Larry Press: Professor of Information Systems Researches Internet in Cuba

Larry Press, professor of information systems, was quoted as an expert source in a broadcast of Public Radio International’s (PRI’s) “The World” last October. Co-produced by BBC World Service radio and WGBH public radio in Boston, “The World” is aired on 240 stations on the public radio network in the United States. Press was sought out for his expertise on Internet connectivity in Cuba and to provide insight on President Bush’s comments about providing Internet access and computers for Cuba’s citizens. Press has spent time researching Internet connectivity in Cuba, and reported that the country has the lowest percentage of people using the Internet in the Caribbean.

“At the time of my first study of Cuba in 1995, the country was among the leaders in the Caribbean,” says Press. “In the mid 1990s, the Internet attracted the attention of politicians, and there was a debate between the conservative hardliners and the more progressive technocrats. Hardliners, including current acting Cuban President Raul Castro, feared possible political instability from the Internet -- they felt that Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy led to the fall of the Soviet Union, and did not want the same thing to happen in Cuba. Progressive leaders argued that the Internet would be important for education and commerce, and that it should be encouraged.

“The hardliners prevailed, and they ended up connecting to the Internet, but maintained control over who had access and what they could use it for,” he continues. “[Internet] accounts were through [the workplace], and using them for anything but work was prohibited. A single organization was also selected to control the Internet and international links. Internet diffusion in Cuba has now fallen well behind that of many Caribbean nations and political control measures are partially responsible for their relative decline.”

Press has been studying the global diffusion of the Internet, with an emphasis on policy and technology in developing nations, for more than a decade. With colleagues at Georgia Tech, the University of Arizona and University of Nebraska, Omaha, Press developed an early framework to characterize the state of the Internet in a nation. This framework has since been widely used in national case studies and surveys. Press has done studies in Russia, Chile, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Singapore, and Vietnam. He is currently working on a project to use the Internet to support Cuban non-governmental organizations.

Press states that developing nations are far behind the curve in Internet usage trends.

“Connections in developed nations are much faster, rural areas are much better covered, and we use the Internet at home, school and work, while users in developing nations are often at Internet cafes or other shared sites,” he says. “If one looks only at the percent of the population using the Internet, the gap seems to be slowly closing, but that is misleading.

“I believe we have amply demonstrated the value of Internet applications in commerce, e-government, education, entertainment, health care, personal communication, news and politics, in developing nations,” says Press, “and I have been arguing for some time for private-public infrastructure projects to bring connectivity to their rural areas.”

His work has been supported by organizations including RAND Corporation, The International Telecommunication Union, Science Applications International Corporation , the United Nations Development Programme , the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the U.S. State Department, as well as governments in developing nations.

Press was also an organizer and instructor in the World Bank Internet Society workshops, which trained more than 2,500 networking leaders from many developing nations.

Press has worked in both industry and academia, consulted on a variety of industrial and multilateral organizations, and published numerous articles and reports. He is the author of Low-Cost Word Processing and The IBM PC and its Applications. He has edited two book series, and been an editor or contributing editor for several magazines, trade publications and academic journals and periodicals.

At CSU Dominguez Hills, Press has received the Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award, the Lyle Gibson Distinguished Teacher Award, and the Outstanding Professor Award. He has also been recognized by the Hyundai Corporation as an Outstanding Professor. His MBA and doctorate in information processing are from UCLA.

To hear Press' PRI interview, click here.

- Joanie Harmon