~~ recommended by a guest contributor ~~
- ....................UNITED NATIONS: INTERNET IS A HUMAN RIGHT
- San Francisco, July 6, 2012—
- On Friday, the UN Human Rights Council declared freedom of expression on the internet to be a basic human right. They affirmed that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression...”.
A New Era of Digital Dissidence in Cuba
A decade later, Cuban dissidents have taken to the Internet, finding a new voice and audience.
ORLANDO LUIS PARDO LAZO JANUARY 21, 2022
In a neighborhood of Old Havana, whose name I do not care to remember, a blogger lived for some time. After years of exclusion, defamation and violent, arbitrary arrests, he escaped from the Island of Utopia to the citadel of capitalism on March 5, 2013. It was me, one of the founders of Cuban digital dissidence. A text-based (more than an action-based) movement, we were freelance journalists who hoped to democratize the ancien révolution, that living fossil from the Cold War.
I wrote in the December 2009 In These Times special issue, “Inside Cuba, Voices from the Island”:
Though their work generates controversies and awards worldwide, Cuban bloggers are largely unknown here. With Internet access in Cuba restricted to the very few, the nation’s bloggers function as a kind of guerrilla underground. They work as independent agents whose existence heralds a civic re-activation that will modulate the Revolution’s Realpolitik— or is that Raúlpolitik?
In just the past two years, when least expected, that 2009 assessment has become obsolete: Cubans are now allowed to pay in hard currency for slow (and closely monitored) internet access. But that access was enough for younger generations to speak up, challenging the guardians of the old orthodoxy, aware that the world is now their witness in real time.
An action-based (more than a text-based) collective then began to organize in a neighborhood of Old Havana, the name of which I do want to recall: San Isidro. Despite the attacks of the official press (owned by the Communist Party) and the recent accusations that they are “mercenaries” of Donald Trump promoting a sort of “soft coup,” the group Movimiento San Isidro (MSI) has expanded its cultural influence beyond just the eight members listed on its website to promote freedom of expression in Cuba, among other things.
Of course, these activists will not topple Castro’s military model. No American citizen, regardless of their personal views on U.S.-Cuba policy, should imagine that MSI intellectuals will do (with a couple of mobile phone recharges from abroad) what Pentagon hawks couldn’t (with billions of dollars).
But in 2020, in response to the Cuban government’s authoritarian approach to Covid-19, many Cubans joined MSI’s provocative campaigns. The campaigns were aimed at the heart of Cuba’s drama, which is not the affairs of its northern neighbor but the frustration with a fundamentally conservative single-party regime.
Susan Sontag once dismissed Communism as “Fascism with a human face.” In 2009, like a Don Quixote who dreamed the Plaza de la Revolución was his windmill, I wrote:
The state has not yet passed specific laws against a phenomenon as new as blogging, although the habit of accusing critical voices of being “capitalism’s useful idiots” or “mercenaries of enemy propaganda” can serve as a brake on free expression. … There are also legal warnings issued for “peligrosidad predelictiva,” or “dangerous inclination toward criminality” that [have] been used to arrest and harass, but not yet convict.
Today, the Cuban regime’s laws are being manipulated to charge the members of MSI with crimes. On November 11, the rapper Denis Solís was summarily sentenced to eight months in a maximum-security prison for “contempt.” Solís first ran afoul of the state after publishing his 2018 protest song “Sociedad Condenada” (“Condemned Society”) online. This time Solís called a policeman who had entered his house without a warrant a “chicken in uniform,” an encounter he captured on his phone and posted to social media, for which he was incarcerated.
The government’s treatment of Solís helped spur hundreds of peaceful protesters to gather outside the Ministry of Culture in Havana on Nov. 27, 2020, all day long until midnight. The campaign, calling itself 27N, came together to demand respect for independent cultural spaces, as well as a stop to all censorship and coercion against Cuban citizens. A delegation of demonstrators was reluctantly received by Vice Minister Fernando Rojas, and promises were made in exchange for clearing the crowd.
The next day, however, that verbal agreement was broken on national television by Rojas himself, who ridiculed MSI and threatened to prosecute its members. The leaders of the Cuban Revolution never directly respond to public pressure. Instead, they demonize dialogue as a sign of weakness. Consequently, the harassment has intensified — including the illegal confinement of MSI members in their homes, who are now detained if they attempt to step outside.
I am proud knowing that what bloggers tried 10 years ago has been taken up by MSI. But I also fear that the new generations might be forced to “commit exile,” as I was. Small “d” democrats have a moral duty to engage. Otherwise, efforts like MSI and 27N, whose desires defy despotism and whose poetry challenges power, will collapse under the repression of the Western Hemisphere’s most undemocratic government.
Cuba passes internet censorship and cybersecurity law
Following weeks of protests against its decades-long communist leadership, the Cuban government passed a series of new laws that limit freedom of expression on the internet and force local service providers to create censorship mechanisms on their networks in order to prevent the spread of “false information.”
Passed last week, the laws will be enforced by a new agency announced yesterday and named the Institute of Information and Social Communication, which the government created inside the Ministry of Communications.
According to the new law’s text, local telecommunications operators will have to ensure they own and operate equipment capable of intercepting and supervising network traffic.
Operators are mandated to intervene and “interrupt” communications when their networks are used to “transmit false information, offensive or harmful to human dignity; of sexual, discriminatory content; that creates harassment; that affects personal and family privacy or one’s image and voice; the identity, integrity and honor of the person; collective security, general welfare, public morality and respect for public order; or as a means to commit illicit acts citations.”
The new laws also target and crack down on neighborhood networks, which have popped up inside Cuban cities without a formal telco presence, which are also legally obliged to follow the same clauses, despite lacking a legal entity.
Furthermore, the new laws also prohibit the importation and sale of networking devices without authorization from the Ministry of Communications, in a bid from the communist government to prevent the spread of more rogue networks.
Government criticism classified as “cyberterrorism”
In addition, the government also introduced a cybersecurity law that introduces mandatory reporting of cybersecurity incidents to the Office of Security for Computer Networks, inside the Ministry of Communications.
Network providers that discover a “cybersecurity incident” on their network have to take steps to investigate and shut down the malicious activity.
In an annex included with the new cybersecurity law, the spread of information that damages the “constitutional, social and economic” of the Cuban state was labeled “cyberterrorism” and formally classified as a cybersecurity incident, meaning network operators would have to intervene and block any online criticism aimed at the communist regime.
The new laws, which entered into effect last week, would give the Havana government a legal ground to justify broad internet shutdowns, but more importantly, it provides the legal ground to create a country-level firewall on par with similar systems implemented in China, Russia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and other autocratic regimes.
Lacking the ability to filter online criticism during the recent July & August 2021 protests, the Cuban government often resorted to shutting down internet access in attempts to quelch the spread of dissent among its citizens.
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