I think we can define the objectives at two levels: First, the “blogger” movement in Cuba has broken the monopoly that the Cuban Government had on information until just recently; that is a first goal and it was an important objective, and remains a major goal of the Cuban blogosphere. To break the monopoly of information, means that many issues are leaked that the Cuban press would never have published; There are very concrete examples such as: closed-door meetings at the central committee, pictures of people who died from hunger and cold in the psychiatric ward, all the corruption scandals, many videos of police beatings, significant evidence and clear visions of Cuban reality that did not have a place in the official media, which is practically the only media in Cuba. These began to be debated in the Cuban blogosphere.
A lot of information that the Cuban bloggers put on servers arrived and spread instantaneously to the international press and to other media in exile, which forced the Cuban government to react. Since these cases spread uncontrollably, it was practically obligatory for the journalists and press correspondents to ask Cuban officials about the issues that the press had not published. That´s the first level, and I think it´s a very important level; because the government monopoly on information was broken by this emergence. But I think there´s another level that is, in my opinion, as important as the first one, but that has received less attention, and that is the issue of to what extent these new movements have created a shift in the logic of the protests.
That’s a hot topic today: to what extent do the new media really impact on dissidents? To what extent can they shake up governments? Can they push authoritarian regimes to a crisis point? I believe in the Cuban case there are reasons to be optimistic. It’s not just that new technologies are a new way of spreading information, but they also generate a different logic for the protests, a logic that is starting to be copied or imitated by the traditional dissidents because they have realized that it works. Whether the government keeps quiet or represses, the consequences are still negative for them in the short term. Because if they repress, that example may trigger another reaction and give them bad press, and if they keep quiet, many people who were thinking of protesting get encouraged and join the movement. Of course the level of access that Cubans have to the Internet is minimal; I think this is a singular case, that Cuba, unlike countries such as China and Iran, has no regular, normal access to the Internet. For Cuba, Internet access is minimal.
The most optimistic governmental numbers, which confuse Internet with Intranet, report about 10 of the population having Internet access. Imagine, with those rates of access, it gets very difficult to use the Internet as a mobilization tool; but it can be used to generate effects, to create certain events.
Ernesto Hernández Busto is an essayist, journalist and blogger and a recognized authority on technology and democracy. He was born in Havana, Cuba in 1968.
As a young man, he became active in the Paideia movement, a group of artists and writers that sought to reform cultural policy in Cuba. The response of security forces to this group of young intellectuals influenced his decision to emigrate. At the age of 21, he left Cuba “to escape the oppressive atmosphere of a totalitarian society, which was suffocating in all areas of life.”
From 1992 to 1999, he lived in Mexico, where we wrote for Vuelta magazine, edited by Octavio Paz, as well as other literary journals and publications. Since 1999, he has lived in Barcelona, Spain, where he works as an editor, translator and journalist.
His books include ‘Perfiles derechos. Fisonomías del escritor reaccionario’ (Barcelona, 2004; III “Casa de América” essay prize) and ‘Inventario de saldos. Apuntes sobre literatura cubana’ (Madrid, 2005). He has also published literary translations from Italian, Russian, French and Portuguese.
Since 2006, he has edited and published Penúltimos Días (www.penultimosdias.com), one of the most important websites on Cuban issues, with more than 70 contributors in 12 countries and over 10 million page views. He has participated in various forums on digital activism as “Internet at Liberty 2010” (organized by Google and the European Central University) and “Personal Democracy Forum Latin America,” among others. His blog is widely recognized as among the most authoritative and comprehensive websites covering events in Cuba.
He wrote the chapters on Cuba’s for Freedom House’s “Freedom on the Net” report (2010 and 2011). He is a frequent contributor to the Spanish newspaper El País, on policy and technology.
Read his blog at www.penultimosdias.com and follow him on Twitter: @penultimosdias
Cuba, an island nation of 11.4 million people in the northern Caribbean Sea, is a totalitarian state.
Fidel Castro led the 1959 Cuban Revolution and ruled the country for 49 years before formally relinquishing power to his younger brother Raul in 2008. Raul Castro is the current head of state and First Secretary of the Communist Party, which is recognized by the Cuban Constitution as the only legal political party and “the superior leading force of society and of the state.” Raul Castro has said that he will step down from power at the age of 86 in 2018.
Cuba was a territory of Spain until the Spanish-American War. The United States assumed control of the island until 1902, when the Republic of Cuba became formally independent. A fledgling democracy was established, with the U.S. continuing to play a strong role in Cuban affairs.
In 1952, facing an impending electoral loss, former president Fulgencio Batista staged a successful military coup and overthrew the existing government. While his first term as elected president in the 1940s largely honored progressive politics, universal freedoms, and the Cuban Constitution of 1940, Batista’s return to power in the 1950s was a dictatorship marked by corruption, organized crime and gambling. He held power until 1959 when he was ousted by Fidel Castro’s rebel July 26th Movement.
While promising free elections and democracy, Castro moved quickly to consolidate power. By 1961, Castro had declared Cuba to be a communist nation.
Castro’s communist government nationalized private businesses, lashed out at political opponents, and banned independent civil society. As Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Union, Cuban-American relations soured, including a U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union came close to war, after the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, prompting a U.S. naval embargo.
Since the revolution, Cuba has remained a one-party state. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the evaporation of Soviet economic support, Cuba loosened some economic policies, became more open to foreign investment, and legalized use of the U.S. dollar. By the late 1990s, Venezuela had become Cuba’s chief patron, thanks to the close relationship between the Castro brothers and Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez.
The regime continues to exercise authoritarian political control, clamping down on political dissent and mounting defamation campaigns against dissidents, portraying them as malignant U.S. agents. In a massive crackdown in 2003 known as the Black Spring, the government imprisoned 75 of Cuba’s best-known nonviolent dissidents.
The Cuban government does not respect the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association, movement, and religion. The government and the Communist Party control all news media, and the government routinely harasses and detains its critics, particularly those who advocate democracy and respect of human rights. Frequent government actions against dissidents often take the form of attacks by regime-organized mobs. Prison conditions are harsh and often life-threatening, and the courts operate as instruments of the Communist Party rather than conducting fair trials.
Cuba relaxed its travel laws in 2013, allowing some prominent dissidents to leave and return to the country. It continues to experiment with modest economic reforms but remains committed to communist economic orthodoxy.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, Cuba was designated as “not free” and is grouped near the bottom of the world’s nations, with severely restricted civil rights and political liberties.
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