Kilobytes Win, Extremists Lose

Kilobytes Win, Extremists Lose / Yoani Sánchez
Translator: Unstated, Yoani Sánchez

For three days, from June 21 to 23, an event organized by civil society
on technology, social networking and the Internet was held in Havana.
Called the CLICK Festival, this event was the realization of a
long-cherished dream among citizens who, from the Island, are using
social networks and the web as a path to civic and professional
expression, as well as for purely personal reasons.

Bit by bit the technology is making its way into a society marked by the
lowest cellphone use and least access to the vast World Wide Web.
According to the latest official statistics, in a population of over 11
million people only 2.6 million users are "online," a large percentage
of whom has access only to an intranet of controlled and reduced
content. Hence, among the popular demands felt most strongly throughout
the country is a desire by Cubans for massive access to cyberspace.

More than a year after the fiber optic cable from La Guaira, Venezuela
to Santiago de Cuba was installed, the true state of this very costly
tendon is still unknown. With a price of 70 million for its purchase and
installation, the cable brought with it high expectations for improved
accessibility and telecommunications. According to experts, if it were
to operate at full capacity it could multiply by three thousand times
the current connectivity of the largest of the Antilles. However, the
deepest official secrecy has remained over whether the fibers are
already transmitting kilobytes.

Even so, the famous cable was one of the themes most present in the
discussions of the CLICK Festival. In the three days of panels and
workshops, many voices raised the question of when it will be possible
to contract for a service to surf the web from one's own home, legally
and without political limitations.

One of the hallmarks of the discussions at the festival was their
openness to all kinds of opinions. The announcement issued by the
principal organizers stressed that the character of the event would be
"inclusive, plural, without segregation." Significantly different from
the precepts of previous events in Cuba, which preferred to define
themselves more in line with "bloggers for the Revolution," or to
consider the Internet as an ideological battleground.

The great reach of the CLICK Festival lay in not defining itself in
those terms, but rather in being disposed to accommodate every kind of
opinion and trend. Even the invitation specified that no "final
statement insulting or discrediting anyone" would be drafted. A
necessary declaration given the tendency to conclude such events with an
ideological reaffirmation, as has been the case with other meetings on
social networks and blogs.

The festival announcement spoke in purely technological terms, and
thousands of invitations were sent to official websites, institutional
bloggers, and even Twitter accounts that have systematically attacked
alternative voices. As "at the table of the poet Walt Whitman, everyone
is welcome here" read a little pamphlet that circulated days before the
opening of the event.

But the official response was swift. A day before the CLICK Festival
began, the site Cubadebate attacked with an editorial that had all the
appearance of a threat. They called the event "a subversive monster" and
linked it to the old hobgoblins of official propaganda: "the CIA, the
Pentagon and the United States." Anyone in their right mind would have
canceled the CLICK Festival for fear of reprisals and attacks on the
site, but as everyone who has spent too much time in front of a screen
tends to have "a screw loose," the organizers decided to continue with
everything as planned.

So on June 21 at 9:00 in the morning, in a Havana battered by rain, the
first session began. Among the key presenters was José Luis Antúnez who
was part of the organizing committee for the Spain Blogs Event (EBE),
Antonio Rodiles who leads the project Estado de Sats, and Yoani Sanchez,
this writer, who heads the Cuban Blogger Academy.

The fear triggered by the harsh criticism leveled from official sites
against the Festival influenced the number of attendees. That was
probably the objective of the aggressive editorial: to dissuade many
from even coming to the site. However, during the three days of the
event, about two hundred people attended either as panelists or
audience. Given the fear unleashed by any attack of this kind — launched
from the government — the number of participants was surprisingly high.
In the words of @npimienta89 — one of the young twitterers who dared to
come despite the official demonization — the reality was far from the
claims of Cubadebate.

"I came to see for myself and I have not seen the horror film that they
announced," he confirmed in his Twitter feed. Phrases like this arose
throughout the event, while some observers, initially skeptical,
witnessed that the discussion really was about technology and the
Internet. Amid the extreme polarization on ideological issues that
exists in Cuban society, the broad scope of the Festival remained
focused on social networks and cyberspace.

There were eight panels including the presentation and explanation of
the program, plus a movie night discussion dedicated to the documentary
"How Did Facebook Change the Arab world?" Among the topics addressed was
the immediacy and brevity of Twitter, adapted of course to the Cuban
context and the peculiar ways in which citizens manage to publish on
this microblogging service.

Looking to the future, one of the chats was dedicated to thinking about
the first points for a possible bill of rights for Cuban internauts,
moderated in this case by the lawyers Laritza Diversent and Yaremis
Flores, along with the blogger Regina Coyula. There was also time for
technical issues… pure and simple. Such was the case with the workshop
let by @jlantunez about how to publish on the content manager WordPress.
Abstraction also had its moment, raised in the topic "Social Complexity
and New Technologies," which sparked an extremely intense debate.

During the last day there was a technology space dedicated to children,
where these little ones could try out an iPad for the first time, as
well as a PC and an iPhone. This session offered the most beautiful
scenes, with visions of the future from the entire CLICK Festival.

On the same days as this festival of technology, the government
organized its own Festival of Knowledge. According to official TV, more
than one hundred thousand Cubans throughout the country participated in
this event. Asked about it, those participating the alternative festival
said they were pleased to have prompted such a hasty official response.
"If the wall of disinformation that we want to tear down ends up being
moved by those who support it, then we are satisfied," as one
participant said.

So amid the steady drizzle that fell on the city, Havanans had the
opportunity to talk about Twitter's little blue bird, socializing on
Facebook, and even this gadget called a cellphone that is spreading
little by little over the Island.

Three days to "think about technology, project it, make it our own," as
the CLICK Festival motto said, and so we did. The kilobytes came out a
winner, the extremists lost.

1 July 2012

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