Interviews with Ernesto Hernandez Busto

I think we can define the objectives at two levels: First, the “blogger” movement in Cuba has broken the monopoly that the Cuban Government had on information until just recently; that is a first goal and it was an important objective, and remains a major goal of the Cuban blogosphere. To break the monopoly of information, means that many issues are leaked that the Cuban press would never have published; There are very concrete examples such as: closed-door meetings at the central committee, pictures of people who died from hunger and cold in the psychiatric ward, all the corruption scandals, many videos of police beatings, significant evidence and clear visions of Cuban reality that did not have a place in the official media, which is practically the only media in Cuba. These began to be debated in the Cuban blogosphere.

A lot of information that the Cuban bloggers put on servers arrived and spread instantaneously to the international press and to other media in exile, which forced the Cuban government to react. Since these cases spread uncontrollably, it was practically obligatory for the journalists and press correspondents to ask Cuban officials about the issues that the press had not published. That´s the first level, and I think it´s a very important level; because the government monopoly on information was broken by this emergence. But I think there´s another level that is, in my opinion, as important as the first one, but that has received less attention, and that is the issue of to what extent these new movements have created a shift in the logic of the protests.

That’s a hot topic today: to what extent do the new media really impact on dissidents? To what extent can they shake up governments? Can they push authoritarian regimes to a crisis point? I believe in the Cuban case there are reasons to be optimistic. It’s not just that new technologies are a new way of spreading information, but they also generate a different logic for the protests, a logic that is starting to be copied or imitated by the traditional dissidents because they have realized that it works. Whether the government keeps quiet or represses, the consequences are still negative for them in the short term. Because if they repress, that example may trigger another reaction and give them bad press, and if they keep quiet, many people who were thinking of protesting get encouraged and join the movement. Of course the level of access that Cubans have to the Internet is minimal; I think this is a singular case, that Cuba, unlike countries such as China and Iran, has no regular, normal access to the Internet. For Cuba, Internet access is minimal.

The most optimistic governmental numbers, which confuse Internet with Intranet, report about 10 of the population having Internet access. Imagine, with those rates of access, it gets very difficult to use the Internet as a mobilization tool; but it can be used to generate effects, to create certain events.

Ernesto Hernández Busto is an essayist, journalist and blogger and a recognized authority on technology and democracy. He was born in Havana, Cuba in 1968.

As a young man, he became active in the Paideia movement, a group of artists and writers that sought to reform cultural policy in Cuba. The response of security forces to this group of young intellectuals influenced his decision to emigrate. At the age of 21, he left Cuba “to escape the oppressive atmosphere of a totalitarian society, which was suffocating in all areas of life.”

From 1992 to 1999, he lived in Mexico, where we wrote for Vuelta magazine, edited by Octavio Paz, as well as other literary journals and publications. Since 1999, he has lived in Barcelona, Spain, where he works as an editor, translator and journalist.

His books include ‘Perfiles derechos. Fisonomías del escritor reaccionario’ (Barcelona, 2004; III “Casa de América” essay prize) and ‘Inventario de saldos. Apuntes sobre literatura cubana’ (Madrid, 2005). He has also published literary translations from Italian, Russian, French and Portuguese.

Since 2006, he has edited and published Penúltimos Días (www.penultimosdias.com), one of the most important websites on Cuban issues, with more than 70 contributors in 12 countries and over 10 million page views. He has participated in various forums on digital activism as “Internet at Liberty 2010” (organized by Google and the European Central University) and “Personal Democracy Forum Latin America,” among others. His blog is widely recognized as among the most authoritative and comprehensive websites covering events in Cuba.

He wrote the chapters on Cuba’s for Freedom House’s “Freedom on the Net” report (2010 and 2011). He is a frequent contributor to the Spanish newspaper El País, on policy and technology.

Read his blog at www.penultimosdias.com and follow him on Twitter: @penultimosdias