Blogs em Cuba
Blogueiros de Cuba começam a furar a censura e falar mais sobre a situação da Ilha. Cuba tem a menor taxa de penetração da internet da América Latina, internet cara e dificuldade de acesso. Vejam para detalhes a matéria Bloggers begin to tell the realities of life in Communist Cuba.
HAVANA: When Yoani Sánchez, 32, wants to update her blog about daily life in Cuba, she dresses like a tourist and strides confidently into a Havana hotel, greeting the staff in German.
That is because Cubans like Sánchez are not authorized to use hotel Internet connections, which are reserved for foreigners. In a recent “Generación Y” posting at www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/, Sánchez wrote about the abundance of police patrolling the streets of Havana, checking documents and searching bags for black-market merchandise.
She and a handful of other independent bloggers are opening up a crack in the government’s tight control over media and information to give the rest of the world a glimpse of life in the one-party, Communist state.
“We are taking advantage of an unregulated area. They can’t control cyberspace out there,” she said.
But the bloggers face many difficulties. Once inside the hotel, Sánchez has to write fast. Not because she fears getting caught, but because online access is prohibitively expensive. An hour online costs about $6, the equivalent of two weeks of pay for the average Cuban.
Independent bloggers like Sánchez have to build their sites on servers outside Cuba, and they have more readers outside Cuba than inside. That is not surprising, since only 200,000 Cubans of the 11 million on the island have access to the World Wide Web, the lowest rate in Latin America, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
Only government employees, academics and researchers are allowed to have their own Internet accounts, which are provided by the government. Ordinary Cubans are allowed only to open e-mail accounts that they can access through terminals at post offices, where they can also see Cuban Web sites but access to the rest of the World Wide Web is blocked.” (…)