CUBA: Dissident Blogger Yoani Sanchez Labelled "Cyber" Traitor On TV Program.

GUARDIAN/

   Dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez is under attack again for waging "cyberwar" against Cuba.
   Sánchez, 35, whose blog Generacion Y has won many prizes and cash awards from around the world, was the subject of Monday's episode in a series of TV programs called "Cuba Reasons".
   The latest episode claims Sánchez was "demonising" socialism.
   "Cyberwar is not a war of bombs and bullets, but of information, communication, algorithms and bytes. It is the new form of invasion that has originated in the developed world," said the program's narrator.
   Sanchez tweeted her response: "I am so happy. Finally the alternative blogosphere on official television, although it's to insult us. They don't know what they've done! Pandora's Box has been smashed open!"

CUBA: 10 Feb UPDATE: Bread Shortage As Black Market Devours Flour; Blogger Yoani Sanchez Posts Unblocked On Isla; Undersea Cable Reaches Isla.

G.POST/ NICK MIROFF / Apparently Miroff is still only a freelancer for the WashPost /

    For over 50 years, a ration of one bread bun per person per day has been the accepted norm in Cuba.
    But with a slew of new small businesses opening up under Raul Castro's reforms, state-run bakeries are suffering shortages as the black market bids up the price of flour...as popular 10 peso pizza kitchens pop-up like weeds after a rainfall.
     “We’re making about 60 percent as much as we used to,” said one La Habana government baker where customers were turned away. “We don’t have the flour,” he said.

 AND:  10 Feb UPDATE -- WITH LINK CHANGE:
    The Castro regime has unblocked access to dissident Yoani Sanchez's blog, off limits on the island's Internet since 2008.
 "In the long night of censorship, a small hole has opened. My blog Generation Y returns to the insular light,"  wrote the 35-year-old blogger on Twitter.
   Now Habanistas around the world are trying to figure out why the government has unleashed Sanchez.
  Sanchez and her husband believe it is because Cuba is hosting an internet conference.
 “It would not be very elegant for those persons to be able to confirm that in Cuba there are blocked Web sites,” he told El Nuevo Herald. The blocks could be put back once the foreigners leave Cuba.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/09/2058892/cuban-government-unblocks-critical.html

ALSO: Undersea Cable Reaches Santiago from Venezuela:

   A $70 million usd undersea fiber optic cable financed by ALBA has reached Cuba's shore. 

It can potentially increase Internet speed 3,000-fold and handle about 80 million simultaneous phone calls.

   It will be ready for use in July.

  Cuba currently has the second slowest Internet speed in the world and the lowest internet penetration in the Hemisphere with just only 2.9 percent of the population having used the Internet during a 12-month period.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/09/2058223/fiber-optic-communications-cable.html#storylink=mirelated

CUBA: 08 Feb UPDATE: Secret Video Lecturer Identified; Claimed Dissident Bloggers Are U.S. Agents; Yoani Compares Isla To Egypt.

M.HERALD/ JUAN TAMAYO / With Secret Video Link/

    A 38-year-old counter-intelligence official seen lecturing on a secret internet video about the involvement of the U.S. with bloggers has been identified as Eduardo Fontes Suárez.
    He religiously follows dissident bloggers likeYoani Sánchez on Twitter and Facebook.
     He is described as a computer engineer who joined the Interior Ministry’s counter-intelligence section after graduation from a La Habana  high school  for the children of Cuba’s ruling elites.
 FOR DETAILS:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/07/2055415/internet-critic-is-identified.html

   The 53-minute secret government video posted on the internet claimed that dissident bloggers like Yoani Sanchez (pictured) and others are part of a U.S. plan to overthrow the Castro regime.

   It also alleged a secret U.S. effort in 2008 to create wi-fi points giving up to 250 computers access to the Internet through satellite telephones, free of government controls.
 For Sanchez Observations On Egypt Vs Cuba, SEE:
"...the State media showed caution in dealing with the news from North Africa. They administered tablespoon-sized doses of the events, without dwelling on the reasons that drove a people to put a limit on the personal mandate of an octogenarian."
http://translatingcuba.com/?p=6806

CUBA: Yoani Sanchez On Chavez's $70 Million Undersea Cable Connection.

Generacion Y / dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez /

    "For more than two years the fiber optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela has been the carrot dangled before the eyes of the inhabitants of this disconnected Island. Its thin threads have served as an argument against those who insist that the web access limitations have more to do with political will than lack of bandwidth. We have paid attention to the sluggish wanderings of the umbilical cord that will connect La Guaira with Santiago de Cuba, the boat that brought it from France, and the news which announced it will increase our data, image and voice transmission speed by three thousand times. But something tells us that this cable already has a name, an owner and an ideology.
With its 640 gigabyte capacity, the new tendon will be particularly devoted to institutional projects monitored by the government."

    This blog has ignored posting a rash of recent news stories breathlessly praising the possibilities of a new $70 million cable being laid by Alcatel and heavily financed by Hugo Chavez -- because of a strong hunch that it won't affect ordinary Cuban citizens. It may speed-up the ridiculously SLOW connections at the hotels where tourists pay more than $10 usd per hour. Yet Sanchez seems confident that dissidents like her will get access-- whether the government allows it or not.

 FOR DETAILED COVERAGE FROM REUTERS, SEE:http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/technology/telecoms/traffic-jams-unlikely-on-this-data-highway-1.1015495

CUBA: Where The Secret Police...Are Not So Secret.

GENERACION Y/ 
Yoani Sanchez /
     Today, Sanchez posts about the secret police shadowing dissidents in Cuba.
    Everybody knows about them, everybody can spot them.
  "They don’t try to hide because they want this person, who signs his name to his critical opinions, to know they’re there; they want his friends to distance themselves so as not to end up caught in the network of control, in the spiderweb of vigilance," she writes.
     I know a little about this subject.
    While visiting my cranky old Catholic dissident friend Emil in Cienfuegos in 1999, we were shadowed EVERYWHERE by the secret police.
     The "secret" police were easy to spot with their expensive Ray Ban sunglasses, good shoes and short military haircuts. They followed us closely as we crossed in the middle of traffic and expertly dodged through stores and shops.
     Sadly, the next time I visited Cuba with gifts for my old friend, I learned that he had died...suddenly and mysteriously...and that his large old mansion and gardens had been confiscated by the state and quickly divided into four residences.

CUBA: Big Ration Card Cuts Start As Castro Slashes Subsidies.

M.HERALD/

   Soap, toothpaste and liquid detergent and other items will disappear from Cuba's ration card Saturday.
   A new price list shows some products increasing 12-fold.
  The card began in the early 1960s as a "temporary" way to give everyone equal access to goods, provide monthly food and other items at steeply subsidized prices.
   "No one can survive eating only what's on their ration card," wrote blogger Yoani Sánchez. ‘‘But the very low salaries and high prices in the (open) markets mean that the end of this subsidy will be dramatic."
   But Sanchez believes the end of the ration card will change Cubans, comparing it to the seeds owners give to caged birds. "Perhaps the most important change will occur in the thinking of Cubans, when they realize that the small portion of birdseed is no longer being delivered to the cage, when they begin to feel the real pressures of each one of the bars.'

CUBA: Dissident Farinas Denied Exit To Receive Sakharov Prize.

BBC/
    Dissident Guillermo Farinas will be represented by an empty chair at a ceremony for the EU's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
    Farinas was not allowed to leave for France to collect the award.
     He has spent 11-and-a-half years in prison.
     Earlier this year, Farinas was near death while on a 134-day hunger strike protesting the death of fellow dissident Orlando Zapata. He ended it when President Raul Castro promised the release of 52 prisoners.
    Farinas is the third Cuban to receive the prize.
   Yoani Sanchez, another dissident and well-known blogger, also was recently denied an exit permit to receive the $45,000 Jaime Brunet International Prize for the Promotion of Human Rights in Spain.


FOR DETAILS ON SANCHEZ AWARD, SEE:
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=381250&CategoryId=14510

CUBA: Going Crazy In Havana... Over Crazy Glue.

DESDECUBA/ Yoani Sanchez :
"People are shouting from balcony to balcony and at first I think they’re insulting each other, but that’s not it. The woman from the building on the corner tells another woman that they have Crazy Glue at the little shop at Boyeros and Tulipán. Both are wide-eyed, gesticulating, “I thought it was gone forever,” “There’s been none anywhere,” they say. I chuckled while looking at the tip of my shoe, greatly in need of this instant fixative that the neighbors are announcing as if the ration stores had gotten a delivery of beef. If I get there in time to get a tube of the magic glue, I could fix the computer key that’s been flying off, and also the doorbell, which you can barely hear when someone rings it."

CUBA: Observations On Fidel Castro's Return To Public Life.

WASHPOST/ YOANI SANCHEZ/ OPINION/  Noted dissident blogger writes about how Fidel watchers in Cuba now see him: as an unpredictable, dottering old man, stripped of charisma.

SANCHEZ:  "Fidel Castro's return to public life after a four-year absence provokes conflicting emotions here. His reappearance surprised a people awaiting, with growing despair, the reforms announced by his brother Raúl. While some weave fantasies around his return, others are anxious about what will happen next.
The return of a famous figure is a familiar theme in life as in fiction -- think Don Quixote, Casanova or Juan Domingo Perón. But another familiar theme is disappointment -- of those who find that the person who returns is no longer the person who left, or at least not as we remember him. There is often a sense of despair surrounding those who insist on coming back. Fidel Castro is no exception to this flaw inherent in remakes. "

CUBA: Prisoners Free To Leave... Or Be Exiled?

GENERACION Y/ YOANI SANCHEZ / OPINION/     "...the word “liberation” has been stuck to a term with nefarious connotations: “deportation.” “They will go directly from the prisons to the planes,” a gentleman who keeps his ear glued to the radio told me, based on what he hears on the prohibited broadcasts from the North. Forced expatriation, expulsion, exile, has been standard practice to get rid of dissenters. “If you don’t like it, leave,” they tell you from the time you’re small; “Get up and go,” they spit at you if you insist on complaining; “Why’d you come back?” is the greeting if you dare to return and continue to point out what you don’t like. The ability to rid themselves of the inconvenient, the skill to push off the island platform anyone who opposes them, this is a talent in which our leaders are quite adept."

CUBA: Yoani Sanchez's Media Execution.

DESDECUBA/GENERACION Y BLOG/      "On Friday they pronounced my name on the boring Roundtable program, mixed with concepts such as “cyber-terrorism,” “cyber-commandos” and “media war.” To be mentioned in a negative way in the most official program on television is, for any Cuban, the confirmation of her social death. A public stoning that consists of insults directed at someone who has critical ideas, without allowing her a few minutes of the right to reply."
And..."A few years ago, government bullets of contempt would have made everyone stay away from my person and my house, but now they sidle up and give me a wink and a thumbs up as a sign of complicity. They have used defamation so much as a method to silence the other, that their incendiary adjectives have ceased to have any effect on a population sick and tired of so many slogans and so few results."

CUBA: The Dangers Of Teaching Bloggers In Havana.

GLOBAL POST/    Dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez conducts a twice-a-week Bloggers Academy in her 14th-floor Havana apartment. The 30 or more students who crowd into her apartment to learn Twitter or write code for their blogs are taking a huge risk -- because Sanchez, 34, is considered dangerous by the government even though she and her blog "Generacion Y" are virtually unknown in Cuba.

CUBA: U.S. Permits Social Networking But Government Hinders Use.

BBC/ 2:33 Video Report/     A new ruling allows US companies to provide access to instant messaging, chat and social networking internet sites but the island's government makes it nearly impossible to use them.

CUBA: Corruption A La Cubana.

YOANI SANCHEZ BLOG/   Rumors of corruption scandals abound on "Radio Bemba" about senior ministers found with suitcases full of dollars and the state-owned juice maker whose earnings were sent out of the country to private accounts.

CUBA: New Ration Books...Less Of The Same.

GENERACION Y BLOG/ Yoani Sanchez/ With Image/

"The new ration book surprised us at the end of December, just when speculation was growing about the demise of this booklet with its grid-paper pages. It arrived, like every year, surrounded by anxiety and annoyance, submerging us in that avoidance-approximation conflict generated by the subsidized. In its little pages I notice the absence of many products that once made up the monthly quota, now reduced to just a monotonous repertoire with insufficient nutritional values and rising costs."

CUBA: Fighting Critical Dissident Blogs... With Blogs.

MIAMI HERALD/
Cuba is counter-attacking cyber-foes with backers labelling them mercenaries and CIA agents. Bloggers like the well-known and much lauded Yoani Sanchez and the 15 other bloggers who regularly criticize Cuba are seen as dangerous subversives. Many counter-attacks are posted on the Cambios en Cuba blog. Others are posted on Blogcip, a Cuban site with 44 blogs. Professor Ted Henken said the attacks seldom focus on the blogs' criticisms and their ``overall intent is to argue that the fatherland is threatened by an ungrateful anti-Cuban, a skinny computer hacker with a poison pen -- ink bought and paid for by Uncle Sam, of course.''

CUBA: Castro's Media Counterattacks Blogger Sanchez's Letter From Obama.

CUBAN COLADA/MIAMI HERALD/
An article, titled "Operation Marketing," written by Estaban Martinez on Cubadebate.com is the first commentary on the Obama-Sánchez exchange to appear in an official website.
Martínez said that "the blogger's position has changed from mild criticism of the Cuban revolutionary project to more open and aggressive stances that invite a confrontation." Thus, Sánchez "aligned herself with the enemies of the Revolution, appearing frequently in articles and interviews on Radio Martí and El Nuevo Herald, mouthpieces of the most retrograde positions and the loudspeakers of the Cuban-America mafia in Florida." After listing several public events at which Sánchez appeared, "seeking at any cost to make herself visible," Martínez said that Sánchez "concocted a new tale when she told everyone about her 'kidnapping' by agents of State Security who (she said) beat her."

CUBA: Blogger Yoani Sanchez's Receives Personal Reply From President Obama.

MIAMIHERALD/
Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez emerged as a factor in U.S.-Cuba relations after receiving a reply from President Barack Obama to seven questions she sent him. But, Obama broke no new ground in his responses. Her letter and Obama's responses also played a role in current Congressional hearings about opening-up travel to Cuba.

CUBA: Interview With Injured Dissident Blogger Yoani Sanchez.

MEDIAITE/EXCLUSIVE PHONE INTERVIEW/Jose Simian/
Blogger Yoani Sánchez Says She Was Beaten by Cuban Authorities: “They Want To Paralyze As Many People As Possible With A Preventive Strike.”

CUBA: Yoani Sanchez Describes Her Beating By State Thugs.

GENERACION Y/