Aimara García Cabezas remembers what Web3 made possible from Cuba. She could learn with people across the world, join communities and build relationships that eventually took her from Cuba to Bengaluru. Those experiences gave her reason to believe that decentralisation could open doors. They also made her look closely at what happens after someone walks through them.
“Open technology does not mean equal starting conditions,” says García Cabezas, an independent Web3 copywriter and narrative strategist. “We don’t arrive with the same passports, languages, infrastructure, financial access, or opportunities.”
Access is not equal to Opportunity
For García Cabezas, that is the question beneath many claims that Web3 is meritocratic. It may give people access to a global industry, but access does not necessarily bring paid work, promotion, funding or a say in decisions. A woman can be welcomed into a community and still have little influence over its products or governance. She wants the industry to pay as much attention to who can remain and grow as it does to who joins.
Her understanding of leadership follows the same line of thought. She describes it as cultivation: building the trust and shared purpose that let people contribute, disagree and continue working together. Global Web3 communities bring together people whose circumstances and views differ considerably. Making room for them requires more than inviting everyone into the same conversation.
García Cabezas also sees leadership in ideas. A person can influence a project through the questions they ask, the assumptions they challenge and the conversations they open, without managing a team. Her perspective comes from being a woman, but also from being Cuban, Latin American and a native Spanish speaker in an industry where English and access to financial tools can often be taken for granted.
That combination of opportunity and limitation has shaped her view of decentralisation. She was drawn to the possibility of changing who controls money, ownership and participation. She remains interested in those possibilities, while questioning whether new technology will alter the structures around it.
Decentralisation does not necessarily remove Gatekeepers
“You can remove the middleman from a protocol without removing the gatekeepers from people’s lives,” she says.
Power and capital can become concentrated again, even when the underlying technology is decentralised. Regulation offers another example. García Cabezas understands its value in protecting users and creating clearer rules. At the same time, she knows what it is like to encounter a new requirement and wonder whether it will close off access for someone already excluded from conventional financial systems. When a service is described as available to everyone, she asks who can use it in practice.
These concerns inform the way she writes about Web3. García Cabezas is a writer and poet who first found her way into technical subjects through their history. Understanding why people developed ideas such as decentralisation and trustlessness gave the concepts meaning before she began trying to explain the technology itself.
She encourages newcomers to find communities where they can ask questions and experiment. That mattered in her own learning because using financial technology often requires money. Support from communities and their protocol partners let her work with testnets and tokens provided for learning, rather than only reading about how the tools worked.
Explaining what she learned was part of that process. Writing in her own language pushed her beyond repeating definitions and towards asking what the technology meant in the context of her life and work. She thinks women entering Web3 should be able to begin with their own questions and skills, rather than feeling obliged to follow a single route into the sector.
Community has remained central to her experience. García Cabezas joined KERNEL in 2021, then SheFi in 2022, where cohort learning and opportunities to experiment with DeFi helped her move beyond theory. DLT Talents, now Web3 Talents, later gave her a more structured mentoring programme focused on women in blockchain. Each offered something different: context, practical experience, relationships or a clearer sense of direction.
She would like more communities to offer that support over time. Learning to use a wallet is one stage; finding paid opportunities, taking on senior responsibilities and influencing product decisions are others. García Cabezas points to SheFi as a community she can return to at different points in her career, with different needs.
Trust is based on Relationships
Her views on trust are similarly grounded in relationships. Web3 systems may be designed to reduce reliance on intermediaries, but people still have to decide whom to work with. In communities where members had reasons to protect their identities, she learned that knowing someone’s real name could be a confidence they chose to share. Privacy, she argues, should not automatically be treated as a lack of trust. Consistency and accountability matter too.
She applies that same concern for human agency to the emerging relationship between Web3 and AI. García Cabezas wants women involved in making decisions about design and governance while the frameworks are being formed. She is interested in AI’s ability to expand what people can do, provided people retain the ability to exercise judgement and disagree with it. Participation has meaning, in her view, when it affects what is built and who holds power.
Three Tips
- Define leadership for yourself. Your influence may come through your ideas, questions, work or the way you help others build.
- Build relationships, not just a network. The people you learn and work with can become an important part of your path.
- Find your own reason to engage with Web3. Connect the technology to your circumstances, interests and existing skills, then build from there.
