Viva La Internet Revolución in Cuba

Egypt.

After seeing how mobile and social networking technologies led to popular revolutions in places like Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year, is it possible that we’ll soon see a similar type of revolution in our own backyard? On May 9, Raul Castro and the Cuban Communist Party released over 300 new measures designed to loosen control over the state. For the first time in more than 50 years, Cubans will be allowed to buy and sell houses and new automobiles, as well as travel abroad as tourists more freely. More importantly, Cuban dissidents are increasingly turning to the Internet to share their thoughts about everyday life in Cuba.

For now, the ability of everyday Cubans to leverage the Internet as part of a grassroots revolution is marginal at best. With only 10% of its citizens having access to the Internet, Cuba is the country with the lowest Internet usage in the northern hemisphere. Connections are slow, and at a rate of $2/hour, the Internet is incredibly expensive in a country where the average income is $20/month. Moreover, the sale of computer equipment is strictly regulated, Internet access is widely filtered, and e-mail is closely monitored. The Cuban authorities carefully control the news that reaches its citizens and ruthlessly cracks down on "counter-revolutionary" journalists. Sounds a lot like Tunisia or Egypt, right?

Despite these obstacles, a brave band of Cuban bloggers led by Yoani Sánchez have already made progress. Sanchez, named by TIME Magazine as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2008, has created an Internet-powered dissident movement that continues to attract new adherents. Last summer, the New York Review of Books brilliantly outlined how these brave voices are trying to effect change on the island nation by cobbling together makeshift Internet connections and relying on supporters outside of Cuba. (In some cases, the extent of censorship is so great that these bloggers have never actually even seen the blogs they have created!)

The loosening of rules on buying and selling goods in Cuba is a nice first step. Certainly, similar types of thaws under the Soviet regime eventually created the pre-conditions for Gorbachev’s perestroika and the end of Soviet-style Communism. However, real change needs to leverage the power of mobile technology and social networking connectivity –- and that requires bandwidth.

There's good news on this front as well. The current issue of Monocle points out that Cuba’s Internet capacity is set to increase by 3,000% thus summer (no, that’s not a typo!), as the result of a new 1,600 kilometer-long fiber-optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela. That’s a lot more bandwidth capacity to carry photos, voice and images of life in Cuba. By the time the cable is finished, it will stretch from Cuba to Venezuela to Jamaica.

What remains to be seen is whether the increase in connectivity will represent greater freedom of expression and change the dynamic of the public debate over Cuba. Over a nice round of Cuba Libres and music by the Buena Vista Social Club, U.S. policymakers should consider whether the current U.S. embargo – in effect for almost a half-century – is actually doing anything to bring about democratic freedom to this island nation. Many Cuban bloggers actually make the point that the embargo hurts – not helps – their cause. At the end of the day, making the Internet and mobile technology more widely available to the average citizen in Cuba could be far more effective than a nationwide embargo in preparing people for revolutionary change.

Dominic Basulto

Source: Big Think

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Libya is no Cuba, Gadaffi is no Castro or Che

Gadaffi and Castro in the "old times".

"The only real power comes out of a rifle." Joseph Stalin

"Death is the solution to all problems - no man, no problem." Joseph Stalin

"I trust no one, not even myself." Joseph Stalin.

“I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated!” Che Guevara 1956.

A tribal dictatorship on Gadaffi’s model is vastly different from a Stalinist one on the Castro model. Gadaffi’s goons-for-pay are certainly murdering people in Libya—but it appears a haphazard and tardy affair. “A bumbling, haphazard and amateurish affair,” veteran Stalinists Fidel and Raul Castro are probably nodding to themselves. “We could have shown Gadaffi the proper remedy for these matters.”

“When even a portion of your armed forces turn against you—you’ve had it,” any Stalinist could have advised Gadaffi. “You nip these things in the bud.”

Upon arriving in Havana in Jan. of 1959 Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana's La Cabana fortress as a handy-dandy execution pit. At Babi-Yar, Hitler's SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had one ready-made and so they put their firing squads to work in triple-shifts.

Cuban-American Scholar Dr. Armando Lago documents 1,168 firing squad murders in the first few months of 1959. The Black Book of Communisms estimates 14,000 by the end of the 60’s.Vengeance – much less justice – had nothing to do with this bloodbath. Che's murderous method in La Cabana fortress in 1959 was exactly Stalin's murderous method in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, like Stalin's Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che's (Castro-ordered) firing squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise that served their purpose ideally. This bloodbath decapitated – literally and figuratively--the first ranks of Cuba's Contras.

The victims were overwhelmingly military and police officers. Watching how many of these refused blindfolds and yelled defiantly at their murderers before the volley shattered their bodies show that the Cuban Bolsheviks had been diligent in rounding up the right victims. dustry" in Cuba (tourism) is run primarily by Cuba's generals. They also run the export industries. If anyone craves “stability” in Cuba, it's these high-rolling graduates of Cuba' Military Academy—but not just because of fiduciary considerations.

The Red Terror had come to Cuba.

Today Cuba's military is fat and happy -- has been for decades. They run Cuba. The only thing properly describable as an "in

Tito Rodriguez Oltmans, a former Cuban freedom-fighter and political prisoner, watched many of these men, as young cadets, perform one of the requisites for graduation from Cuba's military academy of the time. "They were all armed with Belgian .308 caliber FALs as they lined up for the firing squad," recalls Mr. Rodriguez, a prisoner in La Cabana prison in the early 1960s. "Every evening the cadets would be bused in from the Managua army base and the Mariel naval base near Havana. As darkness fell the condemned patriot -- shirtless and gagged -- would be dragged to the execution wall and bound. The cadets would line up only four meters in front of the patriot and all had loaded weapons." ... FUEGO!

A brief aside: historically and almost universally, most members of a firing squad shoot blanks, to assuage their conscience. But such assuaging would contradict the Cuban firing squads' most vital purpose, secretly named "El Compromiso Sangriento" (the Blood Covenant.) This tried and true Soviet scheme was presented by Soviet GRU agent Angel Ciutat to Che Guevara just weeks after he and Fidel entered Havana in January 1959. The scene was a meeting at Che's palatial (and recently stolen) estate in Tarara just west of Havana. Every candidate for officer, suggested Ciutat, would take his place in a firing squad and pull the trigger with live ammo.

In front of a genuine Soviet GRU agent, Che (who often signed his name Stalin II) was undoubtedly smitten and instantly embraced the idea. So let's see here: a policy suggested by a Soviet butcher and adopted by an Argentine hobo for murdering Cuban patriots, instantly became government policy in newly "nationalist" Cuba.

As recently documented by Cuban-American scholar Jose Azel, Cuba’s “Social media” is so tiny as to be essentially irrelevant. Cuba—a nation with more phones and TVs per capita than most European countries in 1958--today has fewer internet connections per-capita than Uganda and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.

Castro’s police state controls what its subjects, read, say, earn, eat (both food and amount), where they live, travel or work. In the mid 1990's the Catholic Human Rights group Pax Christi headquartered in Belgium, visited Cuba and (secretly) conducted a study on the status of the neighborhood snitch committees known as CDR's. Castro, under East German STASI tutelage, installed these in 1960, making a potential regime spy out of half the population. Instilling the pervasive fear and a mutual-suspicion society is essential to every communist dictatorship.

“Fear is the basic instrument of (Cuban) political control,” concludes the study. "There is one CDR for every 140 Cubans. The information at the State Security’s disposal can be used to threaten and intimidate anybody. There is no place to escape the tentacles of the State. Most ordinary Cubans reported that they remained intensely wary of CDR surveillance, even while conversing in their own homes.”

The CDRs also supervise the issuing of the monthly food ration cards to all Castro's subjects. “Food is a weapon” famously snickered Stalin's foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov during the Ukrainian Holocaust. 

Humberto Fontova 

From: TownHall

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