Support Cuban bloggers

Translating Cuba bloggers

Since Yoani Sanchez launched her blog Generaion Y in April, 2007, the Cuban blogosphere has grown to represent a variety of points of view and voices and played an increasingly important role in public discussion. One can discover blogs in collections like the state-run Reflejos blogging platform, the English language Translating Cuba site, Desde Cuba or elsewhere.

Internet access is extremely expensive for bloggers in Cuba.

While Cuban connectivity prices are among the highest in the world, those of us living outside of Cuba can afford to support bloggers we like and at least two companies, Ding.com and Fonoma.com allow us to donate Internet-access minutes to Cubans.

If you like what a Cuban blogger is saying, "top up" his or her Internet account.

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

Blog Bang Cuba: a Cuban blogging documentary

Claudio Peláez Sordo has made a documentary on Cuban blogging for his masters thesis at the University of Havana. It shows interview snippets of specialists and bloggers who access the Internet from school or work accounts controlled by the Cuban government.

The video was posted September 3, but has had only 458 views so far.

Conference papers online

Papers and proceedings from the 21st annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) are now available online. The papers cover a wide range of social, political and economic topics.

Two of special interest to this group are Ted Henken's A Bloggers' Polemic: Debating Independent Cuban Blogger Projects in a Polarized Political Context and my paper The Past, Present and Future of the Internet in Cuba.

This is an interesting, rigorous conference. The theme of next year's conference is "Where is Cuba Going?" and the call for papers is available on the ASCE Web site.

Round-table forum on the Cuban Internet and blogs

Ted Henken, professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Baruch College, CUNY, and I spoke on Cuba 1.5? The State of the Internet and Uses of Social Media in a Changing Cuba at the Inter-American Dialog in Washington DC. I talked about the past, present and future of the Cuban Internet and Ted reported on his recent interviews with Cuban bloggers. Robert Guerra, director of the Internet Freedom project at Freedom House, provided commentary.

You can read a summary of the round table here and see a video of the presentations and subsequent discussion here.