http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/jul/06/can-internet-bring-change-cuba/Can the Internet Bring Change to Cuba?
Daniel Wilkinson
EXCERPT:
For decades, the Castro government has been very effective in repressing dissent in Cuba by, among other things, preventing its critics from publishing or broadcasting their views on the island. Yet in recent years the blogosphere has created an outlet for a new kind of political criticism that is harder to control. Can it make a difference?
There are more than 100 unauthorized bloggers in Cuba, including at least two dozen that are openly critical of the government. The best-known blog, Generation Y, gets more than a million visitors a month and is translated into 18 languages. Its author, thirty-four-year-old Yoani Sánchez, has won major journalism awards in the US and Europe and in 2008 Time Magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Sánchez has set up a “blogger academy” in her apartment, and she helped found the Web site, Voces Cubanas, which hosts the work of thirty independent bloggers.
Like other government critics, these bloggers face reprisals. Last November, for example, Sánchez reported being detained and beaten by Cuban security agents. Weeks later, her husband and fellow blogger, Reinaldo Escobar, was subject to an “act of repudiation” by an angry mob of government supporters on a Havana street. Such public harassment, as Nik Steinberg and I reported in our recent New York Review piece is commonly used against “dissidents” on the island, along with police surveillance, loss of employment, and restrictions on travel. (The Cuban government requires its citizens to obtain permission to leave the island, and those marked as “counterrevolutionaries” are generally denied it.) And then there is the perennial fear of the “knock on the door”—as Sánchez puts it—announcing the beginning of an ordeal that has been endured by countless critics: arrest, a sham trial, and years of “re-education” in prison. Cuba has more journalists locked up than any other country in the world, except China and Iran.
Policing the Internet, however, is not so easy. The Cuban government controls the island’s Internet servers, just as it controls the printing presses and broadcasting transmitters. But the inherent porousness of the Web means that anyone with an Internet connection can disseminate new material without prior approval. The government can block the sites it does not like (as it blocks Generation Y in Cuba, for instance), but it cannot stop other sites from springing up to replace them.
The biggest challenge for Cuban bloggers isn’t outright censorship. It’s simply finding a way to get online. To set up a private connection requires permission from the government, which is rarely granted. Public access is available only in a few government-run cybercafés and tourist hotels, where it costs approximately five US dollars an hour, or one-third of monthly wage of an average Cuban. As a result, bloggers often write their posts on home computers, save them on memory sticks, and pass them to friends who have Internet access and can upload them—for example workers in hotels and government offices. Others dictate their posts by phone to friends abroad, who then upload them through servers off the island.
No amount of resourcefulness, however, can change the fact that most people in Cuba are unable to access even the unblocked blogs. Indeed, the bloggers themselves are not always able to read their posts online. Some have never even seen their own sites.
Still, by reaching large audiences abroad, the critical blogs pose a threat to the Cuban government’s international image—which explains why the government and its supporters have reacted so virulently, attempting to discredit the bloggers as pawns or even paid mercenaries in the service of US imperialism. Granma, the official state news organ, published an article in its international edition dismissing Generation Y as “an example of media manipulation and interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.” The editor of the pro-government blog Cubadebate, put it this way: “the United States has been waging economic and political warfare against
for the past 50 years. And this is just the latest form of that warfare.”
Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez
José Goitia/The New York Times/Redux
The Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, Havana, May 2008
Yoani Sánchez herself, when asked by another blogger about the “external factors” that had contributed to Generation Y’s popularity, acknowledged that attention by The Wall Street Journal and other foreign publications had helped bring new visitors to her site. “But,” she went on, “what happened was the readers came and they stayed. Users could have come once and not come back. Press coverage doesn’t make a site.”
So why do the readers come back?
I asked the Cuban novelist José Manuel Prieto what the bloggers’ appeal was for Cuban exiles like himself. “First, it’s their moderation,” he said. “They criticize the Cuban government without calling for its overthrow.” Indeed, Sánchez, Escobar, and others are unequivocal in their condemnation of the US embargo toward Cuba, a position that until recently was taboo within much of the exile community. In late May, for example, a group of Cubans, including Sanchez, Escobar, and several other bloggers from Voces Cubanas, signed a public letter to the US Congress, urging support for a bill to lift travel restrictions to Cuba.
But more than their politics, Prieto said, what’s appealing is their measured tone. Sánchez herself puts it this way: “I have never used verbal violence in my writings. I have not insulted or attacked anyone, never used an incendiary adjective, and that restraint may have garnered the attention and sympathy of many people.” Ironically, the bloggers’ moderation may be their most subversive quality. It makes it harder for the Castro government and its supporters to dismiss them as right-wing ideologues.
If these blogs are to serve as a catalyst for change, however, it will not be by influencing Castro sympathizers, who are less likely to read them anyway. Instead it will be their growing audience within the exile community, whose leaders have largely shaped US policy toward Cuba. Like the Cuban leaders, the anti-Castro hardliners have sought to discredit opposing views by questioning the motives and allegiances of those who hold them. They accuse critics of the US embargo of ignoring the Castros’ repressive policies. But this charge does not work with the independent bloggers in Cuba who question US policy. For not only are these writers themselves victims of the repression, they are today among its most credible witnesses.
Whether the bloggers can ultimately influence US policy is an open question. In any case, their objectives appear to be more modest—and more profound. They 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. The bloggers’ ability to evoke the realities of daily life in Cuba, Prieto says, is another principal source of their appeal. MORE>>>>>>>>>>>
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