Like the sneeze of a desired flu, the alternative Cuban blogosphere
continues to propagate itself. It is no longer like the bleak wasteland
that displayed -- if anything -- a few pseudonymous pages in April 2007,
when I started Generation Y. I've lost count of how many we are now,
because every week I learn that at least two new virtual spaces have
been born. The blockade of various blogger platforms and the constant
attacks have served only to make the virus of free opinion mutate into
forms more complicated to shut up. The DNA of citizen expression will
not concede in the face of vaccines based on intimidation and
defamation; eventually everyone will be infected.
The plurality of approaches is the sign that the public squares of
discussion have found, in cyberspace, a scenario more tolerant than
reality. I know sites of catharsis for accumulated frustrations, while
others specialize in news or protest. They range from pleasant blogs
such as Cuba Fake News, to magazines filled with indispensable articles
in the style of Convivencia. Their authors range from former
counterintelligence agents from the Interior Ministry to exiled writers
from the official publishing houses. They are all joined by the need to
express themselves, the tense desire to be done with the cycle of
silence that has lasted too long.
Such a bundle of free electrons, this blogosphere doesn't respond to any
hierarchy or leading figures. Its strength is that it is not possible to
cut off its head, or to catch it, a slippery and playful being with no
need to reach agreement or carry credentials. During the time they spend
developing a strategy to fight it, for which they meet on high,
preparing a law under the direction of the possible executors of
censorship, the number of sites on the Island has already doubled. When
they begin to understand what it's about and how to administer an
antidote, the blogger fever will have made the temples of thousands of
Cubans throb.
Yoani Sanchez: The Free Blogosphere Takes Off in Cuba (15 December 2009)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/the-free-blogosphere-take_b_393526.html
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