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AmSpecBlog
Internet Free Cuba
The New
York Times has a story today about how savvy Cubans
are circumnavigating the obstacles erected by their government to
limit access the internet by ordinary Cubans: "Yet
the government's
attempts to control access are increasingly
ineffective.
Young people here say there is a thriving black
market giving thousands of people an underground
connection to the world outside the Communist
country."
I was told the same thing last summer when I was in China. An English speaking Chinese citizen told me that despite the best efforts of the Chinese regime to block access to sites on the internet, he and many others were able to find ways around the censorship. He then demonstrated his knowledge of the weekly primetime television line-up in America. He knew far more than I did.
The hope is that the internet will be one of the mechanisms by which politically oppressed people will be able to access information about the outside world and ultimately demand change from their respective government. As people living in repressive countries become more aware of the political freedoms that exist in other countries, they too will eventually reach a point where they will demand such rights for themselves. Of course, there are many obstacles to winning these much coveted political freedoms, namely the heavily armed tyrannical governments who don't want to grant them to their citizens.
The NYT ends its story by quoting a
Cuban student who expresses hope in this web
revolution:
Pedro, a midlevel official with a government
agency, said he often surfed Web sites like the BBC and The Miami
Herald at work, searching for another view of the news besides the
ones presented in the state-controlled media. He predicted that the
10,000 students studying the Internet and programming at the
University of Information Sciences would transform the country over
time, opening up more and more avenues of
information.
"We are training an army of
information specialists," he said.
Viva la web Revolucion!
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