Thaindian News

Havana, Jan 14 (IANS/EFE) Blogger Yoani Sanchez said Wednesday that Cuba’s President Raul Castro has begun to understand that he must eliminate or intimidate the creators of blogs in order to silence them, because he cannot bribe them with “a week in Varadero”, a coastal resort near Havana.
“To stop bloggers, you have to eliminate them or intimidate them, and the government, the party, the general have begun to understand that equation,” Sanchez said in the latest entry of her Generacion Y blog.

“It has taken them some time to understand it, but they’ve begun to realise it. They now know that to silence a blogger they can’t use the same methods they have used to silence so many journalists,” the winner of prestigious international press awards said.

“No one can fire these impertinent people on the web from the pressroom of a newspaper, nor promise them a week in Varadero or a Lada auto as compensation, much less can they win them over with a trip to Eastern Europe,” she said.

The blogger acknowledged that “a journalist doesn’t run the same risks in Cuba that professionals of the press do in other countries”, since on the communist-ruled island “they don’t shoot news reporters or kidnap them - instead they poison the profession.”

“Why eliminate physically an individual who writes uncomfortable truths if the red pen of the censor can delete him? Why kill him if you have all the resources to domesticate him?”

“Professional death,” Sanchez said, “isn’t reflected in statistics, only in the frustration of those who, like me, once saw the news as their destiny.”

She recalled that in the spring of 2003, numerous independent journalists “went to jail to serve sentences of 10, 15, 20 years,” and that “most of them are still behind bars”.

“The government controls the cameras in television studios, the microphones in radio stations, the pages of magazines and newspapers on the island, but up there, out of their reach, a satellite network - satanised but essential - offers anyone who wants it the chance to post opinions in a practically limitless way,” she said.

–IANS/EFE

rd/jg