Blogging about Cuba: breaking the media's embargo on the truth

As I said earlier, today I participated in a panel discussion at ASCE. Below are my prepared remarks. Some of this might be familiar since I borrowed from other things I have posted before.

UPDATE - I should have mentioned that I played second fiddle to Yoani Sanchez. She gave the moderator of the panel (Ted Henken) a 50 minute interview in Cuba a few days ago. We watched the video of the interview first and then Henken introduced me. I told the audience that they didn't know they had come to watch an episode of "el gordo y la flaca". I'm happy to play second fiddle to Yoani any day. Hopefully Ted Henken will post the interview on the web soon. I should mention that when asked about blogs outside of Cuba she of course mentioned Penultimos Dias. She also referred to Babalu as the "abuelo de los blogs cubanos." Of course I was very proud of that.

In order to comprehend the role that blogs play in Cuba, it’s important to first understand the space blogs occupy in the rest of the world.

A number of American journalists have expressed their disdain for bloggers culminating with author and columnist Buzz Bissinger's recent expletive-filled tirade on Bob Costas' TV show. Bissinger argued that blogs are filled with lies, bloggers are mean-spirited, that there's no fact checking on blogs, and that blogs value speed over accuracy. 



What old-guard journalists, like Bissinger, don't seem to understand is that the reason citizen journalists and blogs even exist in the first place is that they fill a vacuum. Whether it's a more humorous take on the world of sports or a more serious look at what's going on in Cuba, bloggers fill the void left by incomplete, inaccurate and indifferent coverage by the regular media.

Of course there is some truth to what Bissinger says about blogs. There are unscrupulous and inaccurate bloggers. But there are also unscrupulous and inaccurate professional journalists and editors. Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass had credentials, fact checkers and editors and still they managed to have plagiarized and fictional stories published as legitimate articles in the New York Times and The New Republic respectively. The same Times, incidentally, that was instrumental, through award-winning journalist Herbert Matthews, in bringing a bit player like fidel castro onto the world stage and which has consistently been sympathetic to the Castro regime and hostile to the Cuban exile community ever since.

As the target of Bissinger's wrath, Will Leitch, of the popular and irreverent sports blog, Deadspin, rightly pointed out, in his defense, that the blogosphere is a meritocracy. There are literally millions of blogs on the web and most are read by only a handful of people, but a precious few have readerships larger than some newspapers. If a blog is widely read it's purely a reflection of the connection that blog's writers have made with their audience.

And this explains the mind-boggling amount of readers and comments that the courageous Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez has garnered with her blog Generación Y. She is reporting and commenting the truth of Cuban life in a way neither the official Cuban media can or the international media will. And she’s doing it under the most inhospitable of circumstances.

I was drawn to blogging because I realized that within this wild frontier was an opportunity to draw the average person’s attention to something the mainstream media in America had ignored for far too long, the dictatorship in Cuba.

Thomas Jefferson eloquently stated that “our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press.” He understood that citizens of this country, or any country, couldn’t act rationally or in their best interest unless they were well informed of the events going on around them.

But Jefferson wasn’t the only one that understood this link. Surely this very fact is what caused Fidel Castro to crush the independent press in Cuba when he took power and what drove him to imprison dozens of independent journalists in 2003’s black spring. It’s what drove him to place an information embargo on the Cuban people. It is why Cuba today is the country with the most incarcerated independent journalists, per capita, in the world.

So whether it’s in Cuba where the media can’t report truth or in America where the media often refuses to report truth, bloggers act as the watchdogs of the media watchdogs.

Recently Yoani Sanchez had this to say about being denied an "exit visa" to leave Cuba and accept an important journalism award in Spain:

They forget that in cyberspace my voice can travel without limits, leaving and returning without asking for permission… It doesn’t matter that they have taken my passport. As of a year ago I have another, on which, in the section for nationality, appears a short word: “blogger”.

I'm very proud to be a fellow citizen of the same blogging nation as Yoani Sanchez and others who cover and comment on the Cuban reality.

Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at August 5, 2008 04:56 PM

Comments

Posted by: Henry Agueros at August 5, 2008 05:21 PM

Posted by: Al Godar at August 5, 2008 05:59 PM

Posted by: Ziva Sahl at August 5, 2008 07:48 PM

Posted by: Henry Louis Gomez at August 5, 2008 09:11 PM

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