[NYTr] "Secret" Bloggers in Havana: Reuters Weekly Bash-Cuba article Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:06:22 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by TB - Oct 12, 2007 [Well, at least Reuters hasn't killed off Fidel by rumor again this week. They've returned to the tired old "police state, no Internet" theme. The blogs discussed are hardly "secret" -- they are all over the net, and most of them are banal in the extreme. These are mostly by members of the "lost generation" of greedy Cubans who are attracted by shiny objects and want lots of Yanqui trash. They buy some of their yanqui trash with money they get by hooking, or selling counterfeit cigars, to gullible turistas. As for how this dame (whose name is undoubtedly as fake as her tall tales) gets onto the net to blather on her blog, she's probably NOT using a hotel internet connection (all of which are monitored, so if she is, they're on to her). There are these things called "logs" ... and system administrators know how to read them, even if the local Windoze jockies don't. First of all, she'd be spotted immediately as a fake German, so if she's using a hotel, maybe she also turns tricks there, and maybe she's a friend of the manager or the hotel security (who are supposed to be protecting their guests from being hassled by hookers and other jineteras), or she's paid someone off. Most of the prized jobs in the tourist industry are filled by people who are incredibly overqualified for them -- they are mostly loyal Cubans who've traveled all over the world, are multilingual (usually they have 4 or 5 languages, thanks to the free Cuban educational system) and they work as doormen, bartenders, and maids at Cuban tourist spots because the tips are good and they're able to take home enormously more money than if they were doctors or professors. And sure there's corruption... all the way up and down the ladder. Umm... this is Amerika. You want to talk about corruption? Compared with the billions in corruption here, this isn't even penney-ante. If this "source" has bucks to pay the hourly internet connection fee, [admittedly steep whether at an Internet cafe or the Capitolio -- but everything in Cuba priced for foreigners is expensive], she's spending a 15% premium to use her dollars, which might well come from the US Interests Section/CIA station in Havana (and where they have their own internet cafe for the mercenary hirelings to write their counterrevolutionary screed for the likes of websites like CubaNet). As for those so-called salary figures, as Aurelio Alonso says in an interview in this week's Progreso Weekly: "Here, you can't measure values by saying that the average Cuban earns US$40 a month, because we don't pay for education, health care, funerals or income tax. Even the amount we pay for a divorce is so little it's laughable. The Cuban people don't live under the same stress as someone in the United States who earns $40,000 a year but has to worry about spending one third of his salary on the mortgage for his home and if he can't pay it he's out on the street." Alonso underestimates the cost of housing here immensely. Most people must pay considerably more than 1/3 of their earnings just to keep a roof over their heads. And, as The New York Times and many other news outlets reported this week, adults (and especially children) in the US are now doing without any of the normal preventive health care they need -- even having cavities filled by dentists -- because they simply cannot afford it. See: "An interview with Cuban intellectual Aurelio Alonso" by Ramy: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20071008/070001.html The "one-party" state argument is mostly hilarious to Yanquis who live in a state of The One Party with Two Names, and where the sort of political nomination process that is going on now in Cuba -- where money doesn't buy an election -- would seem a dream come true. There is now, and has been for YEARS, plenty of complaining about the bureaucracy in Cuba -- Cubans will bitch about it freely to anyone, including foreigners, who is interested. In the press, Juventud Rebelde has led the way in exposing incompetence, cheating, and inefficiency in the marketplace, but everyone in the government, from Vice President Carlos Lage down (and including Raul Castro) has been working very hard to improve the situation. There's plenty of criticism in the local media, perhaps most especially in Juventud Rebelde, but also on the hundreds and hundreds of Cuban websites that are entirely legal. On the subject of the internet -- the lack of access for average Cubans and those who are not average Cubans is very real. It costs the Cuban Government a fortune to maintain the very expensive satellite connections they do. None of this stops thousands of Cubans from using the net. The internet is available at all universities, medium- to large-sized places of business (where Cuban employees freely use their work connections for personal use, connecting to Yahoo or hotmail or some other free service, and their free blogs). Many thousands of others have connections at home, sometimes legitimate and paid for, some bartered access, some pirated. The modern multimedia Internet is a bandwidth hog and is horribly expensive in terms of time, money and access available. But aside from local e-mail, no one who really wants to access the net bothers with the post offices, which have connections that are mostly used by those with only basic online text e-mail skills taught in all the computer clubs at schools, and who want to communicate with others on the island. The Cuban Government is well aware all this goes on, and permits it, as long as it's not a real threat to national security. Most of the following is sheer nonsense and bullshit. But it's better than another "Fidel is dead" article. And those dreadful consumerist trashy blogs? Take a look and see what you think of them. The bloggers who use them to bitch and moan deserve Miami. We hope they find it. -NY Transfer] Reuters via Intl Herald Tribune - Oct 10, 2007 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/10/business/cubablog.php Blogging from Havana, secretly By Esteban Israel Reuters When Yoani Sanchez, 32, wants to update her blog about daily life in Cuba, she dresses like a tourist and strides confidently into a Havana hotel, greeting the staff in German. That is because Cubans like Sanchez are not authorized to use hotel Internet connections, which are reserved for foreigners. In a recent "GeneraciC3n Y" posting (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/), Sanchez wrote about the abundance of police patrolling the streets of Havana, checking documents and searching bags for black-market merchandise. She and a handful of other independent bloggers are opening up a crack in the government's tight control over media and information to give the rest of the world a glimpse of life in a one-party, Communist state. "We are taking advantage of an unregulated area. They can't control cyberspace out there," she said. But they face many difficulties. Once inside the hotel, Sanchez has to write fast. Not because she fears getting caught, but because online access is prohibitively expensive. An hour online costs about $6, the equivalent of a fortnight's pay for the average Cuban. Independent bloggers like Sanchez have to build their sites on servers outside Cuba, and they have more readers outside Cuba than inside. That is not surprising, since only 200,000 Cubans of the 11 million on the island have access to the World Wide Web, the lowest rate in Latin America, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Only government employees, academics and researchers are allowed to have their own Internet accounts, which are provided by the government. Regular Cubans are allowed only to open e-mail accounts that they can access through terminals at post offices, where they can also see Cuban Web sites, but access to the rest of the World Wide Web is blocked. "My access to Internet is very irregular," said the anonymous author of a blog called "My island at midday," (http://isla12pm.blogspot.com). The Cuban government blames the limited Internet access on the U.S. sanctions that bar Cuba from hooking up to underwater fiber-optic cables that run just 12 miles offshore, a highway of broadband communication. Instead, Cuba must use expensive satellite uplinks to connect to the Internet via countries like Canada, Chile and Brazil. Critics say that is just a pretext to maintain control over the Internet, a powerful tool that some believe could play an important role in spreading information in Cuba. Cuba has already had a taste of openness since the ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro handed over power last year to his brother Raul, who has encouraged debate at all levels of society on Cuba's unproductive economy. But the reaction to television programs in December that honored notorious censors from the early 1970s - when Cuba adopted Soviet policies and cracked down on writers, artists and homosexuals - showed the potential of the Internet to effect change. [This was followed by a storm of protest all over Cuba's media about the "Gray Five Years, as Cuba-watchers will recall. -NYTr] There was such a flood of e-mail messages from Cuban intellectuals, academics and others with Internet access that the government was obliged to meet with them and issue an apology for the program. Dozens of government supporters, mainly state-employed journalists with Internet accounts, have blogs. But most of them avoid commenting on the travails of daily life in Cuba and stick to the official line. Many reproduce columns that Fidel Castro has written from his sickbed, along with criticism of the United States taken from the state-run press. One exception is Luis Sexto, a columnist for the Communist Youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde, who recently posted a blistering attack on state bureaucracy at http://luisexto.blogia.com. "Without public criticism, mistakes will continue to hurt our country," Sexto wrote last month. Others avoid politics and discuss cinema and literature, or nostalgia for the Soviet cartoons Cubans were brought up on (http://munequitosrusos.blogspot.com). But most prefer to remain anonymous or use pseudonyms in order to protect themselves. A blogger who goes by the name of "Tension Lia" posts mostly photographs of the ruinous state of Havana's architectural treasures on a blog called Havanascity (http://havanascity.blogspot.com). [Havana is a living architectural museum, a treasure trove of all architectural styles. May it never succumb to the "it's old- tear it down" philosophy of Miami, New York or any other US city. -NYTr] The creator of "My island at midday" told Reuters by e-mail message that the anonymity of the blog has allowed him to say some things that nobody has dared write about. "Dissent has always been frowned upon," the author wrote. "Intolerance is still the rule in Cuba, even though Cuban society is starting to adapt to diversity of opinions." * ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us Our main website: http://www.blythe.org List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr =================================================================