GitHub, the largest free software platform in the world, has published an incomplete list of 60 computer programs, sites and services restricted for Cuba by the unreasonable U.S. blockade, which according to Senator Marco Rubio does not exist. The list includes everything from the most popular videoconferencing platform in these times of pandemic, Zoom, to most Google applications, such as Code, Cloud, Maps and Play Publics.
The list is partial because services blocked a few weeks ago, such as Wetransfer, which allows anyone who does not live in Cuba to transfer computer files over the Internet and which journalists used to send photos, audios or videos to our newsrooms, are not included. Wetransfer is a company based in Amsterdam, which suddenly decided to abide by U.S. laws and deny access to Cubans.
The paradox is that this is happening when the White House, always such good friends with those from the South, has focused on two axes of the same interference discourse: it will dialogue with the Cubans (meaning Miami) to decide what new sanctions it will impose on the island, and it has decided to provide Cuba with a “new free Internet infrastructure” to make us very happy.
The dialogue with (Miami) Cubans, who do not want to talk to Biden, for whom they did not vote for and still believe he stole the election from Donald Trump, are seen as an extravagance of U.S. foreign policy. David Brooks, correspondent of La Jornada newspaper in the U.S., referred a few days ago to Biden’s meeting with a small group of Cuban-Americans at the White House to hear opinions on what is happening on the island, although most of those present have not set foot on our archipelago in a long time. Senator Robert Menendez, for example, has only seen a Cuban palm tree in photographs, while businessman Emilio Estefan has not known for 58 years what the street lamp on the Morro de Santiago de Cuba, the land where he was born, looks like.
However, as Brooks states, experts in foreign policy and bilateral relations “have confirmed that the case of Cuba is unique, in which Washington, under both parties, consults with the diaspora of a country within the United States to elaborate policy towards that nation”.
The Internet is even stranger. Washington accuses the Cuban government of being the enemy of the Internet, but blocks applications commonly used anywhere on the planet. It promises a new infrastructure with stratospheric balloons and other surrealistic variants, but these days it has subjected Cuba to every possible variant of network information warfare and direct cyberwarfare.
Cuban users have seen an unprecedented increase in the deployment of fake news, photos and videos from junk sites in Florida, which are even replicated by transnational media companies. Videos from July 11 have been repeated ad infinitum as if they were new, a deceptive tactic to give the impression that the protests have continued until today, although the country is in total calm. The use of electronic gateways (VPN) is encouraged to circumvent the national public network and, in particular, the use of Psiphon, a technology developed and financed by the United States Agency for Global Media, Washington’s propaganda agency, is advertised.
Cuban media and institutional websites have received hundreds of denial of service attacks from U.S. soil, where, in addition, domain names have been registered with rude words that redirect to pages of the national network. And if that were not enough, we live under the harassment of cybertroops organized from Miami that use troll farms and robots to generate on Twitter and Facebook the perception of chaos in Cuba and insult and even threaten to kill the main leaders, journalists, artists and other public figures, as well as ordinary citizens who dare to criticize the riots, to call for common sense against the alleged military intervention or simply do not express explicit rejection of the Cuban government or join the fascism with lies, trash and gossip that floods the networks.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English
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