FOCAL’s bilingual Cuba research directory — an online index of policy and research resources on Cuba, built for low-bandwidth access and delivered alongside the main FOCAL engagement.
CubaSource was the Canadian Foundation for the Americas’ dedicated sub-project: an online index of Cuba-related material for Canadian policy researchers, journalists, and academics. It covered documents, organizations, news, and events across Cuba’s political and economic landscape, in both English and Spanish.
The CubaSource sub-project
I designed and built the full site on ASP/Windows/IIS as part of the FOCAL engagement. Low-bandwidth optimization was a deliberate design constraint: the target audience included policy researchers and organizations in places where reliable broadband wasn’t a given in 2002. The bilingual requirement ran through the content architecture and navigation, not just the copy.
Bilingual and low-bandwidth from the start
ASP, Windows/IIS, bilingual English/Spanish. Wayback Machine captures from mid-2002 show the rebuilt design running continuously through at least 2003. The site title in the 2003 archive: “Cubasource — a Resource of FOCAL’s Research Forum on Cuba.”