A short but interesting piece in the New York Times on IT and political activism in Cuba.
A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress....
“It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”...
[T]he government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.
People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night.
Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.
Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.
“There is a whole underground market of this stuff,” Ariel said.
This sounds similar to the story told in Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi's great article "Small Media for a Big Revolution," about the role that cassette tapes played in Iranian protest movements in the late 1970s.
She talks about three technologies in particular: the cassette tape, the leaflet, and foreign news services. Cassette tapes are small, easily hidden, highly portable, and relatively easy to copy with equipment ranging from the cheap to the industrial-strength and expensive; they also fit in well with a culture that had 65% illiteracy, and still favored oral over printed negotiation. Single-page xeroxed leaflets "were another form of small media utilized by the opposition." These were likewise easy to produce, copy, and publicize. Finally, Iran's intelligentsia had "had long supplemented… domestic information channels with various international media such as imported newspapers and news magazines, Persian-language broadcasting… and short-wave radio" (BBC Persia was a favorite).
The difference in that case was that new information technologies were seen as tools of the state and modernizers; much of what Sreberny-Mohammadi is interested in is how traditional institutions and centers of political discourse and information exchange-- in particular the mosque and the bazaar-- appropriated modern technologies for their own use. As she puts it,
The traditional elements with the help of perceptive advisors embarked upon an ingenious and creative adaptation of modern technologies of communication to serve their own purpose…. Current media technologies such as audio tapes and xerography allow multiple points of production and distribution so that they are almost untraceable and irrepressible, providing powerful tools of political propaganda that even the most authoritarian regime finds hard to control.
Despite the differences between the two cases, one can imagine that the problems the Iranian government of the 1970s had with tapes, leaflets, and BBC are likely to be even harder to deal with in an age of flash drives and cell phone cameras.
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