Sunday, September 28, 2014

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


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