Rubira and Gil-Egui

Response to Rubira and Gil-Egui's "Political Communication in the Cuban Blogosphere: A Case Study of Generation Y."

I saw many connections and reverberations of Castells in Rainer Rubira and Gisela Gil-Egui’s “Political communication in the Cuban blogosphere: A Case Study of Generation Y.” Primarily, and I think Castells may agree, Generation Y provides a space for Cubans and non-Cubans to discuss social and political issues that they would not otherwise be able to discuss. However, “a blog that chronicles its author’s residence in the country, but targets an audience mostly located outside it because of internal restrictions to Internet access and censorship by the Cuban government (171)” shows that there is a struggle to occupy space. The occupied space is critical. According to Castells, “The critical matter is that this new public space, the networked space between the digital space and the urban space, is a space of autonomous communication. The autonomy of communications is the essence of social movements” (11). Rubira and Gil-Egui explain, “No Cuban citizen can host a site on a national server… Private access to the Internet at home is still illegal and possible only through the black market or through hotels and tourist resorts, at prices well beyond the purchasing power of the average wage-earner in Cuba” (155). Perhaps, if we consider Castells work, a social movement, we might say, is not possible because of the limited access Cubans have to the Internet.

            Castells, aside from holding a rather utopic view on how much access the countries he discussed had to the Internet, and apart from mentioning the Occupy movement, negated to relate how much experience people had with activism. This is echoed in Rubira and Gil-Egui’s article when they write “Challenges in this regard in the Cuban context emerge not only because of unequal access to technology and important differences in media literacy between Cubans inside and outside the country…but also because of Cuban civil society’s lack of experience in democratic dialogue and mediation of difference” (174). If Cubans have little access to the Internet as well as little experience in having real political dialogue and moments of mediation, what can we really expect to happen? Castells wrote that historically social movements have been dependent on the existence of specific communication (currently multimodal, digital networks) and that feeding that energy for whatever is being made an issue is dependent upon a constant generation of ideas. Ideas cannot be generated or mediated so readily or so easily in Cuba. If outrage has to go through all of these hoops (using a German host, depending on friends in other countries, etc.), how can hope continue to sew itself to her?

            I don’t agree with the following, that “Generation Y provides a space for exchanges on Cuban politics and other issues of public concern in that country, which is relatively open to people outside and inside it as well as relatively free of governmental control. In other words, Generation Y represents one thriving instance in the constellation of communicative spaces that constitute the global public sphere, as defined by Castells (2008).” (159). Does it really provide a space for true response? It didn’t seem clear that Rubira and Gil-Egui knew who was responding to the blog. They new numbers and they could code the names of those responding to Generation Y, but can they track whether those responding are inside or outside the country in one with such limited access and one where punishment for speaking out is possible?

Rubira and Gil Egui write that “[D]espite the difficulties in accessing the Internet, gaps in terms of media literacy, and scarce experience in political dialogue, digital networks have led to the establishment of a meeting place for different sectors of civil society, located both inside and outside the country” (160) and I wonder if sometimes the digital space is all that can be done. Does it make the social movement lesser because it cannot occupy space? Slower?

           The authors also write that “[w]ith Twitter, Sanchez has gotten much more active in politics, expanding her reach to other platforms, such as cell phones. However, Twitter’s interactive capabilities fall short of opening opportunities for real and substantial dialogue between Sanchez and her followers, which could lead to enrichment of the topics addressed in her blog, mostly because of Twitter’s restrictions on post lengths (140 characters)” (164).  Later in the article the authors discuss how the blog responses are often to the most recent responses (165). Really, is social movement dependent upon conversation? Certainly it raises awareness, but I can’t help but question if we waiting for a meaningful event to occur like Castells says is necessary for a social movement to take place. And what, in a country with so little access, with constant fear of punishment, and with little space to be activists or simply in dialogue, would that event have to be?