Sending Ideas to Cuba

APRIL 10, 2014 4:00 AM

Sending Ideas to Cuba
The Castro regime appreciates that Communism cannot survive the free
flow of communication.
By Mike Gonzalez

Cubans have lived on an information desert island for more than 50
years. Ten million people, once a vibrant part of the world — in tune
with it and contributing to it, receiving information and even
immigrants — were cut off soon after Fidel Castro took over in 1959.
That the world has done nothing to help them after five decades of
oppression is an outrage.

What is not an outrage is that the United States Agency for
International Development tried four years ago to circumvent Communist
censorship in Cuba by setting up a text-messaging network that Cubans
could access. This "Cuban Twitter" was a ray of hope that should be
celebrated.

Not apparently by the Associated Press and others who have cried foul.
The news agency exposed the program last week under the headline "US
secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest." This week the U.S.
Senate got in on the act with a hearing at which Democrats took the
agency to task. It is passing strange that journalists and legislators
whose trade depends on a free flow of information should get a bad case
of the vapors when Cubans are given access to each other and the outside
world. Let's concentrate, however, on why USAID's action should be
applauded, not denigrated.
Cubans have no independent press. The three national newspapers and
eight television stations are under the control of the Communist party.
Only 5 percent of Cubans have access to the Internet, according to the
watchdog group Freedom House. This 5 percent is presumably the
percentage the regime thinks it can count on.

What Cubans have, in other words, is 24/7 Castro propaganda. The reason
is very simple. As with all totalitarian regimes, Communism cannot
survive the free flow of ideas. If people under Communism were exposed
to alternative viewpoints, not even the most ruthless police state could
hold them back.

Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) put it succinctly at an event, on the
Internet and Cuba, that the Heritage Foundation hosted with Google two
years ago: "The regime is so afraid of sharing information because they
can't survive it."

Communist governments must rely on a mixture of state terror,
information blackout, and constant propaganda. It's no coincidence that
Cubans share their fate with North Koreans and the Chinese, whose
countries also ban an independent press, or that the Communist party in
Beijing is busily squelching the last few remnants of the free press in
Hong Kong and putting pressure on bankers to stop advertising in the
last truly free newspaper, Apple Daily.

I know whereof I speak. Today I take for granted my information-rich
environment, my drives to work in the morning as I toggle between NPR,
talk radio, and C-SPAN Radio, and my office decked out with two screens,
one on which I typed this article, the other devoted to Tweet Deck,
which I think of as my personal wire-service newsroom.

As a child I wasn't as fortunate, and neither was my father. As a young
Cuban in the 1960s, I saw him huddle in the evenings around the
pre-Castro shortwave radio he used to receive information from abroad,
his ear pegged to it because he had to keep the volume low lest he be
overheard by neighborhood snitches and instantly arrested. Owning such a
device was illegal, so we hid it during the day.

Even my father's father was luckier. He could use his radio show to
fulminate against the dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1940s. Sure, my
grandfather had to avoid Batista's thugs from time to time, and once
they tried to force him to drink a bottle of airplane fuel to intimidate
him.

But my father under Castro had no recourse to his father's "luxury." He
had no independent media he could use to communicate with thousands or
even millions of other Cubans. Had father taken to our porch to give his
thoughts an airing, he would have been heard by only a handful of people
before being arrested and probably later shot.

The difference between the three generations of my family is the
difference between authoritarian regimes, totalitarian ones, and
freedom. Venezuela has demonstrators in the streets because there is
still some vestige of independent media there. If its goonish
authoritarian regime succeeds at quashing that rebellion, it will try to
turn Venezuela into a version of Cuba and North Korea.

It was precisely that totalitarian control on the flow of ideas that
USAID was trying to sidestep. It was trying to give Cubans access to
ideas from outside and, more important, let them communicate with one
another.

Was that subversive? Yes, I suppose it was. But was it noble? Yes, very
much so. That 10 million Cubans today should suffer the same fate as my
father 50 years ago is a tragedy.

— Mike Gonzalez is vice president of communications at the Heritage
Foundation. His book on Hispanics will be out in September.

Source: Sending Ideas to Cuba | National Review Online -
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/375454/sending-ideas-cuba-mike-gonzalez