Looking for Cuban blogs

By Liz Henry, 7:22 am, Sat 23 Sep 2006

Here is my very favorite kind of web site, bold and feminist, literary and political. Sandra Alvarez, on her blog Negra cubana, writes thoughtful articles about race, feminism, gender, books, and health. She's a feminist literary theory nerd, reading Irigaray, hooks, and Spivak, and she's also firmly grounded in political realities.

I had some trouble finding Cuban blogs. The blogosphere swirls with disturbance, with beautiful sites starting up and disappearing or being abandoned. Anti-Castro trolls attack and dishearten small personal bloggers as well as political news and information blogs. There are rather a lot of those news and information blogs, written by journalists - like this one by Zenia Regalado, an interestingly multiblogular person "alias Kasandra –en la página Caribe lindo-; Isabel en Blogalaxia y Cantarina en Viejo Blues." Or this journalist, 62-year-old Elsy Fors of Noticuba, who writes detailed articles in English about the good things the Cuban government does for its people.
For example this editorial on an aging population:

When the time comes, Cuban elderly will still make themselves useful and be the pride of society, unlike other nations where the aged are discarded like old household appliances.

That's good to know, and the point is well taken. How about putting some computers in community centers and get the pride of society blogging their life stories? Wouldn't that be a gift to Cuba, the world, and history?

I hope that La Polilla Cubana, a librarian at the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba, starts writing again. Like many other Cuban blogs I've seen, she starts out trying to explain her country and a little bit about its politics to outsiders. I would love to hear what she has to say about the library, too. The speaking-to-outsiders stance is quite telling; almost no one in Cuba thinks that anyone else in Cuba is going to hear them, which shows us the state of Internet access.

From La Polilla's blog I came to "Bitacora de un bibliotecario", "Blog of a librarian" and this very good post on Cuba (eng/ sp, where Edgardo Civallero, a charming and erudite anarchist librarian in Córdoba, Argentina, interviews his friend Silvia who has just come back from a visit. Read Civallero's ideas in English or Spanish as he muses thoughtfully on social systems, government, and freedom.

Here is another blog full of promise: Aksuna, by Evelyn del Carmen Pena Hernandez, a computer science student interested in artificial intelligence. Her work and ideas are interesting - I just wish there was more!

And finally here is Anna in Cuba: Mi Experiencia Cubana - travel notes from a student from New York spending a semester in Cuba. Here finally I see some photos of the famous Malecón and a little bit of description of daily life with its ups and downs.

So, where are the personal voices? I think what I am seeing in my quest to find Cuban blogs is a fairly recent exploration. The number of journalists with blogs is probably the result of university classes or conference workshops on blogging. This also would partly explain why there are so many personal "ghost blogs" and profiles carefully constructed and abandoned from uncertainty over what one wants to say, and who is listening, who is the audience. Internet access must be a non-trivial barrier. It would be so wonderful to hear from Cuba, from individual people, about daily life, their families, etc. as well as about their work, the excellent state of Cuban health care (which I admire very deeply!) and politics. If only they did not have to be so much on the defensive. Think of what we are missing... I'll keep looking, and have no doubt there will be more excellent blogs from Cuba to share with you here.