From the Cuban Blogosphere - Introducing Erasmo Calzadilla and The Havana Times (Part I)

La blogosfera cubana esta en candela - The Cuban blogosphere is on fire. So in order to capture a bit of that fire, today I will kick off a new semi-weekly feature on El Yuma called,

"From the Cuban Blogosphere."

New blogs are appearing weekly and new groups and portals promoting and hosting those blogs are proliferating rapidly despite, or perhaps because of the Cuban government's simultaneous repression of some blogs and promotion of others.

Periodically, as I follow these developments in Cuban cyberspace, I will post links to, descriptions of, and if necessary, translations of the most interesting of these new blogs and portals. So here goes...

Introducing Erasmo Calzadilla of The Havana Times.

Thanks to the advice of Carlos Alzuguary that was the subject of one of my previous posts, I recently discovered The Havana Times.org, an English-language news and culture portal that was founded in Cuba in October 2008. Originally run from Cuba as a kind of "private venture" by the state-employed, foreign-born interpreter Circles Robinson (yes, that seems to be his real name), the site is now operated out of Nicaragua, where the Robinson lives after losing his job in Cuba. In fact, with the owner based in Nicaragua, the web master living in Spain, the writers reporting from Cuba, and the translators working mostly from the United States, The Havana Times is a true "transnational" operation that illustrates the power of the web in overcoming low budgets and long distances.

While I will have more to say about this on-line portal in my on-going series of posts Let a Thousand Bloggers Bloom, here I only want to introduce and highlight a number of recent posts by blogger Erasmo Calzadilla (pictured above). Calzadilla's blog/diary is available at The Havana Times in both English and Spanish.

A Classy Lady: Sánchez Responds to Critics (via Twitter!)

Yoani Sánchez
yoanisanchez

I have come to think that those who are always ready to insult, disqualify, and attack as a way of life, are quickly neutralized when confronted with sweet words. 23 minutes ago reply

For now, I send them all a complicit wink: I know very well that one’s mask can drop away in a split second, that their true opinions will blossom one day. 2 hours ago reply

Someday, we Cuban bloggers of al stripes will be able to come together and debate without insults and personal attacks. It’ll be soon. 2 hours 10 minutes ago reply

I know that behind all those offensive words and defamations against me, many times there is a journalist under pressure from their superiors. I don’t hold grudges. 2 hours 15 minutes ago reply

Although it may seem that we alternative bloggers are separated by a great difference of opinion from the official ones, we really have common problems. 2 hours 25 minutes ago reply

I want to thank all these official Cuban blogs that keep the topic of the alternative blogosphere on the front burner. Keep it up!!! 2 hours 30 minutes ago reply

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Note: To navegate to the other entries in thies series, "The Savaging of Yoani Sanchez," you click here on Part I, "Crying Wolf(ette)," Sanchez Responds to Critics, "Classy Lady," Part II, "Of Strawmen...," or Part III, "The Reasons Why..."

The Savaging of Yoani Sánchez: Crying Wolf(ette) - Part 1/3

Is this the sound of the other shoe dropping? You can be forgiven for not having noticed, but while you were eating your Lechón con flan over the long Thanksgiving weekend, the Cuban government clearly changed its strategy in dealing with the independent blogger movement and especially with the most prominent member of that movement, Yoani Sánchez.



Of course, October and November were quite eventful in the Cuban blogósfera, featuring a series of audacious guerrilla video maneuvers from La Flaca (first at an immigration office and then inside the Temas internet debate). This was followed by a pair of violent, government-orchestrated crackdowns, both taking place in the streets and aimed at reminding her and her husband, Reinaldo, along with their pesky blogger friends like Claudia Caudelo and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (pictured above with Sánchez), that “la calle es de Fidel” – even if he hasn’t been seen on it in more than three years.

This was all capped off by Sánchez’s coup of scoring a one-on-one Q&A with President Obama, published on her blog as “Siete Preguntas” on Thursday morning, November 19.

However, over the course of the following week, more articles critical and dismissive of Sánchez have appeared in the official Cuban on-line press (and, according to AFP, it seems also in the print version of the Spanish language edition of Granma Internacional) than had appeared there in all of the previous two-and-a-half-years.