Monday, primetime in Cuba. While state television broadcast a new episode of a series of allegations against the opposition, "The Reasons of Cuba,” this time about independent bloggers, the movement's leader, Yoani Sánchez, broadcast her own talk program with dissident journalists, in which she defended the right to access and use Internet on the island, Radio Martí reports.
Sánchez uploaded to her blog Generation Y a video that she ironically baptized as “Citizen Reasons,” which replicates the format of Cuba's leading political propaganda program, The Round Table (La Mesa Redonda). Sánchez and bloggers Miriam Celaya and Dimas Castellanos, along with journalists Dagoberto Valdés and Reinaldo Escobar, and attorney Wilfredo Vallín opened a space for discussion and analysis of current events and the limitations imposed on the exercise of citizenship rights on the island, El Nuevo Herald says.
In half an hour of conversation, Sánchez, an award-winning blogger, criticized Cuban authorities’ obsession with blocking the public's access to Internet and the difficulties of communicating in a country where an hour of connection to the network costs between $8 and $12 and is restricted to hotels and cybercafés.
Sánchez said the government “demonizes technology and the Internet” because of concerns that social networks can play a role similar to what has happened in Arab countries, EFE reports. "It alarms me because access to the network is today a human right in the world," she said. "A government that restricts it and demonizes it knows that it is compromising the development of their nation in the very long term.”
Meanwhile, state television accused the blogger of being part of a movment of “cybermercenaries” at the service of the United States, whose objective would be "to generate sources of internal conflicts through the use of new technology,” La República explains.
“Cyberwarfare isn’t a war of bullets or bombs, but of information, communication, and algorithms. It is the new form of invasion that originated in the developed world,” the program said, as quoted by the Voice of America.
Far from expressing concern, the blogger took the attack with humor and said through her Twitter account that now no one can say “that alternative bloggers don’t know anyone.”
“I’m so happy!" she tweeted. Finally, the alternative blogosphere is on official TV, even if it’s to insult us.”
Sánchez emphasized that the propaganda of the Castro brothers’ regime, which offers no right of reply, worked well in the 1970s and ‘80s, when a state monopoly on information existed, but now, in a new era, “mobile phones, kilobytes, and Bluetooth make the dull official discourse lose ground.”
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
