Name: Konstantinos Zantes
Student ID: s1238604
Course:
International Studies
Word count: 3772
Internet
blogging in Cuba: A representation of Bloggers and their approaches to social
transformation against censorship.
Internet censorship in
Cuba has been an important international concern for years. “The Cuban internet
is considered to be one of the most tightly controlled in the world” (Voeux,
2006). In fact “ a special permit is required to use the Internet and all e-mails are intricately
monitored” (Voeux, 2006). Therefore such an act is considered a violation of
the freedom of speech rights. Such restriction in internet use and other
aspects of life are due to the Cuban government, the US embargo and economic
limitations. So it is not a surprise that Cuba is one of the most tightly
controlled countries in the world. In addition, Cuba is considered by
many a totalitarian state that according to the Freedom House, Cuba’s status on
the net is “not free” (freedom house, 2013). “It is widely believed that the Internet poses an
insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule” (Kalathil and Boas, 2001).
Indeed, ever since the socialist uprising in Cuba under Fidel Castro, the Cuban
government has become notorious for its severe and harsh political repression.
“The government passed a law as soon as the Internet appeared in Cuba.
Decree-Law 209, adopted in June 1996 and entitled ‘Access from the Republic of
Cuba to the Global Computer Network,’ says that the Internet cannot be used ‘in
violation of Cuban society’s moral principles or the country’s laws’ and that
e-mail messages must not ‘jeopardise national security’ ” (Voeux, 2006). Such
control on the internet translates into control of other aspects of the Cuban
people’s daily life. “Although tourists are able to have fairly easy access to
the internet through for example hotels, Cubans have to go to public internet
cafes, where they first have to identify themselves (giving away their privacy)
and have to wait up to 45 minutes in line to be able to access a computer”
(Voeux, 2006). To receive a clearer picture of the amount of control that the
Cuban government has over the internet, “the regime also ensures that there is
no Internet access for its political opponents and independent journalists, for
whom reaching news media abroad is an ordeal” (Voeux, 2006). “In Cuba, you can
get a 20-year prison sentence for writing a few “counter-revolutionary”
articles for foreign websites, and a five-year one just for connecting with the
Internet in an illegal manner” (Voeux, 2006). Therefore, “Through a combination of reactive and
proactive strategies, an authoritarian regime can counter the challenge posed
by Internet use and even utilize the Internet to extend its reach and
authority” (Kalathil and Boas, 2001). Fortunately there are some known
Cuban dissident bloggers such as Elaine Diaz and her work “La Polemica Digital”,
where she and her group are formulating an avenue for criticism in the country,
that offers the public an alternative opinion. Also another renowned blogger is
Yoani Sanchez with her work “Generation Y”, that aims for “liberating of the self from
political process (Venegas, 2011). Furthermore the essay
will explore the effects of
government internet restriction on the politics and culture of Cuba. An
emphasis on the blogs “La Polemica Digital” by Elaine Diaz and “Generation Y”
by Yoani Sanchez will be made, since their works are the most influential and
well known in Cuba. Such an analysis will present the attempts of Cuban citizen
to cause a social transformation in Cuba as a liberalization of
censorship. This will offer insight on
the effect of Cuban blogging between the relationship of the repressive
government and the culture existent in Cuba. The structure of the essay will involve, a
theoretical framework, an analysis of the two bloggers, the relationship
between blogging and the government, and a comparative case study with Chinese
internet censorship. The research question to be answered in this essay is
whether, the blogging dissidents in Cuba have brought social transformation in
Cuba and to what extent.
Beginning with the
theoretical framework, a lot of literature is existent upon the Cuban internet
censorship and Cuban blogosphere. Such works offer indispensable insight upon
the matters discussed in this essay. In her report “Going Online in Cuba : Internet under
surveillance”, Claire Voeux
elaborates on the authoritarian nature of the Cuban government and the
censorship it applies on the internet. To clearly present her point, she states
how “Political dissidents and independent journalists are not usually
allowed into Internet cafes” (Voeux, 2006). This is one of the many actions
that the government undertakes in order to consolidate its censorship of
opposition in Cuba. Moreover Voeux explains the relationship between Cuba and
China and how they exchange information and are attempting to negotiate. Also
in “Freedom and exchange in communist Cuba” by Yoani Sanchez there is a blatant
depiction of the lack of freedom for the people. This idea is reinforced by the
quote “Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution promised to satisfy the basic needs
of the Cuban people, but the price demanded was the surrender of freedoms”
(Sanchez, 2010). Through this remark it becomes obvious how a lot of political
dissidents feel about the regime.
The following piece of
literature worthy of analysis is “Liberating
the self: The biopolitics of Cuban blogging” by Venegas. Venegas clearly
represents the political context of internet activism, more specifically in the
realm of the Cuban blogosphere. She notes how the bloggers act upon the unfair
restrictions they face daily due to the governmental actions and ideals. She
further describes how blogging is a now acting as a tool to represent people’s
identity in Cuba and to the world culture. Moreover, Renee Timberlake suggests in her work
“Cyberspace and the Defence of the Revolution: Cuban Bloggers, Civic
Participation, and State Discourse” the difference between bloggers in Europe
with bloggers in China, Iran and Cuba. For example she writes that “While a
blogger in a liberal democratic country may freely partake in political
discussions, bloggers in countries such as China, Iran, and Cuba are
extraordinary in their determination to share their lived realities with the
world despite limited access to the Internet, government censorship of certain
websites, and fear of repercussions” (Timberlake, 2010).
Furthermore in the
literature, “Literacy, Censorship and Intellectual Freedom: The Independent
Library Movement in Contemporary Cuba” by Kelsey Vidaillet, looks at “what is
the freedom of expression, freedom of information, intellectual freedom and
censorship in Cuba” (Vidaillet, 2007). In addition she further elaborates on
the practises of the government upon the Cuban people. The final, work worth
noting is “From Cyberspace to Public Space? The Emergent Blogosphere and Cuban
Civil Society” by Ted A. Henken and Sjamme van de Voort. It illustrates how
famous blogs and bloggers have effectively become a vital part of Cuba’s
expanding public sphere.
“The political debate in
Cuba appears to be shifting away from the traditional spaces of public
participation created by the state” (Fonseca, 2011). Therefore with the
emergence of the internet and blogging, Boje in his work discusses how “with the advent of
modernity (science, technology[…]), the mechanistic overtook the organic”.
Cyber activism started to emerge as a new challenging practise to the state.
However this would not go unnoticed by the government. This is because,
“Government policies of the United States and Cuba transform the Cuban Internet
into a rough and inaccessible space where it is nearly impossible to navigate
without being co-opted by the Scylla of state capture or beholden to the
Charibdis of foreign support” (Henken and Van de Voort, 2014). Indeed, both
governments employed such policies on the internet in order to satisfy their
own self interests in terms of geopolitical and strategic goals. Therefore it becomes
an insurmountable task to become a revered blogger with the independence to
write about any matter he or she chooses. Elain Diaz and Yoani Sanchez are two
prominent examples of exceptions of people who managed to gain the freedom to
advocate their opinions of day to day repression and censorship by the Cuban
government.
Elaine Diaz is better
known for her work “La Polemica Digital”, where she and her group are
formulating an avenue for criticism in the country, that offers the public an
alternative opinion. “A professor of journalism
at the University of Havana, a public institution, Ms. Díaz is an employee of
the state” (Ritter, 2013). “That has not stopped her from writing publicly and
with disarming directness about the challenges of daily life in Cuba on her
blog, La Polémica Digital, for the last five years” (Ritter, 2013). Ms Diaz has
never been contacted by the authorities, showing signs of surprising tolerance
from the government. Indeed few people are able to criticise the government
without some form of intervention. For example, when Ms Diaz took her leave
from the blogging due to her desire to focus on her teaching, “Cuba’s more famous
and far more radical critic, Yoani Sánchez speculated that she had been forced
off the keyboard by a government that had lost patience with her” (Ritter,
2013). Obviously she did not know then that Ms Diaz voluntarily left blogging
for her own reasons, but this assumption clearly presents the repression and
intervention that the Cuban government is willing to practise in order to
remove any opposition. “The Cuban government, however, has increased the
surveillance by the Cuban police on Sánchez, Diaz and fellow bloggers because
of this, limiting ways for the bloggers to take their protests out on the
streets” (Venegas, 2010). “This of course has increased the risk that comes
along with the work they do, and many bloggers fear what could happen to them”
(Venegas, 2010). Furthermore, Ms Diaz’s
blog La Polémica Digital, offers accounts of
everyday life and criticisms through her experiences in Cuba. She wants to
offer a voice for the people and the government in an attempt to merge Cuban
popular culture with the government’s actions in the hope that the two become
more cohesive and united. Through projecting the complaints from her blog she
can give people a greater understanding of the situation and a mentality of
openness and freedom of speech in Cuba. Conversely she can act as a messenger
of the people to the government thus giving them the people’s perspective on
certain issues involving domestic and foreign policies. Such blogging is an
indispensable source of progress in such a totalitarian state which has been
internationally pressurized for years.
Another
well-known Cuban blogger, Yoani Sanchez is perhaps the main provocateur and
actor of defamation for the Cuban government. In her blog “Generation Y” which
is defined as generation “I”, thus giving a meaning of individualist
independence, she casts light upon the issues of repression on Cuban society.
Venegas further analyses that Sanchez’s work presents a “mobilization
of life forces within the ambivalent dynamics of technological relation – one which sets the
human up as co-emerging with machines,
tools, and media environments.” (Venegas, 2011). Furthermore Sanchez,
offers a creative and personal catharsis in her descriptions of everyday life
and social repression in Cuba, starting from 2007. In the same year she would
receive International recognition and feedback from her readers that introduced
the international fan base she would eventually form. It is interesting to
point out that Yoani Sanchez is more widely known around the world than in Cuba
due to the censorship and lack of access of the internet. In 2008 due to the
increase of political repression in Cuba, Sanchez had the idea of approaching
the issue with a new strategy by taking part in the public action of “La Red
Ciudadana” which aimed to bring power to civil society and to consolidate the
ideals of transparency and independence in Cuba. This in turn managed to bring gradual
movement of political activism from the cyberspace to the public space. What
Sanchez and other Cuban bloggers portray, “Generally speaking, is the
recognition of the disparity between the Cuba that ideally would be (or as
Sánchez says “the Cuba that was promised to me as a girl”) and the Cuba that
has come into being” (Timberlake, 2010). This reinforces the idea that apart
from the existence of censorship in Cuba, there is also the combination of
state propaganda feeding the people with certain ideals that might not be
applied in practise. It is clear that, “while Sánchez may have begun her blog
with the goal of simply communicating her version of her own reality, her blog
and her life as a whole are now directed at drawing attention to the severe
restrictions of the current regime and to effecting lasting change in the
politics of Cuba” (Timberlake, 2010). Sanchez has also taken the next steps in
touring outside Cuba in order to spread awareness on the Cuban situation.
Amidst all of these actions, the Cuban government has been surprisingly lenient
and tolerant. Moreover, both Diaz and Sanchez “are seeking to “extend the
boundaries of free speech” and to redefine how appropriate participation can
look when real value is attached to the expression of critique and dissent as
part of a collaborative approach to a hegemonic discourse” (Timberlake, 2010).
The relationship between
the concept of blogging and the government is a very intricate one since it
involves the conflict of the regimes principles and practise of ideals. As
mentioned in the introduction, Cuba deploys multiple methods in order to
sustain its tight knitted controlled on the Cuban population. This is achieved
through limited internet access for the locals, Propaganda in the media, and
censorship of material against the regime’s ideals. More specifically several
specific cases of blogs have been technically blocked and the famous blogger
Sanchez had been denied the permission to leave the country until recently.
That is why as mentioned before, Sanchez is organizing her tour worldwide, in
order to finally present her views as she has always wished. Also, “Sánchez and
other unauthorized bloggers have been portrayed as mercenaries of the
revolution´s enemies” (Trimmer, 2014). Nonetheless, the repression and attempt
to fight back the so called “internet insurgents” is also translated through
the “operation truth” in which the “State embraced the new medium to counter
the ideological challenge” (Trimmer, 2014).
This operation in turn relates with the Gramscian ideological “struggle”
of hegemony, since it clearly represents the battle for rights between the
leadership and the oppressed classes. Operation truth involved the emergence of
official blogs as top-down initiatives and the purpose was to combat the “media
terrorism” proclaimed to be existent by the bloggers such as Diaz and Sanchez.
For example Fidel’s twitter page. Named as “Reflections by Fidel” ultimately is
an attempt by the regime to pave an ideological path for the accepted ideals,
that society should abide to. Also it is an attempt to give the people a form
of intimacy with their leader through the cyberspace.
In Cuba blogging is
perceived as an empowering action that defines individuals as “senders” in a
global media reality. From such a statement it becomes apparent that, “In Cuba
such an ability to circumvent media filters challenges the state´s grip on the
public sphere” (Trimmer, 2014). Cuba is such a unique case in this aspect,
because blogging in this country was born out of the constraint on public debate in the physical world. From
the moment the physical world was repressed, new alternative methods had to be
discovered and utilized as a response. In the initial stages of blogging,
people would “set up the blogs on a server outside of the island (“blind
blogging”)” (Trimmer, 2014). This is a clear indication of the passion driving
the people to get their point across to the state and the citizens. On the
other hand the “State´s tight control served as a political magnifying glass”
(Trimmer, 2014). Therefore both sides pushed each other in order to accomplish
their aims regardless of the other. According to Christina Venegas, “Blogging
emerges simultaneously as a measure of the difficulty of, and need for being in
the world”. Moreover she mentions that “the networking that occurs constructs a
bio politics where personal practices emerge alongside technology, political
debate and, increasingly, broader economic forces” (Venegas, 2010).
Both sides are struggling
to represent themselves above each other. The government due to the tools at
its disposal is able to easily keep dominance on this front. According to the
columnist Nat Hentoff “In Castro’s Cuba…there were no newspapers, except
official ones. No books, except those sanctioned by the regime…jails filled
with prisoners – from those who violently opposed the regime to those who
simply dared speak out.” From this quote, the conception of the government’s
dominance over the insurgent messages against the state repression is
consolidated. Moreover in Hentoff’s article three main actions of the state to
supress freedom of expression are stated. The state is said to have
nationalized the communications industry, implemented severe and harsh
punishments on Cubans who violate government restrictions and it denied the
people of access of foreign information sources. Therefore once again, it is
blatant that the people are at the mercy of the state and it really depends on
those few pioneers who blog the truth and are allowed to do so by the
government. In hindsight, the situation is improving and the Cuban state is
gradually opening up to the world.
China is another example
of a regime having complete control and supervision on the internet. What this
entails is that by “Examining the
experiences of these two countries may help to shed light on other
authoritarian regimes’ strategies for Internet development, as well as help to
develop generalizable conclusions about the impact of the Internet on
authoritarian rule” (Kalathil and Boas, 2001). In this part of the essay a
comparison of the two regimes will be made in terms of how they supervise
internet usage within their sovereign borders. In both cases it is historically
proven that they have the means to counter the multiple insurgent fronts they
face from the development of the internet. Moreover, they both use very similar
pro-active strategies in order to achieve their state interests such as
internet usage restriction to the local population. Conversely, the two
countries have differences in their reactive measures of control. “Cuba’s
strategy hinges on control of access to the Internet, including a prohibition
on individual public access and the careful selection of institutions that are
allowed to connect to the Internet” (Kalathil and Boas, 2001) . “In contrast,
China has promoted more widespread access to the Internet and has tried to
limit the medium’s potential challenges through a combination of content filtering,
monitoring, deterrence, and the promotion of self–censorship” (Kalathil and
Boas, 2001). Another major difference between the two regimes, is that China is
much more open in formulating its own version of a market-oriented information
economy, than Cuba due to ideological differences. “Although China and Cuba
both seek — in differing degrees — to modernize their economies through the use
of information technology, this strategy brings with it inherent challenges”
(Kalathil and Boas, 2001). This is because the emergence of such an economy,
brings the rise of entrepreneurship which in turn leads to the creation of an
economical elite that inevitably has political influence and demands.
Nonetheless, both regimes have proven to be very strong in dealing with
opposition and more specifically civil society organizations. Another aspect of
this discourse worth discussing is that both authoritarian regimes did not lose
control after the diffusion of the internet in their countries. “Although
conventional wisdom often suggests that the Internet is an inherently
democratizing technology, many authoritarian regimes have translated a long and
successful history of control over previous ICTs into effective control of the
Internet” (Kalathil and Boas, 2001). Therefore it is clear that, through the
use of reactive strategies such as the restriction of access, removal of
undesired information and promotion of self–censorship, authoritarian regimes
can neutralise any problem regarding internet use. Finally, Voeux declares that
there was a possible cooperation of Cuba with China in surveillance of
electronic communication. Claire explains that, “China and Cuba have stepped up
economic cooperation since President Hu Jintao’s visit in November 2004,
following which a Chinese official said China would participate in developing
the Cuban telecommunications sector” (Claire, 2006). On top of that she reports
that according to an American site, it is known that in 2005 Santa Clara in
cuba had electronic spying equipment. Such equipment clearly illustrates the
fact that governments like Cuba are organising their defences carefully as a
means to control the internet.
In accordance to the
research question of the essay, regarding whether blogging dissidents have
created social transformation in Cuba and to what extent, the answer is
complicated. From analysing both sides it becomes apparent that the blogger
dissidents have managed to make their voices heard in the global scene, but not
as successfully in the interior. What this insinuates is that the Cuban
government is in firm control of the internet usage and capacity, and is not
intending on making it completely free. Although the government has shown signs
of openness and adaptation towards the processes of globalization and technological
advancement, it maintains many of its repressive features. Also its application
of surveillance of the internet which is similar to the Chinese, brings doubts
to what extent Cuba will open up. The only positive sign has been the lenience
the state has given to certain key blogging dissidents that have made a
sensation worldwide. Conversely, it beckons the question whether such leniency
is tactical or a form of compromise from the government. Elaine Diaz and Yoani
Sanchez are the pioneers of a liberating front on the internet that has
culminated to a physical presence in society. Their actions offer voice to many
people in the country and had been an onset of some social transformation in
the demand of civil liberties.
In
Conclusion it is blatant that the Blogging in Cuba is a start for the freedom
of internet use in Cuba. There is an ongoing struggle between the government
repression and the civilians push for more rights. “Blogging
has made it possible for individuals to reconsider their identity and their
relationship to the world culture and Cuban politics” (Venegas, 2010). “Even
though it is clear that the Cuban government has not adopted a friendly
position towards these bloggers, the activity in blogging persists because the
writers are driven by the need to express their dissatisfaction with the Cuban
government, and call for reforms of policies” (Venegas, 2010). However it is
highly unlikely that we see any radical changes in the freedom of use of the
internet anytime soon. But from viewing the changes occurring in the past
years, optimism of change is present since the people’s culture and rights are
not going to be restrained forever.
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