![objetos con forma prismatica objetos con forma prismatica](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/38/dd/3738dd9169f3614d4d626d0e030b7e01.png)
Or who, with the match shortage, invented an electric lighter out of a light bulb and a pen. The same person who by day repaired the motor of a MIG15 Soviet jet fighter, at night made their spouse a picture frame out of hundreds of nails, pieces of mirror and string. But it was their creative activities in their personal lives where the innovative movement really resided it was their homes that served as the true laboratories for invention and manufacturing.
![objetos con forma prismatica objetos con forma prismatica](https://st2.depositphotos.com/4399827/11571/v/950/depositphotos_115716502-stock-illustration-hexagon-monochrome-set-of-geometric.jpg)
The government generally supported and publicized the news of successful repairs and adaptations of factory machinery in the eyes of the State, the worker was a hero. We could even speak of a continual process of transformation, of the worker’s movements as a vector transferring ideas as well as material and technical resources from the home to the factory and vice versa. I spoke to some of those first Cuban innovators and rationalizors, now elderly, and I noticed a recurring theme: over the course of their life they had left a trail of inventions in their wake everywhere they lived and worked, altering the functions, uses and appearance of everyday objects and environments.
![objetos con forma prismatica objetos con forma prismatica](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/54/27/4854278bebc6fae93b21bda3ef51ba9e.jpg)
The entrails of the North American technology that he knew so well had been substituted with others: imperfect, rustic, but equally efficient. If an engineer exiled in the US for ten years would have returned to the island, he would no longer be an expert. In workshop jargon these altered (or completely remade) machines were rebaptized “Creole” machines. The workers began to fill those voids, filling them so many times, over so many years that many of those machines now consist of more parts made by the workers than originals. The missing pieces in the machines paralyzed the gears that were to set the revolution in motion. A lathe without a spindle, a band saw without wheels, worn-out molds and thousands of other mutilated contraptions threatened the course of the new society like zombies. The broken machines seemed, during those days, to be the nation’s number one enemy.
![objetos con forma prismatica objetos con forma prismatica](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e1/7d/49/e17d492a7af617e0aaf8b30ed5b3aad1.jpg)
The new government nationalized both foreign and national companies and called for the workers, as the new “owners” of the national industrial park, to take up the task of producing replacement parts and tackle the first repair jobs. It’s existence and solidification was the result of the confluence of two fateful circumstances: on one hand, the accelerated deterioration of the industries that had been paralyzed, and on the other the mass exodus-beginning in the early 1960s-of engineers, technicians and skilled workers who sought job security on US soil with the companies that they had worked for on the island. Several years later, this organization of increasingly ready and willing workers consolidated themselves as the Asociación Nacional de Innovadores y Racionalizadores, known to the public by the acronym ANIR. Two and a half years later, in 1964, the Comisión Organizadora Nacional del Movimiento de Innovadores e Inventores was created with the goal of facilitating and institutionalizing the movement’s activities. This event was the first ideological initiative of the national movement of Cuban innovators and inventors, who had begun organizing themselves in 1960 with the Comités de Piezas de Repuesto. “Worker, build your own machinery!”: this was the appeal that Ernesto Guevara-Minister of Industries from 1961 to 1966-directed to the participants of the Primera Reunión Nacional de Producción in August 1961.