Ordinary Cubans can join an island-wide network that allows them to send and receive international e-mail. Lines are long at youth clubs, post offices and the few Internet cafes that provide access,
but the rest of the Web is blocked — a control far stricter than even China’s or Saudi Arabia’s.Still, thousands of Cubans pay about $40 a month for black market dial-up Internet accounts bought through third parties overseas or stolen from foreign providers. Or they use passwords from authorized Cuban government accounts that hackers swipe or buy from corrupt officials.
Sanchez said so many Cubans read her blog that fans stop her on the street.
Generacion Y takes its title from a Cuban passion for names beginning in Y. It offers witty and biting accounts of Cubans’ everyday struggles against government restrictions at every turn.
Some of the bloggers hew to the belief that openness is the best answer to official surveillance.
“By signing your name, giving your opinions out loud and not hiding anything, we disarm their efforts to watch us,” Sanchez wrote on her blog.
On a blog called “Sin EVAsion” (“Without Evasion”), Eva Hernandez dared to mock “Granma,” the official Communist Party newspaper, for taking its name from the American yacht that brought Castro and his rebels back to Cuba from Mexico to launch their armed rebellion in 1956.
“Cuba is the only country in the world whose principal newspaper, the official organ of the Communist Party and the official voice of the government, has the ridiculous name ’granny,”’ she wrote. Piling on the heat, she added that the name “perpetuates the memory of that yacht that brought us so much that is bad.”
Generacion Y is maintained by a server in Germany, and Sanchez says the Cuban government periodically attempts to block her site within Cuba, though the problem is always cleared up within hours.
Administrators of the “Petrosalvaje” site also claim to struggle with government-imposed limits. A recent post called uncensored Internet access a “virtual raft” — a reference to the rafts on which Cubans flee to the United States.
The government is also into blogging — maintaining dozens of sites dedicated to promoting the island’s image overseas.
“Raul needs time,” reads a post on Kaosenlared.net, a forum based in Spain. “We are confident, calm and staying united in favor of the direction of our revolution.” It is signed Rogelio Sarforat and was apparently posted from Cuba.
Reynaldo Escobar, Sanchez’ husband and a former journalist for official media, now uses his own blog to criticize the government. He said Cuba pays supporters to flood the Internet with positive opinions.
He says he knows of nobody who would spend money to go on the Web and defend the system. “Everyone who argues in favor of the government is paid to do so, or does so because they have been asked to,” he said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24316406/page/2/