Cuba’s Bloggers

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Blogger contest reflects 'vibrant' blogosphere in Cuba
By: jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Published: Thu, 09/10 @ 12:37PM

Cuban bloggers sent Twitter messages to announce the winners of their first-ever contest -- two milestones in a country where a report Thursday said a ``vibrant'' blogosphere is emerging despite ``vast legal and technical obstacles.''

``We're pretty happy to have achieved all this,'' said a clearly ecstatic Reynaldo Escobar, a blogger and contest judge. ``None of this, none of it, has ever been done in Cuba.''

Both the tweets and contest prizes were landmarks for Cuban bloggers, described in a report by the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) as ``mainly young adults . . . [who] have opened a new space for free expression in Cuba, while offering a fresh glimmer of hope for the rebirth of independent ideas in Cuba's closed system.''

The Cuban Communist Party controls all but a tiny minority of the island's mass media, and the Communications Ministry has the legal power to block access to Internet sites ``with content that is contrary to social interests, ethics and good customs; as well as . . . applications that affect the integrity and security of the state.''

Nevertheless, the CPJ reported, ``a vibrant, independent blogging culture is emerging in Cuba, of all places,'' noting it counted at least 25 independent journalistic and regularly maintained blogs, 75 others based on more personal interests and nearly 200 produced by government journalists.

The report, issued Thursday, notes that most independent blogs are not aligned with the political opposition. Instead, they explore issues not addressed by the official media, such as food shortages, problems in housing and the health and education systems and the lack of Internet access.

Yoani Sánchez, one of the first and best known Cuban bloggers, said that's true, up to a point. ``In the real Cuba, where everything is political, there are very few possibilities for living in a bubble separated from that reality,'' she said in a telephone interview with El Nuevo Herald.

The CPJ report added that while Cuba does not have a ``sophisticated system for Web censorship such as that used by China,'' it is ``one of the few countries in the Americas with explicit censorship rules intended . . . `to defend the country's interests and security.' ''

The high cost of surfing the Web -- $6 per hour in a country where salaries average $17 per month -- limits access. And computer science students are reportedly deployed as ``cyber police'' to monitor the content of independent blogs, the report added.

Bloggers sidestep the restrictions, however, by writing their posts at home on personal computers, copying them to flash drives or CDs and taking them to Internet centers in cafes, hotels or foreign embassies to e-mail them to friends abroad, according to the report. All the independent blogs are based in foreign servers.

Although few Cubans can afford to spend the time online reading blogs, Sánchez said, bloggers pass their posts to others on the island through the CDs or flash drives. One set of posts from several bloggers has been copied into more than 1,000 CDs and distributed around the island, she said.

The CPJ report concluded with a set of recommendations, urging Cuba to stop harassing bloggers and independent journalists and remove legal barriers to Internet access and calling on the international community to push Cuba in that direction. Cuba argues that it must limit Internet usage because the U.S. embargo makes access expensive.

Sanchez, who is married to Escobar, said the contest whose winners were announced Wednesday was conceived a year ago as a way to recognize Cuba's intrepid bloggers, reward quality sites and encourage newcomers to join the blogosphere. Both served on the panel of six judges. El Nuevo Herald interviewed them by phone from Havana.

Readers nominated 187 blogs -- including many that favor the Cuban government -- but only 66 met the requirements: no anonymous authors, no blogs totally based outside Cuba or infrequently refreshed. The tweet was sent from www.unaislavirtual.com, a site with links to dozens of Cuba blogs.

The prize for best blog -- a laptop that Sanchez was awarded by a group in Spain for her blog, Generación Y -- was awarded to Octavo Cerco by Claudia Cadelo, a Havana woman who writes in her introduction that she ``feels useless and empty, and I look at the people without faith who walk on the street, who are so afraid that they no longer realize they are afraid.''

Other prizes and special mentions were awarded for popularity, design, news and literary writing, photography and other categories.

A special mention for work ``under limited situations,'' went to the blog Voice Behind Bars by Pablo Pacheco, an independent journalist sentenced to 20 years in prison during the 2003 crackdown on 75 dissidents known as the Black Spring. His blog says he's at the Canaleta prison in Ciego de Avila province, ``and from there he dictates the texts.''

Cuban bloggers, while sometimes harassed by state security agents, have not been subjected to the same levels of repression as independent journalists, according to the CPJ report by Carlos Lauría and María Salazar Ferro. Pacheco is one of 22 such journalists now jailed in Cuba.

That may be because Cuban leaders don't understand the impact of blogs, since most are more than 70 years old, the report notes. ``I suspect there's a generational disconnect between the activities of Raúl Castro and Yoani Sánchez'' the report quoted Dan Erikson, a Cuba expert at the Washington-based organization Inter-American Dialogue, as saying.

The report adds that the bloggers' strong foreign connections -- Sanchez's posts now appear on the popular Huffington Post -- can provide them with a measure of protection from repression, but also expose them to government charges that dissidents are little more than foreign-backed ``mercenaries.''

Sánchez told El Nuevo Herald that Cuba's current economic crisis also might be helping to protect the bloggers.

The 2003 crackdown on dissent sparked a string of economic sanctions by the European Union, she said, ``and with the current misfortunes, [another crackdown] would bring it an enormous cost in terms of international relations.''