Cuba’s Bloggers: Is Cuba Relaxing Restrictions on Freedom of Expression?

Archibald Ritter

For almost half a century, Fidel Castro required the citizens of Cuba to read from the same page and sing the same song. Though Cuba is a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly basically did not exist. The concept of a “Loyal Opposition” as known in Canada, was alien to the Castro regime; disagreement was considered to be essentially disloyal and in the service of the enemy, the United States.

Under President Fidel Castro dissidence or even serious disagreement was countered effectively; he used measures such as jailing the five authors of “The Homeland Belongs To Us All”, a paper calling for political and economic reforms in Cuba; firing professors who were out of line (Gloria Leon and Miriam Gras in 1995); and suspending one’s position and party membership (Professor Omar Everleny Perez 1998). The country’s former Minister of Higher Education, Juan Vela, stated that ideology trumps science, and that he who is not a revolutionary “does not belong in their classrooms”. (A “revolutionary” is one who accepts the Party line and policy, the Revolution’s historical leadership, and the leading role of the Party in Cuban life. Students ostensibly must be “revolutionaries” to go to university.)

As a result of this and other forms of repression, Cuban citizens have been effectively cowed into silence and generally refrain from publicly voicing any views that could be construed as being hostile to the government, the Party and the leadership. In private, however, citizens speak frankly and critically. Some say there are 22 million Cubans, not 11 million, because each Cuban has two personalities: the official one that voices the politically correct views and goes on the interminable marches and the private personality that analyses and discusses issues honestly.

Could this be changing under the regime of Raúl Castro? The answer would be mainly “No”. The political monopoly of the Communist Party of Cuba, authorized by Article Five of the Cuban constitution, remains. However, the regime does seem to be tolerating the independent “bloggers” and website authors that have emerged in the last few years. Independent bloggers have ruptured the control of freedom of expression by the government of Cuba and gained international audiences and support. Overt suppression would now be so exceedingly costly in terms of the international perception of the Cuban government that it has not tried seriously to silence the new citizen journalists.

Independent blogging began in earnest with Yoani Sánchez. Sánchez began her blog, “Generatión Y” —inspired by people like her whose names begin or contain the letter “Y”— on April 9, 2007. In an act of great courage, her blog bore her name openly and also was illustrated with her ID card. Sánchez’ blog is well-written. She possesses an ability to concisely link a day-to-day event or experience or observation with its broad national context. But what is most significant is that her blogs convey the truth of Cuban life in ways that Cubans speak in private but cannot do so in public. In effect she has broken the dual personality or “doble moral” and openly says in public what she thinks privately. Sánchez presents views on Cuba that Cuba’s national media, all controlled by the Party machinery, cannot present. There were some 11 to 14 million “hits” per month on Sánchez’ blog a few months ago, and it has been translated into 17 languages. Her blog is syndicated in the online newspaper, The Huffington Post. It has won eight international prizes, including Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism, and most recently Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Special Mention “Maria Moors Cabot Prize” for 2009. One might venture to say that her voice outside of Cuba rivals that of former president Fidel Castro who has his own quasi-blog, published online and in Cuba’s newspapers.

Her initiative opened the gates for others. There are now a large number of innovative, insightful and literary blogs and web site authors in Cuba. Among these are “Desde Aquí” by Reinaldo Escobar, Sánchez’ husband, “Octavo Cerco”, by Claudia Cadelo de Neri, “Sin Evasión”, by Miriam Celaya and the web site of Martha Beatriz Roque. These and many others have won significant readership as a result of their high quality.

Still, government tolerance of bloggers is not acceptance. The government has run interference with the bloggers. It has attempted to block the bloggers’ access to the Internet and the access of Cuban citizens to the independent blogs. It blocks the access of Cuban citizens to the DesdeCuba.com website which houses most of the independent blogs. This means that much of the time, the independent bloggers are “blogging blind”, running blogs that they themselves cannot often see. For a while, the right of all Cuban citizens to use the computers in tourist hotels was denied, until the access blockade was filmed and presented in a clip on Sánchez’s blog. Sánchez has been prohibited from travelling outside of Cuba to receive awards and she has been under surveillance by plainclothes Ministry of the Interior officers. Most recently, the Cuban government appears to be trying to “fight fire with fire”, by cultivating its own “in-house” bloggers, and providing them with unlimited access to the web.

Still, Sánchez and the other bloggers are not in jail. Much to its credit, the government of Raul Castro has refrained from such drastic action,. The high international regard for the Cuban bloggers and the risk of intense fall-out from repression provides some protection. This alone perhaps is not an effective and enduring disincentive for such action by the Cuban government. One can be encouraged that, to date, the government has chosen a grudging tolerance rather than a draconian suppression of Cuba’s new citizen journalists who have managed to overcome all obstacles and used new information technologies to make their voices heard. Perhaps the government of Cuba is beginning to accept the theory and practice of a “Loyal Opposition”. One hopes that this may be the case.

Archibald Ritter is the Interim Director of FOCAL’s Research Forum on Cuba program and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics and the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University.