Yoani's better half makes a stab at it: Whose diversionism?

It seems that everyone has an opinion about the origin and meaning of the "cyber-police" video that came to light last week and has by now circled the globe a few times.

The video has been uploaded onto scores of blogs about Cuba (including this one).

The text has been transcribed and then translated into English.

Fontes, the young Cuban cyber-expert who holds forth at considerable length in the video has been successfully "outed" via blogs and Facebook by his former classmates at "La Lenin" (a Havana high school for the elite).

And everyone from Zoe Valdes, to Phil Peters, to Humberto Fontova, to Yoani Sanchez, to El Yuma (and everyone else in-between) has attempted to parse its meaning and read between the lines of what is and is not said in the video and what it all means.

Now the blogger and independent journalist Reinaldo Escobar (who also happens to be Yoani's husband) takes a stab at reading the tea leaves (or should I say caracoles?) of just what is going on in and lurking behind this mysterious video.

Here is an excerpt from his take on the video (first published in Spanish at Diario de Cuba and now translated and available in English at Translating Cuba.

What he seems to be saying is this:


Why would state security and the Interior Ministry repeat the same lies, exaggerations, and bald propaganda in private (entre sabios y gente de confianza) as it spouts in public via Granma, La Mesa Redonda, and los blogs oficialistas?  Is it a ploy, a trick, or do they really believe their own propaganda?

...I get the impression that something very strange is happening “up there.”


How can you explain this effort to fool those who must know, better than anyone, the identity of their adversary? I could understand the speaker’s explications if his audience was composed of a group of foreign correspondents in Cuba. Meaning I could understand it, though I could not accept it from an ethical point of view.


Whether he lied on his own initiative out a desire for notoriety and wanting to appear talented and indispensable before his bosses, or if he lied to satisfy the strict demands of a dark hand, I can’t tell. But I know he’s lying. I know. The alternative Cuban blogosphere is not a creation of U.S. imperialism, but the fruit of a conjunction of factors among which are the failure of the socialist system, public discontent — especially among young people — and the worldwide development of technology.