What new factor does “cyber dissidence” contribute inside the panorama of the Cuban opposition?
The novelty is more of form than of content, it may seem a new type of dissidence because given the inefficiency of the classic dissidence they at the beginning were presented as a group of people that wanted to express themselves but that didn’t want to go into politics, experience has demonstrated just the opposite. They began speaking of daily topics offering an alternative look that in the end finished up being the same look as the counterrevolution, repeating the main topics of the counterrevolution.
What is the objective of these bloggers?
The real objective is double, first establishing an opinion pattern abroad on what is happening in Cuba following the directives of the transnational mass media but the essence is to create internal media figures in order to substitute the traditional figures of the counterrevolution that would never be leadership in the country.
Lately, are the cyber dissidents are passing from the Internet to the streets?
They were forced to leave the cyber cafe to the street, because in no part of the world can you be a leader if your neighbors not even know you, that it is their true drama, they have always tried to build leaders that respond to the North American interests for that reason they have never been able to have relations with leadership among the Cubans.
Do they contribute to the diversity of the Cuban current media reality?
They are trying to build, every day, the image of a country in a controversial situation, and for that reason in their blogs they paint the sky black with thunder and lightening so that the reader thinks that a hurricane will hit the city, but they don’t have bonds with the Cuban reality.
Is the Internet an enemy of the Cuban Revolution?
Considering the Internet is an enemy for the Revolution is why these people write, that it is a true error and they themselves know it, here it is simply about creating figures of international fame that can be inserted into the Cuban society as a link to the U.S government’s interests.
Isn’t the Cuban blog world polarized between those that write in favor and those that write against the Revolution?
Obviously In any war there is a polarization like this, but to recognize that there are two groups I don’t find something negative, because in this case the true objective is not the blogger that writes in favor or against, but the reader, who for us, contrary to them, is not foreign but Cuban.
Is the key of the victory in who takes the initiative?
The key of the victory is in who tells the truth and in who is honest, because we are in an unequal combat, we are the cyber warriors and they are the cyber corporation.
Doesn’t this phenomenon generate a defensive culture in Cuba?
The main objective is the reader and there are things that I cannot leave without an answer, because a manipulation of the truth is arriving to that reader and my ideal reader doesn’t live in any other country than Cuba.
The youth is the potential public reader of the blogs? What’s your opinion about the Cuban youth?
I am very optimistic about the youth. Although the Cuban youths doesn’t have to think the same as we think us, that is normal and that has passed in all generations, I also understand that we had shortcomings in the education that are our fault and in great measure caused by the Special Period.
That hard stage that we lived through left a debit for the youngest, because as they could not know the previous time they cannot compare, but in spite of that they have been raised in a series of values of solidarity and generosity, even those that desert and leave the country they e take those values with them.
What is the challenge of the Cuban youth today?
They have to assume the absolute leading role of their time fully, in their way, but with all confidence, defending that person’s rich individuality without going in the defense of an absolute individualism that is opposed to the social context.
What can Cuba offer to the youth?
What we can never promise to the youth is that they will have two houses and three cars or a baseball player that will have a contract for millions of dollars, but what we can offer him, and that capitalism cannot promise, is that a secondary schoolboy can be in the life what he wishes, he can be the best baseball player in the world, the best musician or the best surgeon because he has the open doors to complete the dreams of his life and that horizon is only possible being here in Cuba.
Translated by: Daysi Olano