 Thank you all. I was very much looking forward to this because I'm hoping that you can help me to understand how to better Interpret what I'm the material that I want to share with you you guys I mean I kind of follow silently a lot of the online conversations and I'm learning a lot about how people from different disciplines approach similar problems Just as a little bit of background how I got involved in following the Cuban blogosphere Really came from my own area of study, which is performance because I began to note in around 2009 and especially in 2010 that the kind of expressions from of opponents in Cuba opponents to the system Ted taken on a very kind of media savvy and performative character And part this was due in large part to the fact that in 2008 all of the restrictions were lifted on Ownership of cell phones in Cuba, even though they are very expensive And that has enabled a lot of people who consider themselves to be non-official artists or Independent journalists or citizen journalists or activists to use the phones not only to send Text information out but to send videos and photographs of themselves in direct confrontation with state authorities So as a result of that Media presence and that immediacy I Argue at least as part of one of the arguments that I make in the book that I'm working on that That suddenly the dissident in Cuba became in a sense a kind of performance artist But I thought what I could do today is to Try to give a more broad presentation to understand why Use in the use of independent media is so controversial in Cuba But also why it gets so much attention outside Cuba Because considering the small size of the Cuban blogosphere and the kind of independent media culture It gets a disproportionately high amount of attention in US Media and particularly from the United States government, which has a vested interest in Exploiting the presence of the of the independent Cuban bloggers So and that was is what I think makes this situation somewhat different from some other contexts that I have also looked at in Latin America Is the the vested interests of the US government and the economic involvement of USA ID in creating this blogosphere, but anyway, um, so So something just to begin just to give you know, this is just a picture of a kind of graffiti that the latest strategy that is being employed by a lot of Dissident groups is to try to plaster their message on On the streets since getting not most people don't have access to phones or the internet And so they've kind of taken up this stylized form of graffiti that is then, you know reported on by committees for the defense of revolution and Taken down or painted over and this battle goes on Back and back and forth back and forth But if you just walk by it as a visitor in Cuba, you might think that the general population is demanding Access free Wi-Fi access so it's important to understand that this Connect Cuba campaign that it is a part of is funded by this foundation for human rights in Cuba, which is one of the top recipients of USA ID money So just as I was preparing this PowerPoint Eliezer Avila, who is a dissident activist and a former computer science student And operation verdad agent Published this in the area of the Cuba Cuba, which is one of the Online daily blogs that functions like a newspaper or like an opposition press. It's based in Spain They get money from the national endowment for democracy But they don't sort of come under the radar of critique from the Cuban government so much because they are located Outside right but he published this thing about you know, what is public debate like in Cuba today? And basically his these are his talking points that you know officially Orchestrated public debate the problem with it is it all happens in Havana. There's no video documentation So exposure to it remains limited to those who are present There's no forum in official Cuban media for any sort of debate about political issues only about sports That's the only thing that's debated in the dailies and on television The attendance to these events is by invitation and it is not it doesn't represent a broad spectrum of the people in the population you have to show your In a way, it's a kind of symbolic thing But you're you're not really supposed to speak unless you can demonstrate that you have a certain professional authority to do So in those contexts There he talks about the rhetoric of in or the rhetorical strategy of being Intentionally obfuscating issues to prevent people from actually getting to the point But on the other hand if anybody in the opposition organizes a similar event there harassed by state security and Government officials don't engage in debate on the issue. So that's how he outlines That's the problem with the official public sphere as far as he's concerned now He's a very interesting figure. He was a computer science student in Havana who in 2008 stood up in a public meeting with Ricardo Alalcon who was the head of the National Assembly at that point and started kind of pointing The finger at him and asking about restrict contradictions that he perceived in Government position on civil rights and press freedoms and so on and so forth and this was filmed but with a cell phone and put on YouTube and became a really famous Confrontation he was also he did not identify himself as this at the time But at that time he was working as part for state security as part of something called operacion verdad or operation truth where Students computer science students were sent into the Cuban blogosphere to essentially troll and harass The independent bloggers and to try to discredit them. So they fill up their common Spaces with negative commentary dispute every single thing they say and basically just try to Make a more pluralistic debate extremely difficult if not impossible and in 2000 I think it was 2011 he came out as a spy Inside and was interviewed by Ioannis Sanchez and told the story of what operation truth was and has since Kind of been reborn as a dissident Who says that he wants to make a new political party and so on And so forth. So he's a very interesting case. Okay, so here are some key dates This is all stuff. That's fairly recent as you know You know Cuba has very very low connectivity in relationship with other countries in the hemisphere service begins in 1996 But I remember that service. It was extremely limited and extremely slow mostly at hotels and ministries in 2003 after the imprisonment of 75 journalists, I should have said independent journalists and activists That basically shut down what had been a very small Milieu of kind of independent journalism print journalism that had existed before then and so any kind of Dissident publishing activity begins to move to the internet at that point in 2006 You have a major shift in power with Fidel Castro stepping down and his brother taking over and claiming to be the economic reformer in 2007 what explodes is the first major Online into conversation between public intellectuals about cultural politics This is known as the Pavón case Luis Pavón was a Basically a cult a commissar in the first five years of the 1970s before there was a ministry of culture in the really kind of height of the Sovietization of Cuban cultural politics when culture was run by the Communist Party and was responsible for really basically blacklisting most famous intellectuals and writers during that time and then he kind of disappeared from Public life for a long time and suddenly that there's a television show on Cuban TV in 2007 where he's brought out and lauded and this Sparks a debate among many an intergenerational debate in emails because it most Cubans who have access to the internet only have access to a Cuban based email But the discussion quickly got out into the diaspora about what it meant to Rehabilitate a figure like that who was so hated right and What's interesting is it was the first documented public conversation in which exiles dissidents opponents and people who considered themselves still working within the power structure as members of the artist and writing We're fighting it out and fighting out a leg over a legacy From the 70s that for some people is a convenient way of saying that's when repression existed and now Things are better. A lot of the conversation became about why the silence had been maintained about the persistence of this kind of repression So what that that conversation eventually spilled over into public events in Havana that were restricted to members of the artists and writers union and this Produced a very negative response from younger people who couldn't be included who are then galvanized to start to generate a blog a World of blogs where they can have a more open conversation about things so bloggers start to meet Weekly, okay, and then in 2009 Johnny Sanchez who is the most famous Of all the Cuban bloggers who's won all these awards and is now has an endowed position at Georgetown and is running a paper from inside of Cuba begins what she calls her blogger Academy which he Holes in Havana and also takes on the road to different provincial cities in which he begin basically teaches Cubans how to Use WordPress or how to use blogger. We're not talking about very sophisticated programming here It's very very basic, but we're talking about a world in which only 10% of the population has a landline at home and you know there are now I think a million and a half cell phones in Cuba for a population of 10 to 11 million depending on whose Figures you follow so but she starts this Academy and then another Blogger lissabelle monica who's now a graduate student at Princeton Started a website called tassa de café that was basically a how-to like how do you do you know given that you have very a Slow dial-up service. How do you how do you deal with the tech problems that arise from this for people? And at that point This is also the cell phones are now easily much more easily available at least there are not as many lead There are no legal restrictions on obtaining them. So the problem then becomes simply a financial one This is what causes the clue Cuban blog blogosphere to explode on this was unanticipated by the government and so it took them a few months to figure out that they had a Problem on their hands a political problem on their hands and the response up to this point has been to launch official blogs To counteract the influence of the inter in of the independent blogs in outside the country and at this point the number of the ratio of Government blogs to independent blogs is two to one but the readership of the independent blogs is far Surplus passes those of the official blogs Okay, so a general problems about connectivity on well first What's the political problem is that the internet is seen as a threat to national security? By the Cuban government and that the internet is a pro-democracy Imperative for the US State Department So this is what pits the two countries against each other and it also what Generates all the money from USAID and other US government Initiatives to support the use of technology some of you the digital technology and get increasing internet access Some of you may have read the story about Sun Sun Ayo that broke on AP last summer I'll get to that in a little bit, but that is a kind of Crystallizes what a lot of these Ongoing programs have been about so the Cuban government's methods for restricting act internet access They don't it's not China. They don't just say you can't get out You know Google is inaccessible or you can't have a Gmail account. It's done in a much more In a less kind of categorical manner, so restricting bandwidth Censorship of sites that are critical of the government prohibitive costs for most Cubans And the criminalization of certain kinds of communication, right? So those are the main restriction methods And then there's a problem of the sort of dent access right that how few people have Landlines how few people have cell phones and at this point internet access is estimated at 25% penetration, but That's it is very I would dispute anybody's ability to come up with an actually really accurate figure because So much internet access is done through the black market And there's no way to measure How many people steal? Service from hotels how many people rent service from foreign students or you know any of the other means that how many I mean I suppose the government could track how many people buy foreign Phone service packages to access with data packages to access the internet from their phones But it's very difficult to measure these things Most internet is you know an in-country email system And to get an account up until now you've had to basically be the member of a Union like the Artisan Writers Union or Access through your workspace through your workplace or if your student access at the University And so that gives the government total control over how much or how little you can do the company that controls this is called a dexa It's the the Cuban telephone company monopoly and the cell phone part of it is called at Cuba sale and the new Internet packages that are available not a package, but the internet access that's available to the population through the cyber cafes is called Nauta right on Some of you may have heard about the case of Alan Gross, which is another part of the cyber war He was he's a guy who's in been in prison in Cuba for the last four years He's serving a 15-year sentence. He worked for a company in Maryland that had a USAID contract And he went made five trips to Cuba Not always masquerading as a tourist And he was bringing in The kind of equipment that frankly most people I know bring into Cuba to give to their friends and their families You know computers phones and so on but He was caught with a mobile phone some of you may know I don't know what this is but a mobile phone chip that makes satellite transmission undetectable Which apparently you can only get from the Pentagon or from the Department of Defense and that was the Thing that the Cubans needed to be able to nail him At you know for a kind of espionage. So he was arrested I think Well, he's been he's been in for four years. He's been in prison I think he was arrested in 2009 tried in 2010 if you could call what they what you get there a trial And is serving the sentence and there's been this ongoing Conversation about whether or not to swap him with the four Cuban spies who are still in prison in the United States for having Been lurking around Miami looking for anti Castro activity and this is still an open question Okay, so a little bit of background on how things got so heated It's that some of you may recall that in 1994 there was a huge rafter crisis In Cuba with 35,000 people leaving on these makeshift boats in and you know many many many many I was as much as a third to a half of the people who attempt to leave Probably died during that time period and that is a constant because this is Continues to go on but the crisis produced a shift in US policy on Cuban emigration up to that point Anybody who left was going to be taken as a refugee now We have the wet foot dry foot policy that you have to have a foot on dry land Right in order to be given a refugee status and otherwise you're returned so as Part of an attempt to try to save more lives some groups in Miami Well a group of Miami that called itself brothers to the rescue started flying planes over the Florida Straits and To spot people and then tell the Coast Guard to go and collect them and they flew into Cuban airspace in 1996 and the Cubans shot down Two planes and killed a bunch of people and that was the event that enabled Jesse Helms to get his Helms Burton Act passed in Congress to tighten the US trade embargo and to begin massive funding for pro-democracy Projects in Cuba that was this has been the bill had been debated for several years and this is what got it going so You know as a lot of it is about tightening tightening the restrictions and being able to take foreign third country companies to court for Engaging in commerce with Cuba But the most important thing for the internet and information is this issue of the funding for Broadcasting to Cuba, so this includes the pro-democracy money for groups on the ground and things like Telemarty, which is the big TV and radio Station that operates out of Miami totally at the you know on the bill is picked up by the US government Okay, it is treated by many news outlets in the United States as if it were a regular news agency When it is in fact a government operation that is now largely manned by former employees of Cuban television Okay, so Cuba's response to this is to introduce law 88 into the Cuban penal code And which is a very long look, but the most important part part is that if you can be found to be guilty of Spreading or reproducing materials received from the US government that supports the objectives of undermining the Cuban government You go to jail right and you go to jail for a long time because it's considered these are considered treasonous acts, so The 75 people who were arrested in 2003 were arrested using law 88 Okay, and here it says it's prison sentence up to eight years That's what it says on the law, but most of the people in 2003 were given 20 to 25 year sentences Okay, so the more technical questions about access Service continues to be slow. It gets it's getting better I used to just get up and walk away from hotel internet centers because I'd paste $8 an hour and just wait for one picture to download It's getting better, but it's still very slow Hotel access is now at about six dollars an hour So the price is going down and you can buy these cards that can reduce the price slightly if you buy a large number of hours The new cyber cafes for Cubans the rate is about four dollars and fifty cents an hour Which is a lot especially if you take into account what the average salary is which is about twenty dollars a month Okay Cell phones have to be paid for in hard currency It's about a dollar for each MSMS if you use MMS with pictures is about 250 You know basically these prices are prohibitive for most Cubans So if you have a cell phone there, you're more than likely just to use it for texting and that's it and More recently now email accounts are now you can have have get email on your phone If you have a phone, but still no access to the web, okay, and this means that basically The diaspora pays for the phones You know, there's two billion dollars in remittances to Cuba every year. There are several I mean, it's not all for cell phone usage, but It you know There are many websites that are maintained both in Miami and in Cuba that allow people who want to charge to pay for cell phones to do so from abroad and most activists have a Pay button attached to their websites and their blogs that allows you to Donate money to charge their phones or to charge their phones directly It is a common request that's made by activists to people in exile is to charge their phones so that they can continue to send News outside the country, okay, but everybody does this knowing that everything is monitored And if you work in let's say you work for grandma or you work for who went to rebel They if you work for one of the an official news outlet you or any other workplace You must submit whatever you're going to post for approval before you post it So there's no there's no independence if your work dissidents are able to put a little bit of their stuff into the Bucket or to make their own bucket a and so to sell for to see you see say oh say which is the Cuban version of hard currency You know when you come in from outside You have to change all your dollars to a Cuban hard currency and the government takes a cut off the top, right? And so to say oh see now is more or less about two dollars, but once upon a time it was More more like four dollars Now it's now it's down to about two So that's not that doesn't seem like a lot of money, but again just have to keep in mind how little money people make so but but they're used widely and then there are private game call parlors that people set up in a room in their houses and I and that's where the youth go to to play Okay What as far as if you are Somebody who needs to use the internet for your work, okay, whatever your work may be Or if you're somebody who you decided you're going to be an independent journalist Or you know you just are not going to work through state channels to do whatever you do your options are You can rent time on foreigners lines There are a lot of foreign students and foreign technicians in Cuba less than there used to be but they're around They can have internet in their homes and they will charge Much less than the hotel rate maybe half the hotel rate So you might be paying three dollars an hour instead of six dollars an hour So there are people who I converse with regularly who'd say I'll be able to chat with you on FaceTime on Mondays between three and four and that's their time, okay? another way is to Steal Wi-Fi access outside hotels, especially around the tourist areas There are a lot of really sharp teenagers who know where they can put laptops in the vicinity of a hotel lobby and And take some of the Wi-Fi from there and then they'll you know if there's a an access code They'll get in bribe employees to give them the codes and then there's the more expensive way, but the most effective way for activists is to Purchase foreign phone data packages and SIM cards so Countries like Switzerland or Spain that have a substantial amount of tourism to Cuba will Offer these data packages for people traveling to the country We can't do it because the American cell phones don't work because of the the the trade embargo, right? But so I know activists who have people outside the country who finance buy them the data package and that allows them to have Internet on a phone Right and that's that not everybody that's that's expensive, but it's probably the best way to go Especially if you are worried about your own safety Because I don't know if you heard about this Activist Osvaldo payah who died in a mysterious car accident in 2012. He had shut off his phone So as not to so so that the GPS wouldn't work But that also gave the Cuban government 12 hours in which to have him die and have no way to trace what happened, right? so Those are the way now what do they call hacking you know cuz I mean I don't I have not been able to find anybody who says Oh, yeah I hack into the Ministry of Interior system and I go in the back door and I know the code for them hacking is really Retooling of machines, right? So they do there are a lot of Initiatives that bring you sale cell phones into the country There are a lot of also just traffickers of goods from the states who make a living go blowing back and forth to function as a wholesale supplier For people doing independent businesses and they bring a lots of used cell phones And smartphones into the country they have those have to be altered to be able to work on the Cuban phone system So, you know, I've gone into backyards of People's houses where you have six or seven guys there pulling apart phones and getting them to work and also pulling apart Playstations and Nintendo's to get them to work without having to use the Whatever it is that you need from here whatever software you need so They also modify apps that are for online to work offline to help Cubans and Every single bit of software that's used in the government and outside the government is cracked software so, you know people who know enough about this stuff either about the electronics or about Computer programming are making a very good living right now Adapting everything for Cuban use. Okay. There is also something called rebel eco a website Which is the Cuban version of craigslist and it's totally illegal But um, it's thriving and basically you can buy anything, you know Any kind of Apple equipment any pro computer program you need to edit on any, you know The latest iPhone or a house or a car or anything else on rebel eco by answering ads on on rebel eco So those are the that's the retooling So who are the bloggers and the artists who use all this media and what are they doing? So they're mostly blogging doing citizen journalism political commentary. There are a lot of literary publications Because Cuba's ability to publish has diminished greatly since the withdrawal of aid from the former Soviet Union and And there's a lot of coverage of human rights activists activities So that's the most is Cuban us is probably the most best-known portal that was set up by Ioannis Sanchez in 2009 and hosts a number of different blogs from people inside Cuba and Havana times also runs a lot of commentary from a lot of different bloggers on the island and is Translated into many languages there linked up with volunteers outside the country who translate a lot of this Into many languages mostly into English I would say and but like so Ioannis Sanchez's page Generation-wise to get translated into 14 different languages daily by volunteers, which is really quite Quite a feat that's always subject to a lot of speculation by the Cuban government of you know This must be an indication that she's a spy Okay, so here's Ioannis the best-known Blogger and with her blogger Academy, and I will say you know for whatever Criticisms there may be made of her she has been quite generous in sharing her knowledge And her tech resources with others I mean she really wants has wanted to create a movement inside Cuba and not make the whole thing be all about her Although she's the times, you know hundred most important pretty people of 2008 and you know gets to meet with Joe Biden and so On and so forth, but she has she does run these academies She does collect equipment and flash drives for lots of people and she has succeeded with her Husband reynaldo Escobar who's over there giving a talk at the academy in Starting the first online newspaper that comes from Cuba, which began this year Okay Some of the other things that started up as a you know in terms of how Cubans are trying to help each other using blogging is this Lisabel Monica's kind of tech support online. It's like their own little internal conversation about You know how do you get around the fact that you have so little connectivity and then? The legal advisor Larissa diversa who has offered her services for free to dissidents to help them and To get out of jail to deal with police detentions and so on and so forth But also to provide people with regular updates in changes to Cuban laws So that they know what limited rights they have So How did they get started with all of this because Cuba has lived for most of the last 54 years in a total information blackout, right? Starts with blind blogging so send, you know when people just couldn't even get into a hotel to Access the internet to put their posts up They would blind blog so send sms text to friends outside the country and have people outside maintain the site so you have these telephone game style chains for example of Prisoners in jail calling Relatives when they get their weekly phone call having the relatives transcribed by hand Their reports from inside a prison that then gets typed up by the family member and taken to a blogger Who converts it into 140 character sms messages that are sent Outside the country to Spain or Sweden or or New York and then posted on a blog, right? That was the the old way of doing things Then Yolani began to teach people about how to use email addresses to send data Directly to blog or Twitter and YouTube but also she gave people the I think it's an HTML code To be able to do MMS from a Cuban phone Because that was key that was being able to do MMS meant they could start to send pictures And that really changed the nature of journalism especially in United States Journalistic coverage of Cuba because they started American outlets start to use Data being sent from Cuba by these independent journalists and bloggers, okay? So the Cuban government begins to fight back by Flagging Cuban blogs to get them taken down or to flag them on flag Cuban bloggers who are posting to Facebook So they got into the game with this kind of hostile reaction, but then Lisa they taught people how to D To disable that function so that they could get back on to Facebook or be able to restore Their blog to use So the main challenges that these bloggers and independent journal Journalists have is that it's very difficult to build a local base The Cuban government is very much more concerned about controlling their access to a local public Than they are about controlling their access to a foreign public So just to give you an example Someone from this group is double the sats was in New York last week at NYU and I was moderating a discussion and he was talking about how They made the group made a documentary about acts of repudiation these kind of public excreation of dissidents and They were able to distribute 500 DVDs in movie theaters in Havana But they have over 300,000 hits on YouTube Okay, now most Cubans cannot watch anything on YouTube So most people watching outside are outside Cuba, right? But that's the that I think is a relatively accurate measure of the difference in their capacity to disseminate their message There are the legal obstacles That are created by the Cuban government. I mean you can go to prison so far since 2003 I don't know of cases of people who are going to prison for blogging Right or for being again engaging in independent journalism It seems that the Raul Castro's version approach to this is to try to de to destabilize them through less harsh means to attack their credibility to Describe them as mercenaries and so on and so forth. So there have been some, you know, very aggressive skirmishes with police and Detentions that have lasted a few days, but overall the bloggers are not going to jail on mass the way that the independent journalist did in 2003 There's this total dependence on pro-democracy funding from the US Largely because we're still in a Cold War world when it comes to Cuba and it's very the the world outside Cuba remains very polarized as to, you know, whether whether this kind of blogging is in fact You know a mercenary activity or a destabilization project or whether it's a project that is Merits, you know being taken seriously and treated as Autonomous from the financial source, but this is there is this problem that there's no gray area in this either You take the money from the US or you can't do it All right, and in some cases it's unclear whether the activists are even aware of The original source of the money because these this money is funneled through Allied states through Poland through the Czech Republic through Sweden And also it's also comes through foundations in the US who don't necessarily make It's so known, you know what it is what money there what they depend on there's Okay, there's another dimension to this though is it's not necessarily it's not all about blogging and activism It's also about giving unofficial cultures unofficially recognized cultures a chance to flourish and to have a way of disseminating their information and Building audiences both inside and outside the country and in that sense all of this kind of connectivity through telephones and through embassies and these indirect means has really helped to For example the the publication of this magazine balsas that publishes all sorts of literature poetry and commentary by Writers who don't come through the official channel So they haven't graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in philology or literature They may come from the hard science that the editor was a I think Biologist in Cuba before he became a fiction writer So that this is gives an alternative means of publishing literature. That's been it's been very important for this It's also been very important for artists who don't have official Recognition from the artists and writers Union because up until very recently if you didn't have that membership you could first of all be denied the right to travel because you didn't have professional status as an artist and Beyond that you could have any public event of your shutdown because it wasn't being channeled through official institutions, so Being able to have an ongoing online video diary has served as a kind of protective shield But also as a kind of online gallery to exhibit and so these guys, you know, they even document their whole sort of final Acquisition of visas to travel in 2013 and this is after they're having been having been working as artists for 17 years without any official recognition There's also a lot of independent film production going on because of this media that is now Distributed via online Sources and a lot of it deals with subjects that cannot be treated by on the Cuban within the community television system or the official Cuban film industry And what will Eliano who also works for Icai? But he makes the films that he wants to make on the side this piece Monter Rouge is about The visit of two security agents to the house of an intellectual This is not something that you're going to ever see in a Cuban film, right? This documentary by Ricardo Figueiro about rappers is all about the politics of rap in Cuba Which is maintains a very kind of oppositional position vis-a-vis the government and again would not you would not find material like this on TV And rappers are almost entirely dependent Rappers with political rap are almost entirely dependent on this kind of independent distribution Probably the most famous case of a musician whose career is entirely dependent on the internet is this punk rocker Gorky Aguilar who's been arrested twice served four years in prison between 2003 and 2007 I believe on trumped-up drug charges and Is this kind of you know the most famous? Terrible of the Cuban music scene Comes to the United States very often to perform for audiences of up to 10,000 or 15,000 in Miami Distributes his music via internet and is totally banned inside the country But it's very notorious been the subject of BBC documentaries and so on and so forth And uses the video diary motif or method as well to protect to shield himself from More police harassment so the second time he was arrested He actually didn't have to serve a prison sentence and I do think that it's because of the media attention outside the country So the cyber battles I mentioned Operacion verdad and there's el yes, they're Confessing to Joani and here talking to questioning the president of the National Assembly in public in 2008 these are things that nobody outside would have ever heard about before were it not for this kind of emergent blogosphere and And then you get the kind of parodying of official media So you have grandma the official newspaper of the Communist Party and wama The parody of the newspaper being produced outside the country and You know for the first time the Cuban government finds itself Unable to maintain hegemonic control over the image of what's going on inside and then you have these blog dailies about Cuba that are 14 si medio is Ioannis, which is based in Havana Cuba Encuentro is based in Spain like a Diario de Cuba Cuba net is in Miami and but they're they they base themselves there But they're the contributors are largely from the island right and cafe fuerte is also based in Miami and these are all Now you know their blogs I mean they're not official newspapers by any stretch of the imagination, but they represent what would be an opposition press Right, and they're quoted by wire services and CNN in Spanish and Fox Latino and so on and so forth The direct line to Washington is really clear because all of the reports from these bloggers end up in basically entering the American media's through fear through these channels and And then but you know when they talk publicly Everybody who comes from the island stresses the importance of the exile community's support and it is Relevant it is significant. I mean there's 17 million dollars in USA ID money Something like 80% of that stays inside the United States There's two billion dollars of Cuban remittance money every year does far more You know financial weight of the remittances is far bigger than the USA ID But so some of the means that that these exile Community support groups from the means of support is recharging cell phones This group of roots of hope which actually started at Harvard with Cuban students at Harvard several years ago they Do a lot of technology donations, so they gather use cell phones by flash drives And bring them they or they help to organize dissident tours in the u.s. They've organized Kind of how do you call it copycat protests in Miami that mimic? activists Events inside Cuba and so on yaguruma is the Cuban version of Kickstarter that was started to support independent cultural projects, but It got stopped in 2013 by the Treasury Department because of the trade embargo restrictions, so it's in hiatus now Yes, we have to stop about 25 minutes left, so it really is a question of how much okay Well, I'm almost done. I'm almost done. So these are the Cuban money project is Run by Tracy Eaton that tries to analyze the financial part of this Like where the money is going the USA ID money And that's also in hiatus since 2013 This is the the Twitter controversy the Sun Sun Nail that you know depending on whose version of it It's either a destabilization program or it's helping the Cubans or it's just totally ineffective and Then just at the end these are the some example of some of the afflict official blogs on They don't have to pay so that's there. They don't have to pay to access the internet. They can get on from work without any control on that Their goal is to foment debate, but their content is restricted They're supposed to adopt the persona of the reformer within the system so you have like the gay official blogger, right the young student blogger and They but they have learned how to move information into news threads to challenge the independent bloggers And then there are some that just devote themselves exclusively to counterattacking counterattack to go going after the dissidents So I think I Just want to give a couple of examples of activism that work has worked in Cuba using the internet there's this group called the Red Observatorio Critico and a lot of their work is Ecologically oriented they're not so much interested in publishing in Luffington Post they're interested in kind of social practice community-based activism about getting people in Cuba to understand what the threats ecological threats are because it is an extremely kind of debilitated biosphere at this point and the most successful, I would say International activist campaign came from 2010 around the death of this political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo where activists inside and outside Cuba mobilized together to combine street action and online action to pressure the Cuban government to release the other political prisoners that were still in prison in 2010 from the ones who were arrested in 2003 and So this included copycat marches in 36 different cities around the world all sorts of petitions and a hunger strike by Guillermo Fariñas that lasted 135 days Yes, it was not his first and it produced the release of the last 50 political prisoners Right now. This is the other campaign that's going on which is about getting Cuba to sign agreements on human rights with the United Nations So sorry that went on for so long, but as you see it's kind of complicated So I'll stop here so that we have some time for questions And I see we already have questions queuing up and I think what you're going to find is There are some people here who know Cuba reasonably well There's a lot of people here who know parallel media environments Where there are similarities and differences and as someone who sort of studied online censorship for the last ten years It's really interesting for me to sort of think about What sort of the different phases we've seen of online censorship? So There have been sort of three books written by a group of people who study censorship The first was access denied and this was sort of the first version either you weren't connected to the internet, right? or you censored very heavily and then there was Access controlled and this was really a theory of Did you turn off access at particular times? Did you shut down connectivity before an election where there's certain sites that would go off but others would be open and Then the most recent paradigm in this has been sort of access contested and this is where stuff gets really interesting This is where you have counter bloggers coming online This is where you have services run either with go up government cooperation Or with very strong government oversight often with blocking other services out of there And what we've seen through most of the world is this sort of gradual move from sort of where Cuba was Sorry, you're not going to have access to this to look of course You're going to have to have access to this But it's going to be a very complicated space and part of what's been so tricky about this is the debate over how one deals with Speaking in this space looking for creative speech looking for political speech looking for artistic speech often hasn't caught up So you still have people, you know, trying to basically parachute radios into Cuba, right? Despite sort of not realizing that, you know, we're a couple of generations beyond that So my guess is that some of the reactions we're going to get from friends around the table are Sort of looking at some sort of parallels in other situations, but I may be just anticipating what Daniel wants to say I don't know much about Cuba, but this is It was interesting to see how there are a lot of parallels and differences as well with the Arab blogosphere, which I've been studying for the past few months now and I guess It's interesting to see that there were some interesting observations That came out of the Arab blogosphere is the fact that a lot of people don't blog anymore Especially political blogs where it's like there is no point Partially, I guess is because there's a shift to other forms of social media Twitter and Facebook And and another part is this sort of access Access issue where it's like you have people who are counteracting that Pro-government forces or other forces that are counteracting that conversation and I'm just curious to hear what you think There are a lot of interesting obstacles or interesting links within the Cuban blogosphere The fact that this is a lot of it is US funded and have the links maybe with Latin America I'd be curious to hear what you think where this is heading Well, I think that one of the things that I noticed is that very very few bloggers in Cuba have a sense of the top blog time of online time of this that that you know in the states everything moves so fast bloggers blog every day right or more than once a day and You know Cubans are not used to that kind of speed in anything. I mean it takes four hours to get to work So why you know when how are you going to do a blog every day? There's also much less of a sense of the the the the tactical use of brevity You know that the lot of blogs are very long the the post very church So it makes it difficult for an outsider to get through them and to figure out what's going on in that sense Joani Sanchez has been very successful because she understood the hundred and forty characters as a kind of challenge, right? But she produced some Also blogs in brief blogs with very vivid vivid imagery in a very common Persons language that made them very easy to translate and very easy to understand outside of the human context So she's been very successful. I think other bloggers have been less successful at Understanding the pace and the kind of ecology of blogging outside the country Nonetheless the demand for information from inside is so great you know that They're gonna I mean there you know their entity entities outside the country that's going to draw that information out of bloggers Whether they want to give it or not I mean that's the the sense that I get is that there's a tremendous demand for This information and there are there's a machinery in the United States for absorbing it So, you know that that is going to produce more blogs Even if it doesn't happen at the speed that we're accustomed to here just said there is that there are consumers outside I think that speed observation is right on because I mean this has been a really fascinating space blogging sort of comes to the fore maybe twelve years ago and in a lot of the places we study it Died three or four years ago And it really died as Twitter instead of Facebook took over and basically For people who weren't writing essays, but we're doing the observational and sort of you know What we kind of joke of is like the dopamine blogging We're just looking for someone to sort of receive the information that's moved into this much lighter weight media And in the US at least what happened was the bloggers have become mainstream journalists in a very funny way You know I still blog but when I actually want an audience I write for the Atlantic right when you're in a place Where there's still so much to report and where you don't have the possibility of that sort of dopamine delivery system of I put it up and my ten friends liked it It seems to me quite possible that it may survive for quite a while Because it's the right technology for the moment in terms of of internet penetration and possibly in terms of what the larger But also there are there are some among them who are becoming Huffington Post's contributors on a regular basis or a Samsung away or what so so there I mean, it's not as fast a process, but it's it's there. So here's an interesting question I'm gonna go over to Jing Long. Yes, but One other dynamic in this that I think most of us aren't used to thinking about is that The Cuban diaspora in the US in particular a huge powerful Certainly influential within US politics clearly sort of involved in some of these dialogues Not every blogosphere has that same sort of dynamic While there's enormous Chinese diaspora There's far more people on Chinese social media in China and that has a lot to do with how Chinese social media dialogue My question is of a different order You know it well, I know your talk is focused on the digital and It seems that in the digital space. There's so little breathing room for voices of opposition to be heard But at the same time, there's such a great demand for information So I'm wondering What about the other media the other mediums underground print media, which is less easily to be monitored It's actually more easy to be monitored in Cuba. Here's this. Yeah It's almost impossible to get a photocopy done in Havana It's almost impossible to print anything the enemy propaganda laws that are part of the Cuban penal code criminalize Implications that are not officially sanctioned But this is the problem, okay So the people who were just to give you a sense the people who were arrested in 2003 They were trying to circulate print media. It was really easy to come down on them using the enemy propaganda laws Okay, they were also Many of them were independent Librarians so people who would collect Samistat the Cuban equivalent of Samistat Books on human rights or just books on by exiled writers or writers that were banned in the country and keep collections to be able to use as references and also to keep collections of the You know underground printing and you know, that's physical media That's really easy to locate and say here it is. This is you know, this is banned You have it you you're arrested It isn't it isn't it's actually harder for them to deal with the flash drive culture right now And that's why the government's response to the flash drive paquete has been to sort of go into a whole kind of moral You know Critique and saying that that this is it has a degenerative effect on the society as a whole to have all this Forbidden media circulating through through the flash drive So I mean this is the thing is that I've been surprised so far that there has been no addition to the penal code to criminalize the digital media Because they're they're not there that has not happened yet And you know some people say it's because the leadership is so old They're just totally out of touch with what young people are doing, but it's to me It's very surprising considering how effective the Laws around enemy propaganda have been in preventing people from publishing inside So so It's always nice for me when something that I wrote, you know Ten years ago has a certain amount of relevance, but I wrote a paper some years ago called the cute cat theory That argued that the most powerful Media in closed societies was the popular media So going in and trying to set up your special Here's the Twitter that's going to undermine the Cuban government, you know That that shit never works. It's too dangerous to play with it's only reaching a small group of people the stuff that's actually powerful as the critique me it's what everybody is using and It's really hard to ban because everybody uses it And so for instance for the Arab Spring what was really powerful was video Particularly over Facebook Everybody was on Facebook. You weren't gonna ban Facebook in Tunisia because you would have had another rebellion on your hands But that turned out to be a way to get video out and that video once it ended up on Al Vizera turned out to be very powerful In Cuba, it's probably the paquete And it's probably the fact that you know whether it's movies whether it's music Whether or not you're slipping the news in there the activist media in there in fact as long as it's got a Certain amount of pervasiveness That's going to become a powerful channel for somebody whether it's a channel internally for someone to get dissident media out Whether it's a channel for someone external I think you're right that probably the greatest threat to this is in some ways having that become too politicized and Having that probably become illegalized or really cracked down on at the same time But it is interesting to sort of see the ways in which Local media sort of rising up to make those needs The end that you want to jump in just a quick question I'm wondering whether the bloggers who are in Cuba for posting things on sites in the US or wherever Are they using the real names are they trackable or is it a pseudonym at the very very beginning? There were some bloggers who didn't use pseudonyms and as a matter of fact There's a woman named Miriam Celaya who is one of the better known bloggers now who can who came out at one point It's like okay. I've made a decision. I'm going to do this using my name So as far as I know at this point in time people who are blogging are using their names But you know if you you go you once you enter this world of being a dissident there You basically move into a kind of gray zone where you experience a kind of social death in Cuba You you can't work, you know, you can't get a job anywhere anymore You know, you will probably be shunned by people who will fear for their livelihoods, right? So they end up in these very kind of small enclosed Subcultures where they don't have a lot of communication with others They are also subject all the time to being accused of being mercenaries because they're they get paid by the nation $75 or you know, whatever. I mean some bloggers you want to get paid a lot more now But she's really an exception, right? I mean that the amount of screaming about how they're all hired hands of the CIA I find really laughable because most of the money from the government stays in the United States to the beltway consultants and the foundations that are You know managing all of this stuff. So they're not making a lot But they might make something or they might get a fax machine or a computer or a cell phone Given to them to be able to do stuff. They do use Twitter The bloggers use to it Twitter basically at this point everything is all linked they have they do the you know I post and then it goes to Twitter and Facebook and I'm done, right? And that's economically More viable for them than just having one or the other and there are some of the more savvy ones who know to use Twitter To protect themselves when they're in a protest if they're about to be arrested They have a Twitter message ready to go and then Immediately it goes to tell a marty and then it goes from there to Fox News and to CNN in Espanol and the next day They're released from the police station so Let me ask maybe a appointed question of this which is you've given I I think a really nuanced But also sort of critical view of the US and all of this which is to say there's a huge amount of US money Trying to come into Cuba At best you could argue that it's trying to carve out a Digital public sphere that is going to make independent journalism artistic creativity all of these things happen At worst you could argue that it's an enormous pile of money Mostly going to defense contractors beltway bandits USA contractors Who may be doing more harm than good and who may be endangering everyone they touch You've got the year of John Kerry You've got five minutes to make a case for what the US does through the State Department in Cuba What do you tell Secretary Kerry? Well, first of all that what Alan Gross did was very dangerous and that Zunzuneo is a waste of time the Cubans are more of A more adept at figuring out how to use those systems to their advantage So, you know, I don't think that trying to send, you know Central American young adults in there as was the sort of the extension of Zunzuneo is going to be very effective It's more effective when Cubans organize themselves, right? on the other hand, I would be much happier with a more a A more diverse Source sources of funding in other words if there were other options so that it wasn't so polarized And that would that I think that would be more comforting and I think also that it's really important for the Cubans who are inside to not be so Unquestioning in their acceptance of alliances with organizations in Florida in particular that are essentially Rehabilitating themselves through this partnership because these were the same organizations that were sponsoring violent opposition up until the 1980s and so but there's no there's no way to have a conversation about that Nobody wants to you know, and these are like I don't think I'm the only person in the world who's aware of this stuff And I don't I also think it's important on the left not to call What these Cubans are doing? mercenary activities because I don't think that the desire to Have independent journalism in Cuba or the desire to have independent culture or Temporary autonomous zones where you can organize your own activities is something that was invented by the United States I think that's something that really is a grassroots demand and desire and that and to to equate that with a kind of you know CIA top-down operation is wrong It's It's an incredibly challenging and somewhat unfair question and that was I thought a terrific answer to it Let's get a couple more questions You talked a little bit at the beginning about the performance They're certainly occupying a very vulnerable position and they're also suffering from credibility So, how do you approach the issue of credibility of these? activists, dissidents and cultural workers in the sense In the way that they're isolated in Cuba about the social death and how to live and I'm thinking going back to the performance and vulnerabilities who they're writing for and who they're Performing for if they are not received. I would venture as in the Arab Spring with the kind of local Solidarity right there people are still afraid to approach them Not everybody okay, not everybody in Cuba has that much to lose at this point I mean the era in which the government controlled everything information You know cons the little bit of consumerism that existed The educational system is over. I mean essentially with the withdrawal of support from the former Soviet Union The economy went into a tailspin and that has forced Cuba to take on a more Friendly relationship with the exile community and also to develop different kinds of alliances But also to withdraw the force of the public sess sector from every aspect of life. I mean the government can't Pay for everybody's food anymore. They can't provide enough housing The educational system is in shambles if you want to go to a hospital Your relatives have to send you the anesthesia to have an operation So, you know in that kind of situation and also where Information and media is constantly coming in from outside Thus the the the kind of totalizing hold that the government had is no longer there So for some people they don't really care that much. It's not that nobody wants to go to jail But it's not like it's not things aren't the ideologically. It's not as airtight as things were let's say up until 1990 okay, so in that sense Yeah, there are people who don't want to get involved because they don't want to be in trouble But you don't get the same kind of public shunning As you might have at another period of time You just might we have people just not want to hang out with you right now not want to be at your meetings and things like that You know in terms of credibility I Have to say I think that there are some Activists like the ladies in white who were the female relatives of the political prisoners who yes They did receive training from the u.s. Intersection, but they had a real political cause and I think that they have a real following I think and great sympathy both inside and outside the country in that sense I think it has been a very effective movement and that it would be inaccurate to characterize them as tools of the the u.s. Government and they got the they got the prisoners out So that was if that's been that's been good. I think some of the others are less known to the public But also that their goals and their interests are less aligned with what the majority population is concerned with right now People are concerned with getting money and getting out That's it right so if you're worried about the political transition and who's going to be in the next government and You know what what's going to happen when Miami humans come in and start pouring money into the economy? I mean for most people who are living there. Those are not Immediate concerns So for me like a something observer outside who is concerned about both the you know people's daily lives and the ability of artists to create an independent culture and What does it really mean for the u.s. Which you know embraces authoritarian capitalism all over the world to be trying to tell dissidents to argue for Free speech, you know, I worry about it, but I have the luxury of being able to do that from here I don't know if that's everybody else's concern So we're almost out of time. I got a couple of hands up You can we get a quick question? Yeah I'm a little bit confused about what should you ask do in this situation There is there are apparently two path the one path it lifted Bargo and led the economy boom Like people organized by themselves and maybe hope they will move into the next phase of control Oh, they will get something else the second path is to squeeze The cool bands and like if it's blown like what do you say they have no choice? They have nothing to lose. So if you are an advisor of Obama government Well The thing is I don't think that you can just lift the embargo It's very it's what else is good. What else are you gonna do? What how I think the concerns of the United States right now as far as I understand it is number one They think Cuba sends sell secrets to Syria and Iran That's the kind of political problem with Cuba right now. No, that's number one and They also are worried about a migration another mass migration of Cubans to the United States 22,000 Cubans have arrived in the US illegally in the last 11 months. That's almost as many as during the rafter crisis So they're not all going on rafts now. They're taking flights to Ecuador and walking with With the smugglers all the way through Central America through Mexico into the United States But that's a lot of people and the South Southern Florida economy can't absorb them Okay, so those are like real concerns in Washington The other problem is how many electoral votes Florida has and the political force of the Cuban Cuban American machine, right and what what can the US do to Cuba? That's not going to upset the political stability of either the Republicans or the Democrats in the state of Florida Okay, so and you know the Miami Cuban community is divided on what whether or not to lift the embargo There are many who say yes, and there are others who say no The ones who say don't lift it are the Republicans who are probably identified with the older Generation right the younger people are less interested in the embargo And but I just think that if there is going to be a lifting of the embargo and there's also got to be a change in immigration policy and some sort of You know 21st century version of a Marshall plan for the rebuilding of a country that is Devastated economically not just politically it looks like it's been bombed over and over again in a war And so you can't just then let you know Anybody come into the country and do whatever because they'll turn it into the Bahamas into just like a bunch of hotels And that's not a solution. That's going to produce more migration, right? Anywhere other than other than there, which is the situation with most of the Caribbean So I you know I see it as very complicated and where the whole kind of human rights civil rights thing Fits in all of this to leaves me with a lot of questions because I don't see I see those issues right now as a way to harass the Current Cuban government, but I'm not so sure what the US's commitment is to those things post transition So Incredibly helpful last question amazing presentation. Thank you so much. Thank you