A Bloggers' Polemic (1): Reflecting on a Year of Rigorous Debate

During the past year of 2011 the Cuban blogosphere has really come into its own, developing a depth and breadth that has made it a force to be reckoned with.

Much well deserved international media attention (along with an outpouring of unsurprising Cuban government attacks) have focused on Yoani Sanchez's Generation Y and the related group blogging portal Voces Cubanas (English).  At the same time, many other collective cyber-projects have appeared and attracted followings of their own.  Among these, the most notable are the maturing and deepening of Havana Times, the relaunching of BloggersCuba (along with the companion site Bubusopia run jointly by Yasmin Portales and Rogelio Diaz), and the dynamic and lengthy comments section of the La Joven Cuba blog.

A number of important new individual cyber-voices and sites have also appeared in the last year to year-and-a-half, including Eduardo del Llano's blog, that of Silvio Rodriguez, Larry Press' The Internet in Cuba, Arch Ritter's The Cuban Economy, Ernesto Morales' Little Brother blog (now done from his new home in Miami), the appearance of El Sexto, as well as the not-to-miss Cafe Fuerte site, Emilio Ichikawa's blog, Tracey Eaton's vital Cuban Money Project and Vimeo sites (complementing his Along the Malecon), The Center for Democracy in the Americas Cuba Central blog with its excellent weekly news blast roundup, John McAuliff's Cuba-US People-to-People Partnership site, Estado de SATS entry into cyberspae with its own blog, and the recent redesign of the indispensable Penultimos Dias.

Finally, Ellery Biddle, Janine Mendes-Franco, and Elaine Diaz have made the Cuba page at Global Voices a source of keen observation and analysis. And the official blogosphere has also added a new voice with the addition of Iroel Sanchez's La Pupila Insomne.

Some of this activity is covered by Julia Cooke in her recent article at Guernica magazine, "Bloggers of Havana."

During the month of January, readers of El Yuma can look forward to a series of posts here where I reflect on the emergence of the Cuban blogosphere and trace the ups and downs of the "Bloggers Polemic" that ignited across Cuban cyberspace during the year.

"Hitch" on "Che"

Today I was filtering through some old files from the course I teach on Cuba and came across a rich and penetrating review article about Ernesto "Che" Guevara written in 1997 by Christopher Hitchens.

The article, from The New York Review of Books, is provocatively entitled, "Goodbye to All That," and is a double book review of Jon Lee Anderson's authoritative Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and a new translation of Guevara's own "on the road" classic The Motorcycle Diaries.

If my memory serves me correctly, I learned of the article first from my colleague, the anthropologist Ariana Hernández-Regaunt.  H/T to her.

You can, and should, read the entire article yourself.  But keep reading below for some juicy and quite timely excerpts, especially given what's afoot these days in the Cuban economy.

First, however, I give you the exquisite finale of the piece:

"The very element that gave [Guevara] his certainty and courage—his revolutionary communism—was also the element that condemned him to historical eclipse. In setting down the whole story in such a respectful but objective manner, Jon Lee Anderson has succeeded in writing, for himself and I suspect for many others, a nuanced goodbye to all that."

BlogTalkRadio: Twitear Desde Cuba

Here is the link to an mp3 of today's Internet radio show with Columbia Journalism Professor Mirta Ojito and Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez (totalmente en Español).

Columbia School of Journalism: Tweeting Under Castro

On Wednesday morning, December 21 at 10 a.m., Columbia Journalism School presents a "revolutionary" webcast, their first ever in Spanish, with Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez (@YoaniSanchez) to discuss how social media breaks down the walls of censorship in Cuba and elsewhere. 

Yoani will be interviewed from Havana and talking with Prof. Mirta Ojito (@mirtaojito), author of Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and professor and blogger Teresa Puente (@tcpuente).  Please email your questions to sree@sree.net (subject = Cuba) or call in live! to the number: (646) 915-9583.

Tune in here tomorrow at 10 a.m. for this exciting broadcast!

"Hitch was one of a kind": Miriam Leiva remembers Christopher Hitchens

Miriam Leiva, Oscar Espinosa Chepe, and El Yuma 

(Havana, summer, 2008)

Those who have read the now late Christopher Hitchens' memoir, Hitch-22, know that it contains a chapter, "Havana versus Prague," chronicling his "internationalist solidarity" visit to Cuba in 1968.  He did voluntary labor at the "Cinco de Mayo" work camp and, tellingly for him, had his passport (then a British one) confiscated for "safe keeping" during his stay so that the authorities could "look after it" and, one assumes, after him too.

I summarized the chapter in a post from June 2010 when Hitchens passed through NYC to promote Hitch-22.  Here's a photo from his memoir showing him posing with two other young revolutionary internationalists.

Others may remember that Hitch visited Cuba again much more recently in the fall of 2008 when he accompanied actor Sean Penn and historian Douglas Brinkley on a junket that included Chavez's Venezuela and Raul's Cuba. Penn got the scoop in Havana, being the first "reporter" to land an interview with Cuba's new leader. Hitchens shares his impressions of Chavez here. Unfortunately for us, he never met or interviewed Castro. That would have been a doozy!

I just discovered, via an article published by Miriam Leiva in Slate (Spanish), that Hitchens was also in Havana with is family during New Year's 1995-1996.  In town doing a story on Cuba for Vanity Fair (the article is collected in Hitchens book Love, Poetry, and War), Hitchens paid a surprise visit to the dissidents Miriam Leiva and her husband Oscar Espinosa Chepe (pictured with me above).  He even invited them back to his hotel, none other than the presidential suite of the Hotel Nacional, for a New Year's Day breakfast!

Leiva informed Hitchens that she and her husband had become "seventh-rate citizens in their own country" as a punishment for their losing the revolutionary faith.  And Espinosa Chepe commented wryly to him: "If Karl Marx were Cuban, he'd be in jail or in Miami." To wit, Hitchens juxtaposes the following pair of pregnant epigraphs to kick off his chapter, "Havana v. Prague":

"Within the Revolution, everything. Outside the Revolution, nothing." - Fidel Castro

"Ex ecclesia, nulla salus." [Outside the church, no salvation.] - Thomas Aquinas

Below, Leiva movingly remembers Hitchens' visit in 1995 and the difference it made to her and her husband both at the time and in the difficult years still to come.

Good Bye, Dear Leader: Kim Jong-il, Leader of North Korea, Is Dead

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times

Kim Jong-il, Leader of North Korea, Is Dead

Kim Jong-il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday, according to North Korean state news media.

Called the "Dear Leader" by his people, Mr. Kim, the son of North Korea's founder, remained an unknowable figure. Everything about him was guesswork, from the exact date and place of his birth to the cause of his death to the mythologized events of his rise in a country formed by the hasty division of the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II.

North Koreans heard about him only as their "peerless leader" and "the great successor to the revolutionary cause." Yet he fostered what was perhaps the last personality cult in the Communist world. His portrait hangs beside that of his father, Kim Il-sung, in every North Korean household and building. Towers, banners and even rock faces across the country bear slogans praising him.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

LATE BREAKING NEWS!

"There is a growing consensus that the United States' five-decade trade embargo against Cuba has not succeeded in weakening the Castro government."

-- New York Times, Dec. 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens: The New Commandments

It's difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words "Thou shalt not."

But who cannot summon the confidence to say: 

Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. 

Do not ever use people as private property. 

Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. 

Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. 

Do not condemn people for their inbornnature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. 

Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. 

Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea howunimportant your call is to us. 

Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. 

Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. 

In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Check out the full version of this video on YouTube.

Martinoticias Hoy: Los negocios y el Cuentapropismo en Cuba

"Los negocios y el Cuentapropismo en la Isla"

Los problemas económicos y la falta de experiencia, son solo algunas de las múltiples dificultades que afronta el cuentapropista en la isla. Hoy, con la colaboración de nuestros invitados, dentro y fuera de Cuba, trataremos de despejar muchas de las dudas y darle solución a interrogantes de cubanos que intentan encaminar sus pequeños negocios. 

En esta edición, dedicada a los negocios y el cuentapropismo en la Isla, incluyendo la importancia de los medios de comunicación social para fomentar el espíritu empresarial cubano, contamos con la presencia vía Skype de experimentados empresarios cubanoamericanos en Union City, Nueva Jersey. 

Desde Cuba contamos con la participación de los economistas Oscar Espinosa Chepe y Karina Gálvez, así como el cuentapropista Yosvani Anzardo. 

La audiencia podrá participar mediante las redes sociales facebook.com/avanzacuba, Twitter: @avanzacuba y nuestra página web www.martinoticias.com. 

Pueden comunicarse con nosotros a través del email: avanzacuba@gmail.com o al teléfono: (305) 437-7319. 

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From Cuba's "Dictator's Dilemma" to the US' "Digital Divide"

Excellent NYT op-ed by Susan P. Crawford on "The New Digital Divide" in US high-speed Internet access.

We invented the Internet and are the leading innovator in telecom, "yet lag far behind in actual use of that technology."

http://t.co/CGA2iIyM

Final paragraph:

"The new digital divide raises important questions about social equity in an information-driven world. But it is also a matter of protecting our economic future. Thirty years from now, African-Americans and Latinos, who are at the greatest risk of being left behind in the Internet revolution, will be more than half of our work force. If we want to be competitive in the global economy, we need to make sure every American has truly high-speed wired access to the Internet for a reasonable cost."