others, such as North Korean Peace, focus on messages of friendship. The group uses balloons to send warm socks to North Korea. A leaflet is affixed to the socks: “The world has not forgotten the current hardships of our fellow brothers and sisters in North Korea. From all countries, we pray for your survival until the day of reunification. We love you.”

Reverend Eric Foley, leader of an evangelical group called Seoul USA, helps organize over eight hundred balloon launches each year. His group has sent around 40,000 New Testaments into North Korea. There are an estimated 300,000 Christians in the country today, who Foley says are “enormously persecuted”. Seoul USA uses balloon launches, among other methods, to communicate support for North Korean believers.

Balloon launches may seem to some like a quixotic attempt to effect change in the world’s last
hereditary Communist dictatorship. However, the North Korean government’s response shows that they, at least, take these balloons quite seriously. KCNA, the official North Korean government mouthpiece, released a statement threatening “direct fire” on individuals launching balloons. The statement called the balloon launches “a treacherous deed and wanton challenge” amounting to “ongoing psychological warfare”.

“One of the ways you can measure the effectiveness of these interventions is by paying attention to the North Korean reaction,” says Evans Revere, former senior US diplomat and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institute. That reaction has become much more emotional and hyperbolic in the past year, Revere says. “The level of rhetoric has really escalated.”

While experts agree that the balloon campaigns are clearly having an effect, without access to ordinary citizens it’s impossible to accurately judge how influential these actions are. For now, activists like Foley will continue to launch their balloons, sending them off on a wing and a prayer.

The post Enter the Void appeared first on MKshft.org.

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Commuters wearing backpacks over their chests shout orders of deep-fried vada pav at the snack stalls. Merchants pile burlap sacks of onions and potatoes near the pillar where the trains’ luggage compartments stop. The train approaches; a mob forms. Riders leap off well before the carriage slows to a stop. Limbs and bags entangle as new riders climb aboard.

Amidst the bustle, a unique rhythm emerges. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. The slender white canes of blind commuters lightly rap the ground, and the swarm of bodies parts ways to clear a path for them.

For the sightless and sighted alike, Mumbai—one of the world’s most densely populated cities—is a chaotic and overwhelming place. But people with blindness must move through this megacity without the advantage of spotting oncoming rickshaws, motorbikes, people, or the gaping gap between train and platform. Discrimination often keeps them from holding certain jobs, even if they qualify. So they adapt.

Many have done so in part by moving outside of central Mumbai. In Vangani, more than an hour away from Kurla Station by train, nearly 400 families with at least one blind relative have settled into a relatively safe and supportive community for the visually impaired—a place where open doors are the norm and neighbors regularly check in on each other. Each blind person carries an identification card with their personal details and the village council’s phone number in case of an emergency.

Satish Chanvakar Nagrekar, 50, moved here from Mumbai’s Mulund suburb a decade ago with his adoptive mother, Kaleka Uttam Avad. The family could no longer afford rent in the city, and, like the hundreds of others who have migrated here from across India, they hoped to find a better life and a cheaper cost of living. Kaleka, a sharp, chatty 75-year-old widow, soon arranged Satish’s marriage, and the three—all visually impaired—live together in a cramped two-room house.

One of Vangani’s main advantages is its connection to Mumbai’s urban amenities. A single-platform train station shuttles residents to downtown organizations, such as the National Association for the Blind, that offer mobility training, skill development courses and rehabilitation programs. And the station creates income opportunities that would otherwise be tough for blind families to access.

Satish, like many there who provide for their families, earns money by peddling trinkets on the city’s vast train network. Jobs are scarce for blind people in Vangani and Mumbai, and although some still hope to benefit from the one percent of government positions reserved for the visually impaired, most people wind up disillusioned by discrimination and bureaucracy. The Mkshft gives the full report.

Vangani’s blind community first formed in 1998, when local politician Ravindra Patil announced a program to provide free housing for visually impaired people. News spread quickly, and soon around four dozen families from across Maharashtra state moved there, according to Atul Jaiswal, an occupational therapist turned social worker who has worked in Vangani for two years.

But the promised housing never came. Rivals murdered the politician before his plans came to fruition.

Most of the blind migrants who arrived at that time were educated young adults. At 18, they had applied for jobs in their hometowns, but many were disqualified from or discriminated against in various positions. They were quick to pounce on the offer of free homes, but arriving in Vangani, they found themselves not only unemployed but also homeless. So many turned to train hawking.

Blind vendors from Vangani take a break with their wares at Kurla platform.

From Satish’s home in Vangani, the train station is a 15-minute walk. Each morning, after finishing his chores at home, he strides along a dusty lane lined with one-room houses, over a small hill and past a provisions store, and finally through a vegetable market that yields to a path to the train tracks. He walks alone, using only his white cane to find his way.

An official message at the station blares through the speakers: “Please do not cross the railway tracks.”

Satish does it anyways. Without a pedestrian footbridge, it’s the only way to reach the platform. Atul, the social worker, led a recent effort to get the Central Railway authorities to build a footbridge here. In a petition he launched in late 2012, he warned of sightless commuters who lost their balance while crossing the tracks and fell. Anita Tai, a Vangani resident, lost a limb after a train ran over her hand; it had to be surgically amputated.

Central Railways agreed to build a footbridge in March 2013 after Atul’s petition gathered over 6,000 signatures. So far, a contractor has come to dig holes, but the construction workers haven’t shown up, Vangani residents say.

For now, blind commuters continue to take precautions. Most cross the tracks in pairs, or in a single-file line of three or more. The leader taps a cane back and forth to find the way, and the rest follow with one hand placed on the shoulder of the person in front. Others cross the tracks with a sighted guide—their children, a friend, or a neighbor—then travel on alone.

By memorizing the exact arrivals and departures of trains, individuals can figure out where to be and when in order to make their way into the city and back, and families know when to expect them home.

Satish always takes the 11:24 a.m. train to Mumbai. Wearing an empty black crossbody bag, he boards the handicapped car and folds his white cane. At 12:14 p.m., he arrives at Thane Station, where he hops off to meet with a wholesaler and fill his bags with goods to sell that day. He’ll spend the rest of the afternoon selling goods like hair accessories, cardholders, key chains, and packs of facial tissues on the rail lines between Thane and Kurla Station, a 27-minute ride in each direction.

At every other station along the way, he switches compartments. As the train nears a stop, Satish anticipates on which side of the compartment the platform will appear and positions himself as close to that side as possible. A change in pattern underfoot—from a raised crosshatch to more pronounced vertical lines—warns of the compartment’s edge.

A new device attached to glasses could allow blind people to detect and avoid obstacles in their path. The Cognitive Aid System for Blind People, or CASBliP, sprang out of Ismael Lengua’s thesis research at the Universitat Politécnica de València in Spain. A short trial period showed that users with blindness felt safer, thanks to how much they could learn about their surroundings.
Time-of-flight camera systems send and receive infrared light pulses, measuring a person’s distance from an object.
Headphones relay sounds indicating whether the object is to the left, right, or straight ahead.
The device can measure from 0.5 to five meters in distance and 30 degrees to the left and right of the human head.

For less experienced blind commuters, maneuvering from coach to coach is risky. Some slip into the gap between the train and platform. But Satish avoids this with careful movements. Stepping off, he puts one hand on the outside of the train while the other sweeps his cane on the platform: right, left, right, left, right, left. He drags his hand along the metal exterior until it finds the opening to the next compartment, just in time to climb aboard before the train leaves the station.

By 5:54 p.m., he makes sure he is at Kurla to catch his train home. An hour and nine minutes later, he arrives in Vangani.

Train hawking is hardly lucrative. At the end of the day, he usually profits about INR 150 (USD 2.50). Of that amount, INR 70 (USD 1.20) is set aside for rent each month. The rest of the family’s income comes mainly from government disability benefits and any assistance or donations from nearby churches that his mother and wife are affiliated with.

“I don’t always want to do the train job,” says Satish, who has ridden the rails almost every day for the last nine years. “It’s not always safe for us. Anything can happen at anytime.”

Some vendors do manage to leave the “cutlery business,” as hawking is called locally. Shankar Pawar, who is also blind, stopped selling on the trains six years ago. He is now a schoolteacher and working to start his own business.

We meet at Vangani Station on a recent Sunday, a school holiday. He folds his white cane and tucks it in the left pocket of his dark slacks, then clutches my right arm and nudges me in the direction of his village. Shankar teaches at eight public schools in rural Karjat and uses his well-developed intuition to travel the four train stops it takes to get there. “I teach blind children,” he explains. “All subjects—Braille, math, crafts…Hindi, English, Marathi, the languages.”

He says it’s easy to navigate the trains because he lost his eyesight as a child due to an infection. (His mother used traditional herbal medicine rather than the modern variety. It didn’t work.) He has since mastered his other senses. “By now, I’m used to it. I listen to everything.” Listen for when the whole train has passed to know when it’s safe to cross, he instructs. Listen to conversations to sort out different languages, accents, and patterns of speech, to discern between first- and second-class carriages, and to distinguish ladies-only from general. Always listen.

Shankar makes it clear that he is not a fan of train hawking. On top of teaching, he is trying to open a candle factory that would make small, thin wax sticks like the ones that top birthday cakes. He already has connections with wholesalers that could stock the candles in Mumbai malls, but his teaching salary is just INR 7,000 (USD 116) a month and not enough to start the operation.

Various non-profit and state-run organizations have offered to provide him with financial support. But none have followed through yet. “People just come to take pictures, ask questions, then just leave,” Shankar says. “The idea is there, but the money is not.”

We return to the train platform after our walk. He releases my arm and unfolds his cane.

“The train has come,” he announces. I look left. A train appears in the distance, though it’s not audible until a good seven seconds after Shankar spoke. Asked how he knew it was coming, he laughs. “My concentration is better than yours.”

The post Following the Tracks appeared first on MKshft.org.

For a year and a half, Mkshft Gregorio has smuggled gas through clandestine routes along the inhospitable frontier, marked only by the desolated ranches of indigenous Wayúu people. He can earn up to 20,000 bolívares a week (USD 300 officially speaking, or USD 2,000 on the black market; Venezuela has several exchange rates).

His operation is bolstered by this simple fact: in Venezuela, a liter of gasoline officially costs a cent and a half, thanks to heavy government subsidies that make it the cheapest gas in the world. But at black market prices, a liter costs next to nothing: a tenth of a cent. In neighboring Colombia, by contrast, gasoline runs USD 1.20 per liter.

Many residents along the 2,219-kilometer Venezuela-Colombia border have turned to fuel smuggling to earn a living over the past decade. They siphon off fuel and pour it into tanks, plastic drums, and bottles, which are then slipped under car hoods, tucked above tires, and hidden behind car seats. It’s a predictably dirty job. Gas often leaks from plastic jerry cans and into local creeks. Smugglers can develop throat and stomach illnesses because they use a straw-like hose to shuffle fuel from container to container, and they sometimes swallow it. Charred remains of vehicles litter the sides of roads, oil drums visible from the back seat or trunk.

Still, the illicit industry “provides a profit that you can’t even get in the drug trade”, José Guerra, a Caracas-based economist, says. “Venezuela’s economic policies in the last 15 years have created such distortions.”

Ricardo, a young man in San Antonio, a border town in southwest Venezuela, says he earns around 5,000 bolívares (USD 800, officially) a week by lugging a 19-liter tank of gas into Colombia on his Yamaha 250 motorcycle. That’s about five times what he could make as a bike messenger at home. Nearly every day, he rides the two kilometers into Cúcuta, the main city in northeastern Colombia, and his haul can fetch around USD 8 for the whole tank.

Altogether, around 25,000 barrels, or nearly 4 million liters, of Venezuelan gasoline are smuggled every day into Colombia, Brazil, and the English Caribbean, officials estimate.

Rafael Ramírez, Venezuela’s former energy minister, figures that the country loses about USD 1.5 billion in annual oil revenues because of the illicit trade. As President Nicolás Maduro struggles to adopt a policy to fix the gas price problem, he is stepping up enforcement. Maduro recently ordered 17,000 troops to police the border with Colombia, and frontier entrances are now closed at night.

Each day, thousands of barrels of illicit fuel sneak through this border checkpoint between San Antonio, Venezuela, and Cúcuta, Colombia.

Like Gregorio, Ricardo is finding ways around the human roadblocks. “At the border checkpoint, the National Guard will take away half of my gas tank,” he says. “I have to come up with another route to cross, one where a guard will take USD 50 or 100 to let me through.”

Danilo, who rides in Gregorio’s truck, similarly carries a stack of cash to grease palms along the way. The crew is often intercepted by civiles demanding bribes from 1,000 bolívares (USD 12) on up. Civiles include military and police from both countries, as well as armed men from the left-wing guerrilla group FARC, paramilitary gangs, or Wayúu people who control certain swathes of land.

“I have to come up with another route to cross, one where a guard will take USD 50 or 100 to let me through.”

If and when the smugglers get through, their fuel finds its way to pimpineros (roadside vendors) like Edgar Medina. A 17-year-old dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals, he parks himself near the entrance to Cúcuta, an astoundingly toasty city. He sells around 40 pimpinas (23-liter jerry cans) a day along the road that connects to San Antonio in Venezuela.“

Up until July, I was buying pimpinas at 22,000 Colombian pesos (USD 11) and selling for 28,000 pesos,” he says from an improvised hut made from logs, scrap plastic, and zinc. Since Venezuela’s National Guard has started cracking down, however, less fuel is pouring into Colombia, enabling him to raise his prices. He now buys at 28,000 pesos and sells for 33,000 pesos.

Even at the higher cost, a car owner in eastern Colombia can still get gas for half or one-third of the price he would pay at an actual service station. About 15 percent of all gas used in Colombia is contraband, customs officials estimate.

How the fuel gets from the smuggler to the pimpinero is somewhat murky. Edgar says he gets his supplies from a wholesaler, who delivers a batch of pimpinas by van. “I just know him as Alfonso, and I don’t ask him many questions,” he says. In Maicao, up to 200 enclosed lots receive gasoline drums and send them to unregulated selling stations. Colombian and Venezuelan media both report that paramilitary troops—now “demobilized” from Colombia’s armed conflict with FARC—are the main shareholders in this illegal fuel trade.

Reflecting on what he does, Danilo maintains that the frontier has been a source of livelihood for generations. “Folks have always profited from the border trade. Long ago, it was the other way around—people smuggling from Colombia to Venezuela. It’s always been a way to make money.”

Fuel smuggling in the region could not thrive without the complicity of formal gas distributors in Venezuela, who are part of Venezuela’s petroleum monopoly PDVSA. Nor could it succeed without the secret support of the country’s armed forces, according to civilian opposition figures. In late August, 21 military officials were taken to court because, while their colleagues were closing off some of the 400 informal roads crossing through the Venezuela-Colombia border, the officials were opening up new routes for the smugglers and their trucks.

Several names in this story are pseudonyms given to the writer due to security concerns.

The post Combustible Contraband appeared first on MKshft.org.

So Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s proclaimed to Cuba’s industrial sector, shortly after the triumph of the  evolutionary movement he helped lead. The year was 1961, and Cuba, increasingly isolated, was experiencing an exodus of foreign companies and investment due to the unfriendly market policies of Fidel Castro’s nascent government. The start of the now famous United States embargo against Cuba meant the large-scale departure of material resources from an island that once relied heavily on American cash and imports. With restrictions on  entrepreneurship and individual enterprise, the economy hit rock bottom in the 1970s.

Revolución

Perhaps foreseeing a future that demanded self-sufficiency, Guevara—then Cuba’s Minister of Industries—offered the first ideological push for what would become a way of life for generations of Cubans to come—Cubans who would have no choice but to build and repair, over and over again, both the state factory machines and the smaller machines in their homes. From the endless, ongoing restoration of the iconic 1950s Buicks to the creation of baby toys made from milk cans and dried beans, fabricating goods not officially available on the island became an essential skill.

Castro’s newly formed socialist government nationalized foreign companies and converted workers into the new “bosses” of the industrial sector. He urged them take on reparation jobs and to create spare parts. People started viewing dilapidated machines as the country’s biggest enemy. A drill without a cylinder, a belt saw without a pulley, a worn out mold—these mutilated artifacts terrorized the new society like wounded zombies.

The empty spaces in the machines paralyzed the cogs driving the revolution. The workers started to fill the spaces, which they would do so many times over so many years that machines now have more pieces made from the repairs than from the original parts. The MKSHFT workshops gave names for the assembled or built-from-scratch contraptions; some stuck, others that did not. If a Cuban engineer had returned to the island after 10 years in exile, he’d no longer be an expert. In fact, despite his training, he wouldn’t recognize the contraptions growing out the hands of the more crude practice of design. Whatever he knew about the internal workings of an American technology would already have been substituted for a cruder but equally productive design practice.

This first wave of makers left a trail of invention that changed the course of interacting with technology in Cuba.

Cubans began to bring this repair-mindset home, turning their own households into laboratories. The same engineer would, during his day shift, repair the engine of a Soviet MIG15 jet fighter and, in the evening—faced with a country-wide shortage of matches—build an electric lighter out of a pen and light bulb.

Here lies some irony: The technological disobedience—which the revolution promoted as an alternative to the country’s stalled productive sector—became the most reliable resource for Cubans to navigate the inefficiencies of the state political system. Workers who had devoted their imagination and resourcefulness to keeping the revolution on its feet were then forced to employ those attributes to endure lives short on necessities.

Acumulación

Lack of trust in the success of the revolution turned Cuban homes into warehouses for all kinds of objects—anything that could be useful but unavailable down the line. The accumulation of products led workers to radically question industrial processes and mechanisms. They started looking at objects not with the eyes of an
engineer but those of an artisan. Every object could potentially be repaired or reused, even in a different context from its original design.

Accumulation—in this case an automatic gesture—separated the object from the Western intent and lifecycle it was destined for. This is technological disobedience.

When people held onto things, they also kept the technical principles and an idea of how they fit together. In any critical moment, they would scratch their heads to conjure the exact piece that could solve the problem. When the power went out, the fan broke, or the chair snapped, the family kept an ear out for technological whispers from the patios, under the beds, or from obscure corners of rooms guarding piles of old things—either parts or in their entirety.

Seemingly insignificant things were assigned new, useful tasks. The tops of penicillin vials have become the best solution for valves on pressure cookers. Deodorant canisters proved excellent electrical switches (close the lid to turn the electricity on!). Defective fluorescent tubes now make up 3D picture frames. An old 33-rpm vinyl, cut properly, would serve as a fan blade—and its creators could reproduce copies of it. An old and deteriorated Eagle kerosene lamp reappeared when power outages became common, and sometimes a milk bottle or gas tank functioned as the lampshade. Each creation’s new appearance and new function made it unique.

Cubans in this time knew just a few brands: Caribe and Kim TVs, Orbita fans, and Aurika washing machines. The communist market of the 70s prioritized production with a social end: clones of state-commissioned chairs, for example, were distributed across the island. That people thus accumulated identical goods meant that similarly ingenious repair methods popped up throughout. Standardized metal trays in schools, for example, were appropriated by the “maker class” to create a product then not officially in existence on the island: the TV antenna.

No one’s really sure whether the idea inspired each person individually or people actively taught each other. The tray was the only accessible metal for this task—but was its secondary use an inevitable result of the mix of necessity, standard availability of goods, and creative use of them?

Another object mysteriously appeared in many houses: the kerosene lamp. Built with a cylindrical glass container—13 cm high and wide—and inside, dipped in kerosene, a wick holder made from a tube of toothpaste. The container, produced by Comecon—the now-defunct alliance of socialist countries—served dual purposes as a fuel vessel and lampshade. This transformed Cuba’s most recognizable container into its most common kerosene lamp. Necessity and standardized resources meant replicable solutions and repeated technological disobedience.

Throughout the 80s, Soviet subsidies created a decade of relative economic stability and, with that, a greater abundance of resources. Then, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban government proclaimed a “Special Period” of extreme rationing and shortages. In 1993, a desperate new law finally permitted—with restrictions—businesses engaged in making and tinkering. A new era of creative enterprise was forced open.

Desobediencia

At the start of the Special Period, instantaneous substitutes, objects, and provisional fixes let Cubans hold on until the end of the crisis. This built worker confidence in homebrewed construction, transport, clothing, or appliances. But these were just reparative solutions of a destroyed or insufficient material reality—and ultimately, just the waiting room for the strongest wave of revolutionary creativity.

While reinventing their lives, an unconscious mentality emerged. As a surgeon becomes desensitized to wounds, Cubans became desensitized to designed objects. They stopped seeing the original purpose of the object; instead it became a sample of parts. This is the first Cuban expression of disobedience in their relationship with objects—a growing disrespect for an object’s identity and for the truth and authority it embodies.

After opening, breaking, repairing, and using them so often at their convenience, the makers ultimately disregarded the signs that make occidental objects a unity, a closed identity. Cubans do not fear the emanating authority that brands like Sony, Swatch, or even NASA, command. If something is broken, it will be fixed—somehow. If it could even be conceived as usable to repair other objects, they might as well save it, either in parts or in its entirety. A new future awaits.

An emblematic object of this building is the “fan-phone”. An improvised repairman remembered, when his fan’s  base broke, that he had kept somewhere a broken phone from Communist Germany. He recalled it because the Orbit fan base somewhat resembled the prismatic pyramidal shape of the phone; the inspired creator was  interested not in associations or meanings but in the formal analogy based on size and structure. The repaired, rebuilt, and repurposed fan was, at the same time, an outline of the cunning abilities of the individual, a diagram of the accumulation in his house, and an image of his disobedience.

Within the process of repair, repurposing, and reinvention, three key concepts speak to an elevated degree of  subversion. Firstly, reconsidering the industrial object from an artisan’s perspective. Secondly, denying the traditional lifecycle of a Western object. And lastly, substituting traditional roles with alternative functions that  meet demand.

In the sense of restoration, repairing legitimizes an object’s qualities and allows the maker to become acquainted with an object differently. But sometimes repairing means creating a novel tool; these reparations are influenced by the more radical processes of reinvention and repurposing.

A telling case is that of a charger for non-rechargeable batteries developed in Havana in 2005. Enildo, the device’s creator, wanted to recharge batteries for his wife’s hearing aid. He could connect his new charger to an outlet and, in just 20 minutes, provide 20 days of battery life.

Like Dr. Frankenstein creating his monster, Enildo pieced together diodes from an old radio, fragments of a conductor, and little pieces of sheet metal, placing them atop a piece of plastic pulled from the radio. The new charger, stripped of its original technical purpose, summons memories of diagrams from science class. The goal was to recharge the battery; how it’s done questions the technical and commercial logic scribed upon the batteries.

The reparation, refunctionalization, and reinvention show leaps of imagination in opposition to the concepts of innovation favored by the logic of Western mass production. And each leap allowed for some small adjustment to the poverty that most of the disobedient inventors lived under.

Technological disobedience in Cuba is not just about the transgression of authority of industrial design and the way of life it projects onto its users. This practice also detours the overarching restrictions of the Cuban system. Houses all over contain rebellious inventions: lunch trays receiving television signals; chopped-up salsa LPs blowing cool air; deodorant cans turning lights on and off; and electrical components now reviving non-reusable batteries.

But technological disobedience doesn’t respect boundaries. It wiggles its way in to the social, political, and economic—realms that inspire subversion in their own rights. It keeps life flowing for those who participate. It interrupts the endless flow of Western goods and the constant push of communism on the island. And it keeps inspiring hands to create things that will make life just a little better for their owners.

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