Digital Dilemmas

My firend and colleague Cristina Venegas just published the following book.  Sounds juicy!

Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba
Rutgers University Press, 208 pages, February 2010

The contentious debate in Cuba over Internet use and digital media primarily focuses on three issues—maximizing the potential for economic and cultural development, establishing stronger ties to the outside world, and changing the hierarchy of control. A growing number of users decry censorship and insist on personal freedom in accessing the web, while the centrally managed system benefits the government in circumventing U.S. sanctions against the country and in controlling what limited capacity exists.

Digital Dilemmas views Cuba from the Soviet Union’s demise to the present, to assess how conflicts over media access play out in their both liberating and repressive potential. Drawing on extensive scholarship and interviews, Cristina Venegas questions myths of how Internet use necessarily fosters global democracy and reveals the impact of new technologies on the country’s governance and culture. She includes film in the context of broader media history, as well as artistic practices such as digital art and networks of diasporic communities connected by the Web. This book is a model for understanding the geopolitic location of power relations in the age of digital information sharing.

Texas rice in Havana?

From today's NYT (link to full article follows):

Farm Groups Push Congress to Ease Exports to Cuba

"Southern farmers and the trade groups that represent them believe their proximity to Cuba and their history as one of its biggest food suppliers would make them natural exporters to the island.

"'In this day and age, we're looking for any kind of market that we can re-establish,' said Curt Mowery, a rice farmer in Sandy Point, Tex., who went on the 1999 Farm Bureau trip. The Cubans, Mr. Mowery said, 'like rice, and they like American rice.'
...
"Rice farmers in particular have a great deal at stake in the legislation. Even under the Bush administration, they were able to ship some rice to Cuba, but the amount depended on how strictly the Treasury Department interpreted financing restrictions.

"In 2004, rice producers in the United States shipped $64 million worth of rice to Cuba. After the administration more stringently applied rules requiring advance cash payment, rice exports dropped to $24 million in 2007. In 2008 they were less than $7 million, and in 2009, rice farmers sent nothing.

"Cuba gets much of its rice from Southeast Asia, and farmers believe the Cubans would be quick to switch to American suppliers to cut down on shipping time and freight costs.

"'They could consume the entire rice crop of Texas and part of Louisiana,' Mr. Mowery said."

Farm Groups Push Congress to Ease Exports to Cuba

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/politics/14cuba.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y>

By YEGANEH JUNE TORBATI (NYT)

The House Agriculture Committee has approved a bill to lift some export limits and remove a longstanding travel ban, and the full House could vote on the bill this summer.
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Social Media & Information Technology in Cuba: Recommendations for the Public and Private Sectors (Friday, July 16, 2010)

In collaboration with the Cuba Study Group & The Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution, the Americas Society presents:

Social Media and Information Technology in Cuba:

Recommendations for the Public and Private Sectors
(webcast available)

When: Friday, July 16, 2010
Where: Americas Society/Council of the Americas
680 Park Avenue
New York, NY
Registration: 8:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Public Breakfast: 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.

Welcoming Remarks:
Christopher Sabatini, Senior Director of Policy, Americas Society/Council of the Americas

Presenters:
Carlos Saladrigas, Co-Chairman of the Board, Cuba Study Group
Theodore Piccone, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Foreign Policy, the Brookings Institution
Christopher Sabatini, Senior Director of Policy, Americas Society/Council of the Americas

Discussant:
Brett Solomon, Executive Director, AccessNow

This event is free of charge and open to the press.

Further Event Information: Please contact Matthew Aho at maho@as-coa.org or 212-277-8389.
Press Inquiry: Please contact Alex Andrews at aandrews@as-coa.org or 212-277-8384.
Webcast instructions will be sent via email on Thursday, July 15.

Love it or leave it?

Excerpt of a phone interview by Yoani Sanchez with political prisoner Pedro Argüelles posted at GY yesterday (the audio of the entire interview in Spanish is available at GY):

"On Saturday, July 10, I went to the office of the head of the prison and there they put me through on the phone to talk to the Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega.

He informed me that I was on the list of those who would leave for Spain if I would agree to go.

I told him that no, I had no interest in leaving my country.

He asked me about my wife as well, if she would have any interest.

I said no.

Well, he told me, he would report back and he said goodbye."

Cuban Art in Katonah (Westchester County, NY)

THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 8, 2010

Glimpses of Cuba and Its Paradoxes

By SYLVIANE GOLD

After half a century of distrust and outright enmity, Cuba and the United States are separated by perhaps the widest 90 miles on earth. Our near-but-far, far-but-near relationship comes through repeatedly in the striking paintings, photographs and sculptures that make up "Cuba Avant-Garde," the new show at the Katonah Museum of Art.

Subtitled "Contemporary Cuban Art From the Farber Collection," this lively, wide-ranging exhibition bristles with artistic energy and cultural contradictions.

Equally exposed to the iconography of the Soviet Union and the United States, Cuban artists borrow freely from both. Eduardo Ponjuán González and René Francisco Rodríguez Hérnandez, who work in tandem as Ponjuán-René Francisco, illustrate this tension in "Outside Cuba Inside," a 1993 oil painting that juxtaposes bright propaganda images from Russia (a cheery peasant woman from a Malevich painting) and America (Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter), with Cuba symbolically caught in the middle.

Irony would seem to be a birthright for artists who, steeped in a communitarian island culture, have become global art celebrities. On the one hand, they live under a repressive Communist dictatorship see the images Ángel Delgado inked onto handkerchiefs in the 1990s, after being jailed for a scatological work of performance art. On the other, they currently operate in a kind of alternate economy, free to earn dollars by selling their work abroad.

The pieces in "Cuba Avant-Garde" were made between 1983 and 2004, a period of ferment not just in Cuban art but in Cuba. The flowering of an avant-garde scene in the early '80s was followed by the "special period," the economic crisis and crackdown resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Many artists fled; many artists stayed. In both cases, the work in this show often reflects an almost obsessive investigation into what the exhibition catalog calls "Cubanidad."

Evidence of Cuba's folk art traditions can be seen in the simple forms, basic colors and rural subject matter of Manuel Mendive Hoyo's "The Sons of Water, Talking to a Fish" ("Los Hijos del Agua, Conversando con un Pez"), a 2001 sculpture whose charmingly polka-dotted fisherman and huge open-mouthed fish commune in a small boat atop a rippling blue sea. For an American, it calls to mind Ernest Hemingway's Cuba-set novella "The Old Man and the Sea," but in fact the work references the animism of an African-based religion to which Mr. Mendive adheres.

Fernando Rodríguez Falcón taps into the same traditions and naïve style, but to more mordant and ironic ends. In "Nuptial Dream" ("Sueño Nupcial"), his 1994 series of carved and painted wood panels, a young Fidel Castro marries Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba's patron saint. But the wedding is presented not as fact or myth but as the dream of Mr. Rodriguez's alter ego, a blind Cuban peasant who, like Mr. Mendive, lived through Mr. Castro's revolution. To Mr. Rodriguez, born in 1970, the revolution is ancient history, subject to re-evaluation.

Whatever their personal politics, both Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Mendive have remained in Cuba. But their expatriate counterparts those taken out of the country as children and those living abroad by choice seem no less preoccupied with their homeland.

"The Raft" ("La Patera," 2002), the show's emblematic work, reproduced on the catalog cover and on the Web, is a large-format watercolor by Armando Mariño, who lives in Spain. Its red-and-white 1950s American auto body the kind that provided Havana with its taxi fleet is supported not by four wheels but by a crowded mass of barefoot legs. The image functions as both comedy and tragedy, offering homage to the Cuban population's resilience in the face of scarcity and sardonic comment on the dilapidated state of the country.

In his cryptic painting "The Island Waits for a Signal" ("La Isla Esperando una Señal," 2002), another exile, José Braulio Bedia Valdés, conflates the image of a rocky island with that of a man's head looking toward an onrushing ball of light. And Rubén Torres Llorca reflects on the dispersal of his generation of artists in the haunting "What We Were Then, We Are No Longer" ("Nosotros los de Entonces, Ya No Somos los Mismos," 1987), a mixed-media collage anchored by a 1981 photograph of artists, Mr. Torres included, who had shown their work in the seminal Havana exhibition "Volumen I."

The Katonah exhibition, which originated at the Samuel P. Harn Museum at the University of Florida in Gainesville, also includes work that at first appears to have no specifically Cuban content, like Belkis Ayón Manso's richly textured, semiabstract 1996 collograph, "Untitled No. 3" ("Sin Título Número 3").

A closer look at the label shows that Ms. Ayón, who committed suicide in 1999, was inserting a female form into imagery representing Abakuá, a secret, all-male society that dates to colonial times, when it came to Cuba from West Africa. With its sheer beauty, the print dispels the distance between the viewer and the artist; with its hidden meaning, undecipherable to an American, it makes 90 miles seem unbridgeable.

"Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art From the Farber Collection," Katonah Museum of Art, 134 Jay Street (Rte. 22), Katonah, through Sept. 19.
Information: katonahmuseum.org or(914) 232-9555, extension 0.
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Smith v. Cason: Vamos a Cuba?

LETTER

Lifting the Restrictions on U.S. Travel to Cuba

Published: July 13, 2010

To the Editor:

In his July 9 letter, James C. Cason, a former chief of the United States Interests Section in Havana, insists that allowing Americans to travel freely to Cuba will not in any way encourage greater openness on the island. I, too, was a chief of the United States Interests Section (1979-82), and have continued to work on and travel to Cuba for many years after that, and I would strongly disagree with Mr. Cason.

Letting Americans travel freely to Cuba will not by some magical gesture bring democracy to Cuba, but it simply stands to reason that the more Americans who are there, the greater impact they can have. We are not talking only of tourists, after all, but of many with an interest in various aspects of Cuban life - sports, theater, history, the arts and many others. The cumulative impact of such contacts can be considerable.

And we now have that letter from more than 70 Cuban dissidents, including some of the more prominent ones, calling on the United States Congress to lift travel controls so that Americans can travel freely to Cuba. They believe that will help bring about change. I'll go with them rather than Mr. Cason.

Mr. Cason also mentions the 52 prisoners the Cuban government now says it will release and urges that the United States not lift travel controls until all political prisoners have been freed. But I would note that that will not help in any way to bring about their freedom. The 52 are being freed because the Spanish government and the Catholic Church entered into a dialogue with the Cuban government to bring that about. If they had followed the American pattern of refusing to engage, there would be no prisoner release at all.

The United States should indeed lift travel controls and should begin a meaningful dialogue with the Cuban government, which it has not yet done. Its approach has so far been a disappointment and has achieved little. Let us hope for something more imaginative - and effective.

Wayne S. Smith
Senior Fellow
Center for International Policy
Washington, July 9, 2010

Cason's original letter:

LETTER

Should We Ease Curbs on Travel to Cuba?

Published: July 09, 2010

To the Editor:

Re "House Panel Votes to Ease Cuba Travel Restrictions" (news article, July 1):

Representative Collin C. Peterson, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, says American travel to Cuba would "show the Cuban people how great democracy can be." But that is not the point.

Cubans know what democracy is. But under totalitarianism, people do not have the means to realize their dreams: almost two million Cuban exiles have fled to democracies. Despite Cuban government censorship, they have learned about democracy from their relatives in exile and American pro-democracy programs.

As a former chief of the American mission in Cuba, and a retired career Foreign Service officer who traveled extensively throughout the island, I'd like to point out that the Cuban security forces control the tourist industry, that most Americans don't speak Spanish well enough to have any meaningful conversation about democracy, and that most Cubans speak only rudimentary English.

Supporters of the bill say that travel will benefit the regime, but that it will benefit the people more. But the security apparatus keeps ordinary Cubans away from tourists while keeping the tourist dollars, prohibiting even hotel employees from meeting with tourists outside the hotels.

There is no trickle-down of tourist dollars, except to the ruling class. Most foodstuffs needed for tourists are produced abroad, not by Cubans. Unlike places like Mexico and Jamaica, few Cuban handicrafts are available, and Cubans who dare to produce items outside of government strictures are persecuted.

I urge Representative Peterson to ask Havana to release all 200 political prisoners, not just the 52 Cuba has said it will release (news article, July 8), and allow them to stay in Cuba if they wish, before we even consider releasing millions of tourist dollars into Cuban government coffers.

And let's not forget Allan Gross, in Cuban prisons since December 2009 for talking about democracy to the Cubans.

James C. Cason
Coral Gables, Fla., July 8, 2010
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El loco esta suelto

Both Frail and Feisty, Fidel Castro Goes on TV

By MARC LACEY

Published: July 13, 2010

MEXICO CITY - In one of his first public appearances since falling ill four years ago, a frail-looking Fidel Castro went on Cuban television on Monday night and warned in a near whisper that the United States was increasing the chances of nuclear war in the Korean Peninsula and Iran.

Mr. Castro, who underwent emergency gastrointestinal surgery in July 2006, wore a flannel shirt and jogging suit and appeared at times to struggle to get his words out. But some of the feistiness he was known for in booming speeches that could stretch on for much of the day remained.

Reading from a sheaf of papers and gesturing in the air, Mr. Castro rattled off statistics, gave his view of history and appeared cogent as Randy Alonso, a government journalist who is close to Mr. Castro, lofted softball questions at him.

Since undergoing surgery and turning over the presidency to his brother, Raúl, Mr. Castro has slipped from the spotlight, but never completely disappeared. He has met frequently with foreign leaders, usually while wearing a jogging suit, and written regular commentaries for Granma, the Communist Party newspaper, on everything from the global financial crisis to the World Cup.

But his Monday night appearance on "Mesa Redonda," or "Round Table," a public affairs program broadcast on Cuban television, was the first time since fall 2007 that Cubans could actually see and hear their once-omnipresent leader again. His attention to detail, even when it leaves listeners scratching their heads, is one thing that had not changed.

The appearance came as Raúl Castro, who formally took over the presidency in 2008 after two years as the country's interim leader, prepared to release dozens of political prisoners whom Fidel Castro had jailed in a crackdown on dissent in 2003. The first prisoner was released on Monday and placed on an airliner bound for Madrid, Reuters reported, with as many as a half-dozen others expected to follow shortly.

The prisoners did not come up in the hourlong interview show on Monday, and it remains unclear if the Castro brothers agree on the release.

Analysts said that it had always been difficult to interpret Fidel Castro's motives, and that remains the case. Just why he would make such an appearance now was anybody's guess. It followed the release of photographs over the weekend showing Mr. Castro greeting Cubans at a government-run scientific institute.

"It's more evidence that he continues to play a significant role," said Brian Latell, a former C.I.A. analyst whose 2005 book, "After Fidel," examined the transition in Cuba's leadership. Mr. Latell, now at work on another book about the long, slow-motion transition in leadership, noted that Fidel Castro, although no longer president or commander in chief, remained first secretary of the Communist Party and thus continued to wield influence in the Cuban bureaucracy.

As for his health, the television appearance seemed to put to rest speculation that Mr. Castro, who turns 84 on Aug. 13, was incapacitated or even dead. Former President George W. Bush, a fierce Castro foe, had expressed frustration that the ailing Mr. Castro continued to hang on. "One day the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away," Mr. Bush once said.

President Obama's words have been more restrained, but Cuba and the United States have nonetheless found themselves at odds on a number of issues.
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Que Viva Espana!!!

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Sun, July 11, 2010 -- 5:13 PM ET
-----

Spain Wins 2010 World Cup Over Netherlands, 1-0

A goal by Andrés Iniesta lifted Spain to a victory in the 2010 World Cup final over the Netherlands, 1-0. The goal was scored in extra time after neither team could score in regulation.

Spain became the first team to win the world championship after losing the opening game of the tournament.

Holy Water (long version)

By Yoani Sanchez

Holy Water 

(Short Version - GY) http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/

(Long Version - HuffPo) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/cuban-hunger-striker-susp_b_641606.html

After 134 days without solid food, or even a sip of liquid, Guillermo Farinas lifted a red plastic cup to his lips and drank a little water. It was 2:15 in the afternoon on Thursday July 8, and from the other side of the glass in the intensive care ward where he was being treated, dozens of friends watching him burst into applause as if they had been witnesses to a miracle.

In the morning hours of the same day the newspaper Granma, official organ of the Cuban Communist Party, had announced on page two that all the political prisoners incarcerated during the Black Spring of 2003 would be released as a result -- the notice said -- of a joint effort led by the Catholic Church and the Spanish Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos.

Without diminishing one iota the merit of the mediation mission of the bishops and ambassadors, the release of the political prisoners would not have happened without the death -- on hunger strike -- of the prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo in February of this year, without the years of peaceful protest carried out with heroic resistance by the Ladies in White, and without the hunger and thirst strike declared by the psychologist and independent journalist Guillermo Farinas.

Minutes before taking his first drink of water, Farinas wrote out, in his own hand, a statement announcing the temporary suspension of his strike, a suspension that will become final if the government fulfills its announced promise of freeing the prisoners within a span of three or four months. In the narrow corridor on the other side of the glass, tormented by the heat expelled by an air conditioner, leaders of various opposition groups, the Ladies in White, independent journalists, bloggers and friends, coming from around the country, read aloud, photographed and dictated into their cell phones the text of the statement. The paper was held against the window from inside by room by another political prisoner, currently paroled, Hector Palacios, who accompanied Farinas in these momentous moments.

Farinas had won one battle but still remains in a fierce war against death, because the land that has seen the action of this singular belligerency is his own body -- ultimately the only space available to him to carry out this campaign. His intestines are now like fragile paper conduits distilling bacteria through their pores, his jugular vein is partially obstructed by a blood clot which, if it detached, could lodge in the heart, brain or lungs; or more precisely, in his heart, his brain or his lungs. He has suffered four staph infections and at night a sharp pain in his groin barely allows him to sleep.

His shriveled esophagus was not ready for that first sip of water. It created such a pain in his chest that for a minute he thought he was having a heart attack, but he endured it in silence. On the other side of the glass, expectantly watching, were those who for days had been keeping a vigil outside the hospital, praying for his life, and others who had come from very far away to ask him to end his martyrdom and to be a witnesses to his victory. Not wanting to dampen the celebration of his jubilant colleagues applauding the triumph of his cause, he managed to turn a grimace into a smile.

Guillermo Farinas' family allowed me to watch over him on this, the first night after the end of his hunger strike, and he allowed me to be a witness his suffering, his occasional crankiness, and his human weaknesses. Only then did I discover the true hero of this day.
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Stigma, Prison, or Exile?

Readers of El Yuma are likely to know that Yoani Sanchez's Generacion Y is translated daily into many other languages (currently 19, including English) and syndicated at the Huffington Post.

However, the humble English translator of the blog informed me recently that Sanchez ocassionally writes "exclusives" for the Huff Post that do not appear on her blog.

Here is the latest one: Stigma, Prison, or Exile? (posted today, July 9, 2010).  And the closing sentence:

"When they reflect on the roads open to them to change their own situation, there are only two: emigration or crime. If they meditate on how to change the situation of the country, they are overcome by panic on discovering the threatening finger of the omnipresent state pointing at them, insultingly, dismissively and with the revolutionary intolerance which admits neither criticism nor suggestions. From there, they are thrown into the sack of the dissidents, where all that awaits them is stigma, prison, or exile."