The Long Arm of Censorship

The Long Arm of Censorship / Miguel Iturria Savon
Posted on June 5, 2013

From May 29th until today I could not open VocesCubanas.com, the
alternative platform that contains my blog Island Anchor. As I thought
the "closure" could be only be in the Spanish Levante — I live in the
province of Castellón, in the community of Valencia — I called followers
of my posts living in Zaragoza, Madrid, Canary Islands, but none could
access "Cuban Voices" nor enter my blog, not even from Google by
searching on the titles of the last texts.

Coincidentally, Wednesday May 29 was the last day of Yoani Sanchez's
stay in Madrid, where she delivered a speech at the ceremony for the
Ortega and Gasett awards, given by the newspaper El Pais; the next day
she was received in Havana by family and friends while the Spanish
newspaper reproduced her words and pictures with former President Felipe
González and other figures of the Spanish Socialist Worker's Party
(PSOE) and the media.

No one should be ready to think that the closure of the Voces Cubanas
portal in Spain was a way to lessen the impact of her words and to annul
any commentary on her extensive tour of Americanand European countries.
But who benefits from the silence of censorship? Who gave the order to
disconnect? Where and by whom was it executed? The answer points to the
officials who monitor the news in the Cuba Embassy in Madrid and to the
Island regime's network of consulates in the Iberian Peninsula.

It is not the classical theory of conspiracy; the Castro regime tactic
is very old and the order stands, the
diplomats-cum-State-Security-Agents executed it based on a Guide to
events that demystifies the Havana government's propaganda. They simply
overload the networks, hack pages, multiply the trash emails against
some, and "take the offensive" against others, even in media such as El
Pais. The rest is up to time and the naive who are silent before the
long arm of censorship.

4 June 2013

http://translatingcuba.com/the-long-arm-of-censorship-miguel-iturria-savon/