[NYTr] "Secret" Bloggers in Havana: Reuters Weekly Bash-Cuba article

[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 "Generación 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."