Lost in cyberspace
By Yoani Sánchez Posted Wed, Sep 10 2008
Faced with the evidence that neither the television nor the national press reflected the reality in which I lived, I decided to start writing my own chronicles of everyday life in Cuba.
I thought of printing a brochure with my own ideas, but I recalled that if I distributed it, I could be prosecuted for spreading “enemy propaganda.” I also ruled out the possibility of speaking on the radio for a few minutes or writing briefly in newspapers that circulated on the island because they were government monopolies of the Cuban Communist Party. Therefore, the only way to ask questions, to express my frustration and to tell real life stories of Cubans, was to post my blogs on the Internet.
To begin with, I designed a simple page and named it “Generación Y,” adding that exotic letter with which my parents had enrolled me into the group of Yohandrys, Yanisleydis, Yunieskys and Yordankas.
The Generación Y is a group that includes Cubans, now 25-40 years old, who were born in the 1970s and 1980s, the decades marked by the countryside schools, Russian cartoons, illegal escapes from Cuba and frustration. These names with “Y” contrasted with the few words in Spanish that start with the penultimate letter of the alphabet. Our parents were looking for something different, something new and foreign, like an act of rebelliousness against Russian names like Boris, Natasha or Vladimir that inundated us in those decades.
When I started to publish my disappointing sketches of reality, I thought that it would be very difficult to reach out to my fellow countrymen with the posts that I used to publish each week on the Internet. The limitations of access to the Internet, which made Cuba one of the countries with the lowest level of connectivity in the world, could have turned my texts into words thrown into empty space.
Publishing these chronicles of day-to-day life was, and continues to be, an incredible adventure. Cubans are not allowed Internet connection for domestic use, and only a few highly placed officials and artists possess a domestic connection. In the whole city of Havana, there are only two cybercafes but prices are inaccessible for common people. This forces me to work offline most of the time and only connect for a few minutes in those public places to upload my already typed and edited texts. All these technical complications only allow me to update the blog once or twice a week, and, for this reason, my posts cannot be called news.
The adventure of posting from Cuba can seem a bit absurd if we think about the low percentage of Cubans who can sit down in front of a computer that is connected to the Internet.
Nevertheless, one has to remember that the same creativity that enabled us to be repairers of domestic appliances, capable buyers on the black market or inventors of auto parts has also allowed us to slip onto the Web.
For every Cuban who accesses cyberspace perhaps there are another 20 friends and acquaintances who are informed through copies of pages saved on to a Flash drive or a CD. There exist true alternative sites that distribute news taken from the World Wide Web to others who cannot surf the Internet. In the most unbelievable corners of Cuba, there are people who find out what happens at home or abroad thanks to this handmade and rudimentary form of spreading the news.
A few Web sites with Cuban themes, created by Cubans in exile, are not accessible from national servers. Nevertheless, the proliferation of software to evade the censorship — like Psiphon, Tor, and Tour Freedom — enable the interested reader to enter those blocked pages. Some Web sites made on the island have emerged to give advice on how to avoid cyberpolice. Such is the case of the blog “Potro Salvaje,” published by a group of anonymous technicians and hackers.
The blogs also create a discussion forum in which the commentaries flow between the readers and the author. In the case of “Generación Y,” which came into being as a Web site to publish my chronicles, it ended up being a meeting and reflection place for hundreds of Cubans and foreigners interested in our reality.
This type of zone for dialogues is very necessary in the present Cuban circumstances, where intolerance, disrespect and indolence are in abundance. We write essays on the pages of my blog about topics that we should take to our citizens. Debating in the virtuality of the Internet is fantastic training for a future of plurality and democracy.
In the Cuban “blogosphere,” there are people who use pseudonyms and others who reveal themselves. They form part of a process in which people are starting to speak publicly about problems and express criticism. This tendency for collective catharsis does not convey any intention of the government, especially not Raul Castro’s, to open space for debate. A cycle of silence has simply come to an end, and the Cubans have started to speak in public what they had been silent about for years.
The posts have become part of my daily life marked by some emotional outbursts that serious newspapers would never publish. However, every story on “Generación Y” is part of a personal experience. I do not have themes or areas that interest me more than others, but what motivates me is to write something while my sensations are still fresh with hot emotions.
My generation has seen the disillusionment of its elders faced with a social project of firm promises of a bright future that became an authoritarian and economically inefficient system. After a lot of sacrifices, our parents and grandparents arrived to the harsh years of “Período Especial” in the 1990s — frustrated, faced with material limitations and with their dreams that never became reality.
My generation arrived at the age of political consciousness just when the Berlin Wall came down and when the Soviet Union broke up. I like to call this age group the “generation of cynicism” since many of us have a mixture of cynicism, indolence and pragmatism. This combination has helped us to survive in a society that each time looks less like what they promised when we were children. However, we are not a homogenous group; there are refugees and soldiers, opponents and questioners of the state security, rockers and salsa dancers, atheists and believers living in a typical Cuban melting pot.
Change has not come from the top, however, but we ourselves have moved the wall and loosened the limits from inside. The appearance of new civic projects, such as blogs, the digital magazine Convivencia, the portal Desde Cuba and surely the groups for universal autonomy shown that the solution to our problems will not come from the heroic and violent action of a few, but from the daily task of pushing the piece of wall that each one has ahead.
After a year of publishing my reflections on the Internet and seeing new bloggers appear, each one with his peculiar way of tackling the truth, I have confirmed that citizen journalism can be opposed to the triumphalism and slogans of the official Cuban press. This reality has reinforced my belief that public speech and the opinion of the individual will gain more attention faced with homogeneity and mass culture. With that the state will have lost, once and for all, the monopoly on information.