Above: Raul Moas, executive director of Roots of Hope. Photo credit: Michael Bolden.

Three projects focused on helping residents of Cuba access digital information won $1,000 each during a hackathon at The LAB Miami Saturday that focused on the communications challenges of the island nation.

Roots of Hope, a Miami-based nonprofit that empowers “youth to become authors of their own future,” created Hackathon for Cuba to explore ways technology can help people glean information outside the island.

“In an island of 11 million people, less than 5 percent have Internet access and only 20 percent have cellphones,” said Raul Moas, executive director of Roots of Hope. “Wi-Fi is either illegal or highly regulated. The Cuban government doesn’t want people to have access to uncensored information.”

Knight Foundation sponsored the hackathon to cultivate the creation of new ideas in Miami’s emerging tech community. The winners included: RaspberryPi, which offers a device the size of a credit card to create a rogue Wi-Fi network where neighbors can share information via SD cards; Apretaste, which suggested a social inbox based on keywords, something akin to U.S.-based marketplace sites such as Craigslist and eBay; and Cuba Direct, which would help residents browse the Internet via email. The prize money, sponsored by Pop.co, provided seed money to further investigate the ideas.

The inspiration for the hackathon came from Yoanni Sanchez, Cuba’s leading blogger.

Sanchez is a unique cybernaut. Six years ago, she was living in freedom in Zurich, but chose to return to her birthplace to pioneer digital transparency. After a brief stint publishing an online magazine, she created a blog that currently has more than 4 million unique visitors a month and is translated into more than 20 languages, thanks to supporters from all over the world.

“She was also the first person to tweet actively from Cuba,” Moas said. “Sanchez is fond of Twitter’s iconic logo, which symbolizes freedom of expression. ‘I send out the little blue bird with my words and messages,’ [she says].”

The catch? Sanchez can’t even see her own blog or tweets. Although difficult to access, email is legal in Cuba, so she sends dispatches to blogs and social networks via email or mobile text.

Roots of Hope helped Sanchez fulfill a lifelong dream last year; she visited Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and various Google executives in Silicon Valley. Those meetings led to the Hackathon for Cuba. “We wanted to bring coders, developers, programmers and creative thinkers together,” Moas said.  “We wanted to see how we could boost productivity, encourage entrepreneurship on the island and bridge the digital divide between Cuba’s youth and those living abroad, while still within the strict boundaries of U.S. and Cuba law.”

That’s no small challenge. On Friday evening, hackathon participants and supporters gathered for an opening reception. Sanchez chimed in via a pre-recorded video because she was traveling in South America.

“This is a bold dare to help Cubans feel like they are citizens of the 21st century,” Sanchez said in Spanish. “I hope the next hackathon will take place in Havana.”

With this in mind, the hackers—more than 50 percent of them Cuban nationals now living legally in the U.S.—regrouped Saturday morning to spend the day brainstorming about empowering communication in Cuba.

One of them, computer engineer Jose Pimienta, said USB drives have become the holy grail of technology on the island. “This is how information is shared,” he said. “When you do have access to a computer, download speeds are very slow, worse than dial-up.   When I got to the U.S., I couldn’t even sleep for a long time. I was so excited about access that I spent hours on end at the computer.”

Late Saturday afternoon, 12 teams comprising more than 40 hackers presented their solutions to a three-judge panel: Jose Ignacio Rasco, managing director and co-founder of STRAAT Investments; German Montoya, managing director of Rokkr3r Labs; and Melissa Medina, vice president of strategic engagement and technology at the Technology Foundation of the Americas.

Some of the hackers had never even met each other until that morning. The winning criteria: innovation, scalability and feasibility.

“We’re not looking for a finished product today,” Moas said later.  “But we will curate and invest in them, depending on where it leads, and we’ll try to implement.”

The inability to access information in Cuba and how it undermines education was a key motivation for Salvador Pascual, a member of the Apretaste team who graduated with a computer science degree in Cuba and received a master’s in the same field at Florida International University. “I lived that situation in Cuba directly,” he said. “If you get a homework assignment about, let’s say, Joan of Arc, you have very few resources to investigate. Yes, you can go to the National Library of Havana, but it’s a big island, and not everyone has access to that library. Transportation is challenging.”

But even old school access to information, in the form of books, is compromised in Cuba. When asked which authors were censored, Pascual mentioned that his favorite was George Orwell. “You can’t find Orwell in Cuba’s government-sponsored libraries,” he noted. “But you can find his books on the street.”

Maria de los Angeles is a South Florida freelance journalist.