A wall raised on the other side

A wall raised on the other side
By XXXXXX

Below are excerpts from Yoani Sánchez's blog from Cuba, Generation Y.

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 10 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 cyber cafes under surveillance. Feeling my way, I
administer a blog, send tweets that I can't read the responses to and
manage a nearly collapsed e-mail 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 web.

The other side -- 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 naive. 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.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/14/1775506/a-wall-raised-on-the-other-side.html