To offer supercomputing services to all Cuban institutes of higher education,research centers and industrial partners is the mission set forth by a groupof ambitious young system administrators working at various universities ofthe lush Caribbean island of Cuba. With the assistance of the Flemish Inter-university Council (VLIR), lots of hard work and hardware donations by GhentUniversity they have succeeded in setting up a nation-spanning architecturecomprised of three datacenters, in Havana (West), Santa Clara (central) andSantiago de Cuba (East). Their campuses are spread geographically across the1000 km long island and are interconnected by a 20 Mbps network that covers upto the furthest regions of the island where remote rural universities aregiven the opportunity to take advantage of the magnificent capacities ofmassive parallel processing. Thus was born "HPC Cuba" the national center for academic supercomputing.While fully depending on Free Software for their operations, HPC Cuba has alsojoined the global Free Software community by producing installation packagesfor software not yet covered by EasyBuild. On a tropical island where access to resources is being limited by a USimposed trade embargo, setting up a datacenter capable of hosting a propersupercomputer "no es fácil" ("it is not easy", a Cuban saying). Come learnabout the specific challenges poised in the Cuban context, calling forresourceful solutions and unique problem-solving capacities standing proof ofthe high standard of the universities of this so-called third world countryand its relentless human resources. KEYWORDS: Cuba, University, Development Coooperation, VLIR-UOS, Free Software,National Center for Supercomputing, Distributed, HPC Cuba