Global Press Watch: Extensive article about Cuban journalism and blogging

http://internationalnewsroom.wordpress.com/cuba-juventud-rebelde-once-again/
GLOBAL PRESS WATCH



By Alice Speri

OVERVIEW

Cuba’s media is among the world’s least free. For decades, the one-party government has maintained tight control of newspapers, radio and television. Journalism is regularly exploited as a tool for propaganda; overt government censorship and self-censorship by journalists are exercised daily. The government has also jailed, abducted or intimidated many journalists, as well as other critics, and it has expelled a number of foreign correspondents.

But Cuba has a strong and resilient intellectual tradition, and opposition to the regime’s media control has continued throughout its history. Most recently, and in spite of limited access, the Internet has provided a window of opportunity for dissenting writers, who have used it to blog about the realities of Cuban life and to voice their criticism of the government. Though the readership for these blogs remains largely overseas, the phenomenon has exponentially expanded since its inception. The blogs are beginning to have an impact on the Cuban public, but they also have led to new repressions by the government.

“We rely on an enthusiastic youth, responsible and ever more aware.” The first issue of Juventud Rebelde, published in 1965. Photo courtesy of www.juventudrebelde.cu

BACKGROUND

Since it was first published on October 22, 1965, Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) has been the diario de la juventud cubana, the newspaper of the Cuban youth. Published by the Union of Young Communists, the paper saw little change over the past four decades, with the exception of moving from daily to weekly in 1990, during what the editors call the “special period.” That was the term for Cuba’s largest economic crisis due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which financially supported the country. Today, the paper has a Web site with a decent layout and multimedia content. But, as before, there is very little rebellion in its content.

Like Juventud Rebelde, sister papers Granma and Trabajadores are published respectively by the Communist Party of Cuba and the Union of Cuban Workers. The Communist Party is the only legal party in Cuba. Cubans read Juventud Rebelde, Granma and Trabajadores almost exclusively in the print editions, and often the same article is published in all three publications. Though the papers have Web sites, these mainly serve readers outside the island.

Regional papers like the capital’s Tribuna de la Habana, Camagüey’s Adelante and Santa Clara’s Vanguardia are also controlled by the government, as are the country’s four television stations and six national radios.

“All content is determined by the government and there is no editorial independence” in the Cuban media, according to the New York-based freedom of expression group Freedom House.

In 2006, only two percent of Cuba’s 11.2 million citizens had access to the Internet, Freedom House reported in its “Freedom of the Net” global assessment. In 2008, the number was up to 11 percent, but included users who are only able to access Cuba’s intranet, a government-controlled and highly restricted version of the Web. In 2009, the government’s official figure put Internet access at 13 percent of the population, though many experts believed that was an inflated estimate.

Private ownership of electronic media is prohibited by the constitution, and foreign news agencies are required to hire local journalists only through government offices, BBC reports. The constitution allows for the freedoms of speech and press where “they conform to the aims of a socialist society,” and the distribution of “enemy propaganda” and “unauthorized news” are criminalized. Insult laws can get one jailed for three years for criticizing government and the 1997 Law of National Dignity calls for up to 10 years in jail for anyone directly or indirectly collaborating with the “enemy’s” media, a law that makes freelancing from Cuba a dangerous proposition for journalists.

Additionally, a series of laws threaten Cubans with five years in prison for illegally connecting to the Internet and 20 years for writing “counterrevolutionary” articles on foreign Web sites. The media are deliberately used as a tool for “the revolution” – which by now is far from being revolutionary.

National newspapers are used by the party to celebrate Cuba’s accomplishments in grandiose tones, to denigrate “enemies” and to “show that everything inside is good and everything outside is bad,” said Ted Henken, a professor of black and Hispanic studies at City University of New York, who has written extensively about Cuba and is currently writing a book about Cuban bloggers..

The United States’ wars, for instance, offer opportunities for broad criticism of American politics and values. So did the U.S. intervention in the aftermath of January’s earthquake in Haiti, which Cuban papers said was overly militarized. Granma and Juventud Rebelde run periodic features such as Reflexiones del Compañero Fidel, “Reflections of Comrade Fidel,” and rubrics like Inter-Nos, “Between Us” a section devoted to a detailed and critical scrutiny of everything American, with headlines like Otra Guerra Fracasada del Imperio and El Círculo Vicioso de un Ejército (“Another Failed War of the Empire” and “The Vicious Circle of an Army,” both in reference to the U.S. war in Afghanistan).

“They would say, that is the role of the media, to promote the revolution,” Henken said. “When I went to Cuba the first time I thought this was so over the top, so ridiculous. But then, when I watch Fox News, I think the same thing, and a lot of people believe Fox News. They are both promoting a way to interpret the world through an ideological lens. The problem is that, in Cuba, it’s the state mechanism that does that.”

And, in Cuba, all views that dissent from those of the state are outlawed.

GENERATION Y, THE CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

“Cuba has the lowest rate of Internet access of the Americas,” according to a report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

All Internet connections must be approved by ETECSA, the government-owned Internet provider, and are only available to foreigners, government officials and intellectuals with ties to the government, hospitals, universities and government-owned companies. While ordinary Cubans could technically get restricted Internet access at hotels catering to foreigners, Cuba’s double currency – the convertible peso for foreigners and the moneda nacional for locals – make the cost prohibitive. An hour of very slow connection could cost up to $6, about one-third of a Cuban’s monthly salary, CPJ reports.

With Internet access made almost impossible for most Cubans, official Web sites like Juventud Rebelde’s largely cater to the decreasing number of foreign sympathizers and Cubans abroad who specifically look for the government’s interpretation of Cuban daily life. “Our mission is to produce a daily digital edition of Juventud Rebelde that can demonstrate to the world the truth about Cuba that many media outlets try to silence,” the paper’s editors wrote in the “About Us” page of their site.

Most readers turning to the Internet for an update from Cuba, however, look elsewhere, to one of the rebellious blogs that have flourished over the past three years. The most popular among them is Yoani Sánchez’s Generación Y.

Yoani Sánchez was born in Havana 16 years after the revolution and 10 years after Juventud Rebelde was first published. Like many in her generation, she grew up increasingly alienated and disillusioned. Like many, this University of Havana philology graduate dreamed of leaving Cuba, and in 2002 she moved to Europe, where she discovered the Internet. Unlike most, she returned to Cuba two years later.

Back in Cuba, Sánchez – together with friends and husband Reinaldo Escobar, a journalist already known to the government for his defiance – founded the online magazine Consenso in 2004, which they described as a “space of reflection and debate for Cuban, progressive thought.”

In January 2007, an e-mail debate on freedom of expression among Cuban intellectuals exploded into a public debate. Both Sánchez and her husband wanted to attend but that night the Cuban authorities picked up Escobar and held him incommunicado for the duration of the meeting.

“For the government, she didn’t exist, because he was the one, and she was a woman,” Henken said, to explain why Sánchez was not detained . Sánchez made it to the debate, and in April 2007 she started her own blog, Generación Y.

“This is a blog inspired by people like me, born in Cuba in the ‘70s and ‘80s, marked by schools in the countryside, Russian cartoons, illegal emigration and frustration,” she wrote.

Sánchez blogged quietly for a few months, before the international media discovered her. On October 10, 2007, Reuters reporter Esteban Israel wrote about her. In the next weeks, her name echoed over the media worldwide. In December, The Wall Street Journal featured her in a long story titled “Cuban Revolution.” Within the span of a few months, Sánchez had become a famous international symbol.

Meanwhile, in digitally isolated Cuba, she remained virtually unknown, both to her fellow citizens and especially to the Cuban government. While threatening Cuba’s image abroad, she posed no danger to the real source of the Cuban government’s power: control over a population that remains largely cut off from the outside world.

“They just saw her as some frustrated, alienated element who was letting steam off,” Henken said. “She was harmless, and even if she were harmful she wouldn’t have any impact.”

Eventually, the Cuban government did launch a defamation campaign against Sánchez, accusing her of being funded by outside enemies of the revolution and of serving as a tool for “media terrorism.” The main result these attacks was that Sanchez’s profile in Cuba was raised. People began to recognize her on the streets, she said.

Sánchez’s blog also inspired others in Cuba to do the same, and over the last three years, 20 to 25 independent bloggers have started writing on the Internet about their everyday lives in Cuba, CPJ reports. The blogs are maintained under foreign-registered portals DesdeCuba.com and VocesCubanas.com.

“The bloggers have opened a new space for free expression in Cuba, while offering a fresh glimmer of hope for the rebirth of independent ideas in Cuba’s close system,” wrote CPJ Americas program coordinator Carlos Lauria.

So far, the government has observed the blogging phenomenon from a distance, blocking the sites and warning the bloggers of possible repercussions. In November 2009, Sánchez wrote on her blog that she had been kidnapped and beaten.

“How am I going to tell him that we live in a country where this can happen, how will I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kilobytes, has been beaten up on a public street,” Sánchez wrote, referring to Teo, her 14-year-old son. “How to describe the despotic faces of those who forced us into that car, their enjoyment that I could see as they beat us, their lifting my skirt as they dragged me half naked to the car.”

The violence didn’t stop her, however, and a few weeks later Sánchez secured an e-mail interview with U.S. President Barack Obama.

“Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba,” Obama wrote. “It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely, and I applaud your collective efforts to empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology.”

The blogging movement, or – as the critics of Sánchez call it – the “Yoani phenomenon,” actually follows a tradition of dissident journalism in Cuba that started using the Internet as early as the mid-1990s. The early Cuban Internet journalists phoned and faxed their critical pieces to Web sites like Cubanet.org, which were based in Miami or in Spain. After a few heady years, many of those dissident journalists were jailed in a 2003 crackdown.

What distinguishes today’s bloggers from the independent press of the 1990s is their largely depoliticized language – in spite of the profoundly political nature of their very existence – and their criticism not only of the Cuban government but also, for instance, of the U.S.-imposed embargo on Cuba. This was not always the case with the previous generation.

“They talk about life in Cuba, its frustrations, but they generally chronicle that and they do so in a way that Cubans can relate to” said Henken. “Every sentence isn’t human rights and democracy and that was the language that the earlier dissidents used.”

The Cuban government’s slow response to Sánchez and other bloggers as opposed to their fierce repression of the “old guard” of independent journalists has different explanations. “Some analysts say the government does not clearly understand the blogging phenomenon because its most influential leaders are over the age of 70,” Lauria wrote in his CPJ report.

Others think authorities are less concerned about the blogosphere because it has minimal influence on ordinary Cubans, the CPJ report also suggests.

“She (Sánchez ) can talk about Cuba to the rest of the world and the government doesn’t like that, but it’s not a threat to their power because their power derives from controlling Cuba and the minds of Cubans,” Henken said. “So long as she doesn’t have a sizable, consistent Cuban audience – and she doesn’t have that – and so long as she carries out all of her actions online, the government is quite content to leave her alone.”
Yoani Sánchez, author of the blog Generación Y. Photo courtesy of www.desdecuba.com

Yoani Sánchez, author of the blog Generación Y. Photo courtesy of www.desdecuba.com

This, however, may be changing as Sánchez and others bloggers take their dissent beyond the online world, by holding meetings and by asking provocative questions at public events. Sánchez and other bloggers have started burning their writing onto CDs and disseminating them via text message, so that readers can access them even if they do not have an Internet connection.

Recently, Sanchez turned her Havana living room into what she calls “The Blogger Academy,” a workshop to educate Cubans about the use of blogs and Twitter to freely express their ideas. This electronic samizdat could draw more attention from the government, which some fear will eventually crack down on bloggers. But others feel that, even in Cuba, where time seems to have stopped with the revolution, change is inevitable and that independent, citizen journalism will be at its forefront.

PRESS FREEDOM

Cuba is one of the most repressive countries in the world when it comes to freedom of the press, and it is second only to China in the number of jailed journalists, CPJ reports. China currently holds 24 journalists in jail as opposed to Cuba’s 22.

A majority of these journalists were jailed over the course of a two-day crackdown in March 2003 and have been convicted in closed-door trials and given sentences of up to 27 years. On the fifth anniversary of their arrest, CPJ published a report – “Cuba’s Long Black Spring” – denouncing the conditions of these journalists’ incarcerations and the threats and harassment their families continued to face.

Since then, some reporters were released under international pressure and in particular the mediation of Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero. The released journalists were immediately exiled. Those still in jail are kept miles away from their homes and provided inadequate food and health care, CPJ reports.

Months after his arrest during the March crackdown, Guantánamo correspondent Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta begun a hunger strike to protest the conditions in which he and other journalists were detained. Herrera Acosta escalated his protest by sewing together his lips, which became infected, but Cuban authorities ignored requests from international human rights groups that demanded his release on health grounds. Seven years later, Herrera Acosta remains in jail, where he has been diagnosed with diabetes, his wife told CPJ.

The Cuban government’s justification for its tight control of the media is that it is protecting the country and the revolution from an ongoing threat from the outside.

“The Cuban government’s explanation of its own system is usually an old, familiar excuse to explain away what is essentially lack of the freedom of the press: you can’t criticize us because criticism will be used to divide us and conquer us,” said Henken, the CUNY professor.

In fact, added Henken, Cuba has been the target of propaganda attacks from U.S.-based Cubans for years. “It’s important to take the government’s own explanation into account because there are certain things in their argument that have limited validity,” he said.

The U.S. government also targets broadcasts at Cuba, aimed at swaying public opinion, though its Radio-TV Marti broadcasts reach as little as one percent of Cuba’s population, according to a recent report in The Global Post.

And it’s not clear how those broadcasts are received, even among the few they reach. “People in a country like Cuba will swallow a lot, if they believe that they’re being defended against an enemy,” said Henken.

THE FUTURE

Cuban schoolchildren in Young Pioneer uniforms run in the streets of Havana. “Generations are probably the biggest cleavage in Cuban society, more important than gender, more important than race,” said CUNY Professor and author of the blog El Yuma Ted Henken. (Photo by Alice Speri, 2007)

In February 2008, 78-year-old Raúl Castro replaced his 83-year-old brother Fidel as Cuban president. Raúl Castro announced a series of reforms meant to open up Cuba’s isolated economy, including allowing consumers to buy computers and cell phones – though the costs remain prohibitive for most Cubans.

Yet to the frustration and skepticism of many in Cuba, the new president’s rhetoric has only alternated between the reformist and the reactionary.

“They are trapped in a dilemma,” Sánchez said in an interview. “They have to make changes because the social pressure is high, but they can’t change too much because if they do, the wave of changes will engulf them.”

Cuban authorities have also been alternating between a politics of opening up and closure to the outside world. Foreign correspondents, for instance, have been allowed to work in Cuba and have been given some room for criticism – a policy that has helped build a limited reputation for tolerance and led to both critical and sympathetic reporting.

But after an initial opening, the Cuban government retreated. In 2005, The Chicago Tribune’s Gary Marx, BBC’s Stephen Gibbs and Mexican El Universal’s César González Calero, who had all been reporting from Cuba, were told their journalist visas would not be renewed.

Within Cuban media, even outright propagandistic outlets like Granma have been beneficiaries of limited tolerance for criticism. In a story for The Global Post, Nick Miroff recently highlighted the unusual surfacing, in the government-controlled national papers, of op-ed columns and letters to the editor containing some “rather frank criticisms of Cuba’s economic ills.” This criticism, however, never challenges the fundamental system in Cuba.

“We can’t keep living in the past. We have to think about the present and future of our country,” Miroff quotes a young contributor to Granma, but adds “that he believed ‘adjusting’ socialism was needed to ensure its survival.”

“Because Raúl is questioning the functioning of socialism, the mainstream media is showing that debate, but it’s a debate that is clearly within the limits of socialism,” Henken said. “Still, that’s somewhat new.”

And for Cuba today, that is what amounts to change: small steps toward criticism and self-questioning, reflected in a media that is still under tight party control.

More vested interest hearsay than will fit in a 5 pound bag.

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goes to show not all academics are screamin' lefties.

I'm always ready to read your description of the "big picture" :-)

(see Honduras, wonder if he does the same soft analysis there)

Article projects, as do some posters here, that the only dissent in Cuba is dissent facilitated by US funding and organization.

Gawd forbid that we hear that there is a spectrum of political debate (and parties) in "Castro's Cuba". It would render exile efforts at dissident ops null and void - and therefore no need for funding (which would mean lees money to loop around to US political campaign coffers).

More evidence that its all about the money, and these cretins don't give a rat's ass about Cubans in Cuba (other than making some money off of their difficulties).

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