I was just in the process of updating my blogroll, that list at the right-hand side of the blog where I link to other blogs of Cuba interest. Mine's called "BestBlogs."I guess you could say I "recommend" them, since I do call the list "BestBlogs." However, the usual disclaimer applies - recommendation does not imply agreement.
For example, the logo, "Free @ Internet," pasted to the upper left here is used on many blogs connected to the dual projects, Itinerario/Academia Blogger and Voces Cubanas, a weekly blogger workshop and blog portal, respectively, for independent Cuban bloggers usually run out of the home of Yoani Sanchez and Reinaldo Escobar. There are 16 blogs currently collectively housed at the "Voces Cubanas" portal, while the number of such independent blogs in Cuba could easily be double or tripple that.
The logo on the right, on the other hand, is from the main portal of another group of young bloggers, lanuched informally by a group of 15 students and professors at the University of Havana, calling themselves simply, "Bloggers Cuba." Notice that they both use the Cuban flag - but in very different ways. Both groups have also been organized for about a year and meet up regularly to share blogging strategies and encourage one another. Of course, there is also much that separates them.
Keep reading this new five-part series, "Let a Thousand Flowers..., uh, Bloggers Bloom!", as I will have much more to say about these and various other blogger movements and internet news sources rapidly flourishing (despite and sometimes because of government repression and/or support) in today's Cuba.
So, I "recommend" that you check out both of these portals, while I do not uncritically "endorse" all the content of either. In fact, my list of "BestBlogs," like my list of best friends, I only agree with about 50% of the time. What's the point of talking, debating, reading, exchanging ideas, and dialogando (that word with such a tragic Cuban/Cuban-American history - e.g., dalogueros, Cuban-Americans who dared exchange ideas with the Cuban government back in the 1970s and 1980s and were met with terrorist violence because of it in Miami), if we are already in agreement.
I do, however, make recommendations with an eye to the importance of a source's serious contribution to the Cuba debate or if it is sharing of a perspective that is not likely to get much play in the monopolistic corporate media in the U.S. and even less so in the state/party controlled media in Cuba.
Remember these wise words from journalist A. J. Liebling:
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed...
only to those who own one."
