by Will Cade

Where I’m from in the States, some young people are scared to put their wild party pictures on Facebook or MySpace, in case their current or future employers frown on such things. Many of my older friends have even removed their Wall-post section, so their boss can’t read into their private life. The U.S. may be called the land of the free, but business is obviously still business. The last thing someone would be scared of, though, is having problems with the government because of a party picture, a wall post, or a blog.

I read today that the Cuban Bloguera, Yoani Sanchez, has been awarded a prestigious Spanish Journalism Award - the Ortega and Gasset Prize in digital journalism - for her blog Generation Y. In it, Sanchez recounts her frustrations living under a communist government that considers freedom of expression to be as dangerous as an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague. She will not not even be able to receive her award here in Spain, because the Cuban government has denied her an exit Visa (and I thought Visa’s were only required to enter countries?)

As a fellow blogger and human being, I was curious to see what Sanchez has to say. But when I checked her blog online (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony) the website was “currently unavailable.” A coincidence, I wondered, or can dictatorships even shut down websites? I discovered that STRATO, the Internet Service Provider which manages her website, is based in Germany, which I doubt takes orders from the Cuban Government. Still I couldn’t read Sanchez’s writing, so I did the next most informative thing I could think of: I got on Facebook.

I wasn’t even sure if Facebook was legal in Cuba, and at first I had a hard time finding real Cubanos (not just people named Cuba). I eventually found a few Cuban groups which looked both politically grounded and open minded, until I saw that they were based out of the U.S. and Sweden. Finally, I found the group “Cubans on Facebook,” but it was a closed group, so I couldn’t learn that much. After hearing what is happening with Yoani Sanchez, though, I didn’t blame them for publicly guarding their privacy: They might lose more than their jobs if word got out what they were doing in their free time.