According to Pardo, in December García and Vilches, residents of the Eastern Cuba province of Holguín, were sanctioned for acts such as exchanging emails with Cuban writers abroad, considered “improper conduct of intellectuals [...] to the revolutionary process.” According to Luis Felipe Rojas, a Holguín poet, this all occurred following a “meeting and purge” at the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, also known as UNEAC.

Writes Pardo:

Both writers were put through the same process used by communist regimes throughout the world, including meetings where they were encouraged to admit their “crimes” and criticize their own behavior. In fighting their dismissal, the two sanctioned writers did not assert their rights to free communication. To date, Vilches Proenza has remained silent, and Garcia Verdecia has said he was only offering intellectual critiques to strengthen the Cuban revolution.

Catching these men in their so-called counterrevolutionary acts was simplified by the fact that both depended on the writers union for their Internet access, which is both scarce and expensive on the island. The writers union operates its own cybercafé, open only to members, who pay hourly fees and must agree to abide by an ethics code. That code specifically bars visiting any web sites which might “represent a threat to socialist values.”

Until Tuesday, the writers union official site had not published anything about the case. It came to public attention, however, through Holguin poet Luis Felipe Rojas, who dared to post a report on his blog, Crossing the Barbed Wire.

Pardo, author of Lunes de Post-Revolución, is a member  of the “alternative Cuban blogosphere,” the growing network of bloggers that has gained world notoriety through Yoani Sánchez.

Access to the web in Cuba is limited to hotels, a few cyber cafes, embassies and public offices. Most of the dissident blogs are blocked inside the island, forcing bloggers to e-mail their texts to friends abroad who post them online.

In recent months, the Cuban regime, which has a long record of punishing dissidents, has engaged in different acts of repression against bloggers and writers. These have included the kidnapping and beating of Pardo, Sánchez and fellow blogger Claudia Cadelo, as well as the retaliatory erection of a wall on the yard of Convivencia magazine contributor Karina Gánvez Chiú.

CUBAN WRITERS FIRED FOR “IMPROPER USE” OF THE INTERNET [AllVoices]
In Times of Plague the Larger Specimens Will Die [AllVoices]


Photo of Verdecia and Proenza taken from an AllVoices post by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.

Ian Kelly
Department Spokesman

Washington, DC

November 9, 2009

The U.S. government strongly deplores the assault on bloggers Yoani Sanchez, Orlando Luis Pardo, and Claudia Cadelo. On November 6, these three activists were forcibly detained by plain clothes security personnel and beaten while en route to a peaceful demonstration in Havana.

The President has proclaimed November 9 World Freedom Day. It is precisely this sort of repression and violence against the voices of freedom and reconciliation that World Freedom Day is meant to expose. We call on the Government of Cuba to ensure the full respect of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all its citizens.

We have expressed to the Cuban government our deep concern with the assaults, and we are following up with inquiries to Yoani Sanchez, Orlando Luis Pardo, and Claudia Cadelo regarding their personal well-being and access to medical care.

Meanwhile, news of this statement and of the attack are predictably absent from the Cuban press. The websites of the Cuban News Agency, as well as those of official newspapers Granma and Juventud Rebelde, have no reports on Yoani Sánchez’s story.

Yoani Sánchez has resumed her activities. Her Twitter feed today reported she attended the meeting of the “Blogger Academy,” an independent center of teaching that gathers some 30 students. A post said she was recovering from her back injury, and that the Academy was “the best balm”:

We spoke to Yoani on Sunday night.

###

How are you, Yoani?

Well, I can’t say I’m fine, but I’m here.

I read the post where you narrate how you were kidnapped and beaten. Is there anything you want to add to it?

Well, a few hours ago I dictated a post through the phone — I imagine it’s already online. It’s a reflection on being a victim and the things that I didn’t say earlier.

One of the things that strikes me the most about this attack is that your blog is mainly about daily life in Cuba. You are not criticizing anybody in particular or making incendiary denouncements. Your posts are about simple things. It is shocking that the Cuban government can be afraid of that.

I don’t think they are afraid of me, because I’m just a little person that they can easily eliminate. What they are afraid of is the phenomenon of the alternative blogosphere, the phenomenon that more and more young people are projecting their voices: that is tremendously contagious. This is why they may be attempting to make a sort of ‘prevention,’ applying some sort of vaccine, so the blogger virus, the virus of opinions, does not spread. I don’t think their attack is against the person of Yoani Sánchez, but rather against the blogger phenomenon, a phenomenon of different opinions that is taking place in Cuba. They want to paralyze as many people as possible with a preventive strike.

“They don’t understand that these new phenomena can’t be fought with the old weapons of repression. They still haven’t understood the potential of the web.”

Has anything like this happened to you before? Were you followed or attacked?

In the two years I’ve been writing my blog, I’ve been living as if in one of those Saturday night films: people following me wherever I go. But until now they hadn’t interacted in a physical or violent way with me.

There was one precedent, however. During a rock concert, where some friends and I demanded the liberation of a musician, there was some sort of organized violence. But it was covered by the loud music and everything else going on at the concert. What happened [on Friday] was more direct, more aimed at the blogosphere. Those affected by this action were blogger Claudia Cadelo, blogger Orlando Luis Pardo and me. This shows that [those in the Government] are particularly stricken by the potential our words have through the Internet.

But that reasoning is flawed, too. Your work has received recognition outside of Cuba and it’s impossible to cut your access to the web. By attacking you, they might make you a greater figure than if they just ignored you.

Of course, but they are dunces. Their main problem is that they don’t understand that these new phenomena can’t be fought with the old weapons of repression. They still haven’t understood the potential of the web, and that these repressive measures do nothing but increase the number of hits on my blog. They haven’t understood very well what is it that the new technologies do, nor the different effects that repression causes when a blogger is attacked. So they are just employing the old methods of restraint, intimidation, and attempting to isolate you. But they actually produce the opposite effect.

In the post you wrote about the attack, you state that the actions of your kidnappers were motivated by the “the blustering terror of he who knows that his days are numbered.”

Yes, because when the arguments and the faith in a system are over, when the people stop believing in a certain political discourse, those who are in charge can only resort to violence and restraint. This is what we are seeing in Cuba now: the absence of any sort of argument, handling people through violence and fear. This is all we have left. There is no symbolical legacy, none the things that existed in the first years of the [revolutionary] process. Terror is the only thing that remains.

>>>NEXT: “I run towards the place where fear is born.”