The Genius Bar in a country where iPhones can’t legally be sold

Months after Ángel García Padrón fixed a German journalist’s MacBook Pro in his small Havana repair shop, she sent him an email. García Padrón had mended her waterlogged laptop after her home in Cuba flooded, but when the journalist took it to an official Apple Store in Berlin, the authorized repair person had expressed disbelief, saying there was no trace of any water damage at all. “Then my Cuban repairman must be a magician,” she recounted telling the Apple worker. García Padrón is used to conjuring these sorts of tricks on a daily basis — the skills required to deal with Apple products in Cuba require a special sort of magic.

Even though prohibition limiting the exportation, re-exportation, sale, and supply of Apple products to Cuba was eased in 2015, getting a hold of, operating, and maintaining them can still be a challenge. This is in part because basic replacement parts are difficult to import, since they cannot be purchased directly from Apple. It’s not just hardware, either: Downloading apps or software updates is tricky because Cuban IP addresses are blocked. And setting up a new Apple ID with two-factor verification requires a phone number from outside Cuba.

García Padrón is part of an exclusive circle of Apple enthusiasts who are defying Cuba’s constraints to create profitable repair businesses. In little more than a decade, these Cuban Apple technicians have evolved from casual tinkerers to a small yet thriving community of celebrity repairers, respected by locals and foreigners alike.

The absence of official Apple stores and product resellers in Cuba has fostered a community-driven ecosystem that relies on unofficial suppliers and a transnational network of individuals who can travel abroad to buy hardware replacement parts. Technicians told Rest of World there are only a handful of Apple repair shops in Cuba, mostly clustered in Havana; it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact number as there are no official statistics.

Orlando Gutiérrez is one Cuban trailblazer who opened Meca Móvil, his own iPhone repair shop in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood. Finding an Android repairperson, he told Rest of World, is easy enough. “You might even find a few on a single block,” he said. “But a Mac technician is the holy grail.”

From the moment Meca Móvil officially opened its doors in 2011, Gutiérrez began to service the phones of Cuba’s elite creative class and local celebrities — the type of people who had the means to travel abroad and buy an Apple device back then. One of his loyal customers was the reggaeton singer Yosdani Jacob Carmenates, or Jacob Forever, known for his chart-topping track La Gozadera. Gutiérrez said the singer bought an iPhone during a visit to Miami, but then found that he was completely unable to use it upon his return to Havana. He couldn’t install apps or update his phone’s software — until he visited Meca Móvil. 

These cases are the easiest to fix, said Gutiérrez. The first step is to install a virtual private network (VPN) to disguise the device’s presence in Cuba. For VIP customers like Jacob Forever, Meca Móvil’s Apple troubleshooters would also install a bundle of commonly used apps. Back when he first started out, before 3G connectivity was widely available, Gutiérrez vividly remembers clients asking for apps like the offline version of Wikipedia (which he described as “Cuban Google”). Though times have changed — clients now ask for Duolingo, online banking app Banca Remota, or streaming platforms like Netflix — this service remains much the same. Though Meca Móvil shut down in 2015, Gutiérrez is now an Apple-specialized YouTuber.

This arrangement proved particularly valuable during a time when public internet access points in Cuba were scarce and unaffordable for most people. Some Apple technicians discovered a workaround by securing state jobs that guaranteed internet connectivity, allowing them to regularly download apps and software they would later install in customers’ devices. Despite the Cuban peso’s devaluation over the past several years, the cost of installing an app package has consistently stayed within the range of $1–$5. 

Now, as Cubans have gained greater access to tech from abroad, services like creating Apple IDs and removing carrier locks on iPhones are still in demand — for which local technicians have developed their own creative strategies. To create an Apple ID, without which many of the phone’s functions won’t work, repair people must provide a foreign phone number to pass the two-factor authentication process. To accomplish this, they use free websites like TextNow, which offer users unlimited SMS messages and calls from outside of Cuba.

Many Cubans will often ask repair people like García Padrón to install Windows on their Apple laptops. While MacBooks have become a status symbol across Havana’s universities and creative industries, many still prefer the Windows operating system as it’s easier to use in Cuba. 

Users with iPhones from U.S. cellphone carriers like AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile need a technician to remove the lock tying the device to its carrier so it can be used with a Cuban SIM card. Technicians also offer recurring services, such as periodically updating devices, which allows them to develop a sustainable business model and loyal customer base.

These Apple repair shops thrived after 2011, when an economic reform authorized 75,000 licenses for entrepreneurs to establish small businesses, ranging from rental homes to electronic repair. However, while the licenses granted legality to the technicians’ economic activity, limitations persist regarding their capacity to import equipment and replacement parts from abroad.

In April, Michel Álvarez Morales expressed his frustration on Facebook after a Hanchen LCD screen separator machine — commonly used to repair smartphones — was confiscated by Cuban Customs because the technician did not have an import permit. Technicians responded to the post, complaining about the difficulties they face in procuring simple tools like screwdrivers, microscopes, or welding machines. 

During the pandemic, when there was a limited number of flights to Cuba, 23-year-old Chris Gámez Ruiz needed to fix his MacBook Air’s keyboard. The Havana resident had purchased the laptop via Facebook for about 12,000 Cuban pesos (around $100 at the time). While he wasn’t drawn to the laptop’s design, he bought it as a “status symbol,” he told Rest of World, despite the fact that its keyboard was already broken when he bought it.

Gámez Ruiz hired one of Cuba’s most sought-after MacBook technicians: Raiko Israel Pupo Hondal, the founder of Railab, an Apple repair shop in the Reparto Kohly neighborhood of Havana. A year after graduating with a degree in telecommunications, Pupo Hondal began working at a laptop repair shop, where he discovered the unique satisfaction of tackling challenging Mac-related issues that left other technicians stumped. 

Pupo Hondal first tried to order a replacement keyboard from abroad, but was unsuccessful. He then decided to replace it with another old keyboard that “only” had four broken keys. Gámez Ruiz was happy enough with the repair and paid Pupo Hondal with a broken iMac. After all its useful pieces were extracted, the iMac was displayed as a decorative piece in Railab, alongside a collection of other old and gutted Mac computers that have been recycled over a span of six years. 

“We Cubans are used to doing more with less,” Pupo Hondal told Rest of World. “Each Mac we successfully fix is a Mac we rescue from being discarded as waste — and even those we can’t fix, find new purpose in saving others. There’s a magic in fixing what others would have otherwise discarded.”