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Reporters Without Borders just released its list of 12 nations it considers "Internet enemies."
Not surprisingly, Cuba again made the grade.
Among its transgressions, the Castro dictatorship has upped the pressure on dissident bloggers:
In the last few months, the authorities have begun to unfavorably view this dissemination of news that has been outside of their control and to be offended by the increasing popularity of some of these bloggers, such as Yoani Sanchez and her blog, Generacion Y. Voted by Time magazine in 2008 as one of the year's 100 most influential people, she has been hounded by a genuine defamation campaign on the island. Accused of being a mercenary serving a foreign power, her name has been dragged through the mud by the state media. On November 6 of last year, state security policemen assaulted Yoani Sanchez and blogger Orlando Luis Pardo on the eve of a demonstration. A third blogger, Luis Felipe Rojas, was arrested twice in December 2009 and is being kept under house arrest.
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A student named Darío Alejandro Paulino Escobar was expelled from the University of Havana in January 2010 for having created a "polemic" group on the social network Facebook. The group in question contained the minutes of a meeting held by the Union of Young Communists (UYC) (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=93444203329). The authorities are now determined to occupy an area that they had previously overlooked: an official association of Cuban bloggers has been created. And possible links between the Cuban government and hackers who are attacking Cuban websites and blogs hosted abroad are under heavy scrutiny.
The judicial arsenal against online criticism remains particularly repressive. Cuban Internet users face up to 20 years in prison if they post what is deemed to be a "counter-revolutionary" article on a foreign-hosted Internet website, and 5 years if they connect illegally to the international network.
Read the whole section on Cuba, here.
Marc Masferrer edits and writes CUBA Uncommon Sense
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