Cuban bloggers defy authorities
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “Finally we are beginning the planned journey of the bloggers. The shouts delivered at the police station, the constant agent we’ve had with us since last Thursday, and the prohibition on travel to Pinar del Río weren’t much use. We ended up finding the cracks between the fingers of the censors, between which the fine sand of information and knowledge has managed to slip through.”
That’s Yoani Sánchez on her blog Generatión Y.
“As Cuba approaches the 50th anniversary of its revolution this New Year’s Day, the island’s Communist government appears to be taking a harder line against a budding group of Cuban Internet bloggers pushing for greater freedoms,” says the Wall Street Journal, going on:
“On Thursday, Cuban blogger Claudia Cadelo, was summoned to appear at the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of domestic security. A day earlier, Yoani Sanchez, the nation’s most prominent blogger, was told by authorities that her activities had “crossed the limits of tolerance,” and was told she couldn’t hold a planned meeting this Saturday of local bloggers, according to Ms. Sanchez.
“Ms. Sanchez, who writes a blog called “Generation Y,” is at the forefront of a small group of bloggers in Cuba who chronicle life on the island and occasionally vent against its government, which was run for the past 49 years by Fidel Castro until he stepped aside earlier this year for health reasons and handed power to his brother Raúl. Ms. Sanchez was the subject of a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal in December, 2007. The 33-year-old wife and mother has won several awards recently for her work, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people this year.”
Yoani Sánchez, “took a deep breath and gathered her nerve for an undercover mission: posting an Internet chronicle about life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba,” said another Wall Street Journal just before Christmas last year »»»
“To get around Cuba’s restrictions on Web access, the waif-like 32-year-old posed as a tourist to slip into an Internet cafe in one of the city’s luxury hotels, which normally bar Cubans. Dressed in gray surf shorts, T-shirt and lime-green espadrilles, she strode toward a guard at the hotel’s threshold and flashed a wide smile. The guard, a towering man with a shaved head, stepped aside.”I think I’m able to do this because I look so harmless,’ says Ms. Sánchez, who says she is sometimes mistaken for a teenager. Once inside the cafe, she attached a flash memory drive to the hotel computer and, in quick, intense movements, uploaded her material. Time matters: The $3 she paid for a half-hour is nearly a week’s wage for many Cubans.”
Cuba’s Yoani Sánchez, already named by Time as one of the top 100 most influential people, was awarded the Ortega and Gasset prize for digital journalism, one of Spain’s top journalism awards, says the Havana Journal, going on:
Spanish newspaper El Pais, which awards the prize annually, said Sanchez won it for her ’shrewdness’ in overcoming hurdles to freedom of expression in Cuba, her ‘vivacious’ style and her drive to join the ‘global space of citizen journalism’.”
Hosted in Germany, her Generatión Y blog in February garnered 1.2 million, hits, says the story.
But the Cuban authorities are neither impressed nor happy, refusing to allow her go to Madrid to accept the award, said NPR.
‘Freedom discovers roads that suppression cannot find’
“Between December 5 and 6 the first exchanges of a knowledge workshop have begun to take place between people who maintain Internet blogs from the Island and others interested in exploring this medium,” Sánchez said on her blog, linking to a press release “drafted jointly by all the participants”.
It states »»»
Conceived from its beginnings as a journey of study with several stages, the encounter was deprived of its inaugural session because agents from the Interior Ministry cited and officially announced to some participants that they would be prohibited from attending the inauguration in the city of Pinar del Río. It is not possible to provide documented evidence of this prohibition because said agents refused to confirm it in writing.
But freedom discovers roads that suppression cannot find. That’s why the workshop participants, faithful to their choice of dialog and the search for viable alternatives, turned to other methods to begin the journey, without having to physically travel from one territory to another.
There have been several initial topics: General notes about a blog, conducted by Yoani Sánchez, which addresses technical questions related to the software appropriate for a blog; The writing of a blog, proposed by Reinaldo Escobar, with a debate on the application of journalistic norms in drafting the new language of cyberspace; and finally, The Ethical Blogger, where Eugenio Leal introduces concepts relative to ethical conduct in this novel way of transmitting ideas and information. The texts of these discussions and others will be posted on a website.
The exchange of experiences took place in an informal atmosphere of respect for different opinions and purposeful debate. Promoting this experience were the collaborators from the digital magazine ConvivenciaDesde Cuba portal [http://desdecuba.com], among others. [http://www.convivenciacuba.es/] and from the
These first steps constitute an authentic management of knowledge. Among the suggested initiatives is a call for participants in a competition for Cuban blogs, to be launched in 2009. These new variants to the plan of study about Cuban blogs remain open to all interested parties.
Stay Tuned.
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Wall Street Journal – Cuba Tightens Restrictions on Blogger, December 5, 2008
Wall Street Journal – Cuban Revolution, December 22, 2007
Havana Journal – Yoani Sanchez awarded Spain’s Ortega and Gasset prize for digital journalism, April 5, 2008
NPR – Cuba Bars Blogger from Accepting Award in Spain, May 8, 2008
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