Armando Rodriguez

Castro's Robots Armando Rodriguez

In Cuba, a political stigma can bury a person for life. That happened to Armando in 1981, when he was denied his doctorate and forced to leave the chair he directed at the University of Havana. The reason for that decision or punishment-as it is called-among other things was to defend the use of American books, such as the Berkeley University series and Richard Feynman's Physics conferences, against the boring and unimaginative Soviet texts. However, in 1986 it had risen again. From a dark warehouse of food on the outskirts of Havana that allowed him to use, he managed to gather a set of bright minds, which like him, had been discarded by the system. That group, using those primitive personal computers, managed to develop both electronic products and software to process medical images and make controls with technical vision for robots and machine tools. So successful were those successes that the news came to Fidel Castro.