Sara Peyton

Sara Peyton has 25 years experience as a staff and freelance reporter, essayist, columnist, and book reviewer for daily and weekly newspapers in northern California. Her column, Book People, appears in the New York Times-owned Press Democrat. Her essays, interviews, book reviews, and reporting have appeared in More Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Organic Style, Newsweek, New York Times, Poets & Writers, Stanford Magazine, Weight Watchers Magazine, More.com, LHJ.com, Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Magazine, and Women.com. Sara is the publicist for consumer books at O'Reilly Media.

Thu

Jan 24
2008

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O'Reilly Books and the Cuban Internet

Folks are often interested when they learn I work for O’Reilly Media. But few people have expressed as much enthusiasm as Julio, a new friend I met recently at a party in Occidental, a tiny redwood studded town a few miles west of O’Reilly Media’s headquarters in Sebastopol.

“I told my wife that I wanted to drive through Sebastopol so I could see where Mr. O’Reilly worked,” Julio told me. A Cuban by birth and now a Canadian citizen by choice, Julio told me he was among the handful of computer pioneers who constructed the Cuban Internet. And they did it with the help of O’Reilly’s animal books.

Over the course of Cuba’s Internet revolution, Julio dramatically changed his life, leaving his native land as a political refugee and heading for Canada. Today he works as an independent software consultant.

I asked Julio to tell me more about how O’Reilly helped him and others develop the Internet in Cuba and this is what he emailed me:

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