Posted on 09/16/2012 6:30:01 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
When my iPhone slipped from the back of the tank and into the toilet,I snatched it out immediately. Though at first all seemed fine, it soon switched off and remained unresponsive.
"It's toast," was the verdict from Grant,an Apple store Genius. "We don't deem it really,like, worth it to replace the inner components of the shell of a broken phone. I'll throw that guy away and get you a brand new one."........I was about to leave on a trip to Cuba, where my phone wasn't going to work anyway. So I thanked him and left.
.....On my second day in Havana, .....A kid wearing white-framed Ray-Bans nodded when I knocked on the green plywood door at the destination. His name was Andy,and he was confident he could fix my problem. Removing the tiny screws that hold the glass cover in place,he began a rapid disassembly.......After 20 minutes of careful prodding and scrubbing,Andy miraculously resuscitated my phone, but the battery holds little charge.
.....Roberto asked me to wait and bounded up a set of concrete stairs. Minutes later,he returned with a new iPhone battery in its black plastic wrapper.
As payment, he accepted an 8-gigabyte flash drive I'd been carrying. Flash drives are valuable in Cuba, where Internet use is restricted and monitored. Roberto, an architecture student, explained that while "tuition here is free, you have to buy lesson books, paper, pens, your food, your transportation." All that costs money.
......Just as their fathers learned to fix obsolete Detroit cars, Andy and Roberto have learned to make a living with Palo Alto technology to which they have no official access. The healthy cell phone repair market here is the latest example of Cuban ingenuity that locals call sobreviviendo. It's small-scale capitalism working around a 50-year embargo and an anemic,centrally planned economy.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
That's what it is, the U.S. embargo and their centrally planned economy [aka COMMUNISM] that makes the Cubans so ingenious!
They also have “free” health care in this “anemic centrally planned economy’ where you need to bring your own towels, sheets, food, etc for hospital stays — even then...
http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2010/jan/15/cuba-cold-snap-kills-26-psychiatric-hospital/
He probably could have found half a dozen kids within a few miles of the Apple store who could have done the same thing. Hopefully, they would have been smart enough to charge him.
And "bump" to Post #3.
Its like living in the dark ages. Sure they survived but damn, I dont think a poor American would survive. They could not complain that they where not given “Everything”!!!
Its all perspective......
My favorite high school teacher was a Cuban refugee with a PhD in Chemistry from the Sorbonne. Che would have put a bullet through his head if he had gotten the opportunity. My favorite doctor was a graduate of the University of Havana. When I was living in New York, I had a Jewish girlfriend, whose nice Jewish mother worked in a medical association that was staffed by a number of doctors, mostly Jewish. When I needed a doctor, she recommended the Cuban. It turned out my high school teacher (a Roman Catholic cleric) was one of his patients. One of the first things I noticed when I entered his office was a framed excerpt from the Hippocratic Oath, forswearing abortion.
Cuba’s people are vastly better than their government.
If there ever was an example of the uselessness of embargoes, Cuba is it.
That has certainly been my experience.
Kudo’s to the resourcefulness and entreprenuereal spirit of the ordinary Cubans - may they learn to use it in a way that liberates them from the jackwads at the top of the criminal enterprise that enslaves them.
And on a matter related to the other point in this article, I read on some site that if you destroy your iPhone by dropping it in water, you can often revive it by drying it out by hand as much as you can, and then placing it in a container of uncooked rice to dessicate out the moisture remaining inside. Don’t know if it always works, but it’s probably cheaper (and more pleasant) than taking the darn thing to Havana to get fixed.
Years ago I finally gave up listening to NPR when
I listened to an NPR report saying that extreme poverty
in Castro’s regime was good for the environment
because poverty forced people to recycle. Haven’t
listened since.
As an aside, if they can make a $20 Timex watch waterproof, why not a $200 iPhone?
Too many drink the kool aid .....
Sept 14, 2012 - EPA: Staff-wide Che Guevara email an ‘inadvertent error’ - "Environmental Protection Agency staff opened their inboxes Thursday to find an agency-wide Hispanic Heritage Month email featuring a prominent picture of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and largely plagiarized from the website Buzzle.com.
According to the EPA, the email — which heralded the beginning Hispanic Heritage Month on Saturday and offered cultural details about Hispanics — was an accident and the employee responsible has apologized. ..............."
For all practical purposes there is no embargo. Cuba can freely trade with any other nation in the world, including China, Germany, England, France and many other industrialized nations that can and do sell just about any product imaginable. And a number of US exports are exempt from the embargo, including agricultural and food products and some medical supplies.
It is difficult to find a product that Cuba cannot buy on the world market, except for things like jet fighters from McDonnell Douglass. And if they had the money they could buy military hardware from their friends in Russia.
The Cuban government has used the excuse of the embargo for years, when the truth is that the failure of their economy is solely a result of their socialist policies. The real reason they have next to nothing is that they don't generate the money needed to buy anything in the world market. They can't even afford oil from Venezuela, or consumer goods from China.
I inadvertently washed and dried a memory stick once and it still worked.
Thanks CW. This is an good article. I’m interested in the real Cuba but so many books written on life there are either so pro Castro or hate Castro that you question how objective they are. So far I’ve found two books both by Englishmen that seem a fair treatment of whats going on there...
Even worse yet, the liberals in America believe that America’s embargo is the cause of Cuba’s failures!
Idiots fooling idiots!
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