Finally, I sit down in the chair of a hotel, open my laptop, and look
from side to side. Seeing me, the security guard mutters a brief "she
came" into the microphone pinned to his lapel. Afterward some tourists
appear, while my index finger works the mouse as fast as it can to
optimize the few minutes of Internet access. It's the first time in ten
days that I've managed to submerge myself into the great world wide web.
A list of proxies helps me with the censured pages and I will see the
Generation Y portal from an anonymous server, the bridge to banned
sites. In three years I've become a specialist in slow connections and
badly performing public cybercafés under surveillance. Feeling my way, I
administer a blog, send tweets that I can't read the responses to, and
manage a nearly collapsed email account.
After bypassing the limitations to reach cyberspace, we Cubans see the
censorship that grips us from two different sides. One comes from the
lack of political will on the part of our government to allow this
Island mass access to the web of networks. It shows itself in blogs and
filtered portals and in the prohibitive prices for an hour of surfing
the WWW. The other – also painful – is that of services that exclude
residents in our country under the justification of the anachronistic
blockade/embargo. Those who think limiting the functionality of sites
like Jaiku, Google Gears, and Appstore for my compatriots will have any
effect on the authorities of my country are naïve. They know that those
who govern us have satellite antennas in their homes, broadband, open
Internet, iPhones full of applications, while we – the citizens – trip
over screens that say "this service is not available in your country."
Just as we get around the internal restrictions here, we also sneak
through the closed gates of those who exclude us from abroad. For every
lock they put on us there is a trick to picking it open. But it still
frustrates me that after avoiding the State Security agents below my
apartment, paying a third of a monthly salary for an hour of internet
time, seeing the animosity in the faces of the guards at the hotels, to
see that Revolico, Cubaencuentro, Cubanet and DesdeCuba continue in the
long night of the censored sites, I go and type – like a conjurer of
relief – a URL and instead of opening it seems to me that a wall has
been raised on the other side.
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