The Nieman Foundation says there are over 2,900 Cuban public interest blogs.

Yoani Sánchez launched her blog, Generation Y, in April 2007. (Her first post contrasted the freedom Cuban's had to display posters saying “Go Santiago!” during baseball playoffs with their inability to display a poster saying “Internet for all!"). In 2011, she told us that the free blogosphere had taken off. A recent post on the Nieman Foundation blog says there are now over 2,900 blogs dedicated to debate and discussion of issues related to the public interest in Cuba. (Is there a report underlying that statistic)?

The blogs are based in Cuba, Spain, the US and other nations with Cuban communities, and they are often in conflict with the Cuban state media. For example, a blogger disclosed math test fraud in Cuban college entrance exams the day after the exams were praised in the state media. Since Internet access is highly limited in Cuba, blog news is often distributed on the "street networks" which we have described in these earlier posts.

It takes a while, but it seems that even in Cuba information truly does want to be free -- at least in one sense of the word.

Meeting of the Cuban "blogger academy" in 2009

Yoani Sánchez' digital newspaper, 14ymedio, is online

The daily Web newspaper 14ymedio looks like a fully traditional digital "newspaper" with news, sports, culture, opinion, fashion tips, weather, etc.

The 14ymedio "declaration of intentions" says the team is committed to promoting truth, freedom and human rights, without ideological or partisan ties -- they hope to provide a space for respectful debate and to contribute to the peaceful transition to democracy. A group of 28 writers and intellectuals, including Mario Vargas Llosa and Lech Walesa, signed a request that the Cuban government respect 14ymedio and allow it to exist with free expression.

Evidently some pro-government people were not happy with the launch of 14ymedio -- the Cuban domain name server was hacked, and Cubans looking for 14ymedio.com were automatically redirected to a pro-government Web site. Doug Madory of Renesys reported that the hack was local to Cuba and the site was visible in foreign nations. Madory speculated that the hack had been done by someone inside ETECSA.

Today, relatively few people on the island can afford to access 14ymedio online, but stripped down PDF and text versions are available. For the first issue, they were quite minimal -- hopefully they will improve -- becoming something like the daily New York Times Digest. It could also be included on flash drives that are regularly distributed on the island. Regardless, I hope the hack was a rogue action and the paper turns out to be the impartial forum envisioned by the founders.

Yoani Sánchez' digital newspaper, 14ymedio

In a recent post on a different blog, I pointed out that the Internet "crowd" had quickly ruined the reputation of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling but that visibility on the Internet gave Yoani Sánchez cover to speak harshly and eloquently against Raúl Castro -- "a man alone in the crowd."

Sánchez, her husband and a staff will begin publication of their digital newspaper, 14ymedio, next week -- a further sign of her growing confidence in speaking out.

Yoani Sánchez's first impression of nauta.cu email

Yoani has written a post on her experience in signing up for and using mobile email.

The Cubacel clerk warned her that the account was not configured for email, and, when Yoani said she could to it, the clerk asked for help. The clerk also told her the traffic was not routed over the ALBA-1 cable.

Yoani subscribed to a number of email lists, which worked well, and says emailing a photo to a service like Flickr is much cheaper than MMS was. She succeeded in exchanging email with folks in Santiago de Cuba, Holguín, Camagüey and Matanzas as well as Havana.

Of course, she is not naive -- "every word written, every name referenced, every opinion sent via Nauta, could end up in State Security’s archives."

The service she describes is far from what most of us take for granted, but it is a step in the right direction.

(Think what they could do if they would allow satellite connectivity).

Yoani Sánchez tweets from a new Internet access center

The Nuevo Herald newspaper wrote about initial experience with the new Internet centers.  The say that connectivity is expensive and slow, but faster than before -- no surprises.  The Herald article notes that Yoani Sánchez visited one of the centers, where she accessed her blog and the Nuevo Herald Web site and viewed an unintentionally ironic warning that others might see information you send to the Internet.

Check the photos she tweeted below.

The cost of obsolete technology

Yoani Sánchez recently posted a sad anecdote. She had just gotten away for a two day vacation, when she learned that the server at the Cuban blogger portal Desdecuba.com was down. That meant she had to return to Havana and get an English translator to contact her friend who, following instructions Yoani emailed to her, fixed the problem.

This story reminded me of a visit to Cuba in the mid 1990s -- before Cuba's IP link was established. I recall bounding up a staircase to a spare second floor office in Havana with an enthusiastic young man who proudly showed me the PC that handled international UUCP trafic and hosted some email accounts for Tinored. (It may have been Tinored system administrator Carlos Valdes, I'm not sure). At the time of that visit, we were not political, not Cubans and Americans, but confident, naive citizens of the network.

Yoani's post took me back to that day, because it sounds like the Desdecuba server is configured like that of Tinored in 1995, requiring hands-on management. It also reminded me of my school's first Web server, which ran on the desktop computer in my office. It was running Windows 3.0, and crashed a lot. I had to go to my office and reboot it whenever that happened.

Coinicidentally, I just posted a teaching note tracing the evolution of the ways we deploy applications on the Internet. It has gone from standalone PCs to server rooms, blade servers, datacenters, virtual servers and virtual servers in the cloud. I no longer worry about servers and my Web site and blogs have not been down for years.

Obsolete technology caused Yoani to miss her vacation, but, more important, it means that a generation of Cuban users and technicians are being trained on obsolete technology. The technicians are learning skills that have little application outside of Cuba today. The users do not know what the modern Internet is like so they cannot envision new applications, and trained, demanding users drive Internet innovation.

With the ALBA 1 undersea cable, Cuba has a chance to start bringing some users and technicians into the modern era. (See this earlier post). For the sake of Yoani and anyone who is still telnetting into a computer to read text email, I hope they do it soon.

Yoani's iPhone and Jesus' vision

Someone sent me a link to Can the Internet Bring Change to Cuba?, an article published in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Wilkinson.

Wilkinson posits that since the dissident blogs are seldom read in Cuba, their major impact is on the Cuban exile community, whose leaders have largely shaped US policy. He also credits them for being moderate -- not calling for the overthrow of the government, criticizing the US embargo, etc. Instead, he says, they tell stories of life in Cuba.

Wilkinson quotes several such stories told by bloggers, and the one that caught my eye and heart was posted by Yoani Sánchez, who, after seeing an iPhone surf the Web for the first time, wrote:

Between the walls of this house, that had heard dozens of Cubans talk of the Internet as if it were a mythical and difficult to reach place, this little technological gadget gave us a piece of cyberspace. We, who throughout the Blogger Academy, work on a local server that simulates the web, were suddenly able to feel the kilobytes run across the palms of our hands. I had the desperate desire to grab Rosa Díez’s iPhone and run off with it to hide in my room and surf all the sites blocked on the national networks. For a second, I wanted to keep it so I could enter my own blog, which is still censored in the hotels and cybercafés. But I returned it, a bit disconsolate I confess.

This quote immediately reminded me of the 1996 message Jesus Martinez sent to his colleagues in the then small global Internet community announcing Cuba's connection to the Net. Jesus felt the same power as Yoani, writing:

After so many days, years of sacrifice and vigilance, I have great satisfaction to announce that our beloved Cuba, our "caiman of the Indies," has been connected to the Internet as we had desired...A new era has just begun for us. We will soon announce our Web site and value-added services to do as much as we can to help develop our region and our culture.

I hope Yoani gets a 4G iPhone and Jesus' vision is realized soon.

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PS Yoani wrote that her blog was blocked in Cuba, but sometime later, Reuters announced that it had been un-blocked -- does anyone have a sense of how widely the blogs of Yoani and other dissidents are read and known in Cuba?