In the Barricades of the Cuban Blogosphere
BY Diego Beas | Friday, July 9 2010
Few countries in the world have such an active and anti-establishment blogosphere as Cuba. Ironically, it's one of the Western Hemispheres' poorest countries, with an outdated communications system, very limited Internet connectivity and strict political controls over what people in the island-state are able to write and read about. A potent mix that is turning its army of bloggers into a strong and unified voice that, through the cracks in the system, is documenting and churning out daily tidbits of information about how the communist regime crumbles from within.
A cat-and-mouse game in which citizens are not willing to surrender the Internet to a government that wants to turn it into the 21st century version of their flagship propaganda instrument: Granma —the scrappy official newspaper that for over 45 years has served the interests, and only the interests, of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.
A recent post over at the New York Review of Books blog puts it well: bloggers in Cuba “are not polemicists or pundits so much as poets and storytellers. They are less concerned with proposing new policies than chronicling the costs to ordinary people of the repressive policies already in place”.
Ernesto Hernández Busto, a Cuban blogger and editor of Penultimosdias.com, a blog that through multiple voices chronicles the “the last days” of the regime, thinks that the Internet has had one net effect in Cuba: young people no longer fear expressing their opinion. “The use of mobile devices to document repression and ‘leaks’ of hitherto censored information is on the rise. And Twitter keeps on growing”, wrote Hernández Busto at the end of June in an op-ed for El País titled The limits of Cyber-Dissidence.
But, he warns, it’s not only freedom-seeking bloggers that are active in the digital front. Cuban authorities have started policing the Internet in the same way Iran is doing it: “they’ve mounted a cyber counteroffensive that includes the use of official websites, new blogging platforms that are used to attack independent bloggers, and rapid response cyber commands formed by students of the University of Computer Sciences” that monitor and censure the web.
Cuban authorities keep postponing an underwater broadband link that would connect the island —and its dissident bloggers— at much faster speeds through servers in Venezuela. Its implementation has now been pushed to 2011. Currently, bloggers do all sorts of gimmicks to get their ideas online: dictating them over the phone, passing around pen drives with posts and information, even shipping floppy disks overseas that sometimes get confiscated or arrive damaged.
And still, bloggers have managed to create probably the strongest opposition force since the inception of the regime in 1959. They’ve managed to create a movement. Hernández Bustos —and the rest of us— are left wondering what kind of influence will they have once that underwater link with Venezuela goes live. It can’t happen soon enough.