The Empire and the Barbarians in Internet Times

On my way to this forum, I saw a scene that caught my attention at Tocumen Airport in Panama. The same type of tape that is used to organize lines of passengers in airports was surrounding a group of them. Several security guards were watching, and those who entered the isolated area had to go through the X-ray check again after having had already passed through it before getting their tickets or boarding a previous flight.

Concerned about the fate of those temporarily inhabiting that corral, I saw the five letters that made that display both clear and funny to me at the same time. “Miami,” it said on the monitor located beside the quasi-celestial door that the chosen people had had to cross. To confirm my suspicions, I asked one of the guards if, as I thought, those passengers were being treated that way because they were going to the United States. And at the affirmative answer, I laughed. I laughed loudly and defiantly, with perhaps, a laughter only a Cuban could understand.

That’s because it’s Miami from where the four people came who just two weeks ago were arrested in Cuba while planning terrorist acts, in the continuation of a saga that has cost thousands of lives but that the media often ignore when they report that the U.S. government says Havana is the one supporting terrorism.

But that’s not possible: neither in truth, nor fiction. When already in flight, the corralling will turn into indoctrination, and the films will be ones like “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” which tells of how the CIA saves the world from a terrorist plot to destroy the dollar, orchestrated by Russian alcoholics who are so clumsy that they let their wallets be stolen, or “The Monuments Men,” where the same army that only a few years ago destroyed the Baghdad Museum stars in the rescue of gems of universally recognized art from the hands of the Nazis.

With propaganda, redoubled vigilance and fourth-generation wars, the empire wants to keep the barbarians under control and away from its borders. With a waste of billions of dollars for over 55 years, the U.S. government is trying in Cuba what we have seen happen in Ukraine, and what we have seen repeatedly attempted in Venezuela: Training and funding terrorists, illegal radio and television, and the construction of a currency for an internal “opposition” have preceded the use of the Internet for the same purpose, and recent operations, which the American press has revealed, have used information and communications technology for the strategy of “regime change” in Cuba.

For a Cuban, it might seem too much to insist on it, but the ignorance and obscurity that I found here on the subject compel me to narrate the latest in a seemingly endless war.

While the revelations of former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden continue exposing the American use of global communications for intelligence and control, the Associated Press news agency shined a light on a program known as ZunZuneo, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, that created a network of users in Cuba through mobile phones with the aim of provoking a situation similar to the so-called “Arab Spring.” While the spokespersons of the White House and Department of State and the USAID director denied the illegal, secret and political nature of ZunZuneo, successive AP reports have revealed front companies in third countries managing ZunZuneo; theft of data from the users of the Cuban telecommunications company, ETECSA; the ranking of those users by their political attitudes; and a meeting between Vice President Joe Biden with several people associated with the program.

Following these revelations, news broke of similar programs against Cuba, known as Piramideo and Commotion — the latter was revealed by the New York Times — which USAID tested in Tunisia. The scandal has been great, but with the exception of Telesur, the Mexican daily La Jornada and the Argentine Page 12, few Latin American media have investigated or published analyses on the subject.

What abounds in the mainstream media of the continent are reports attacking Cuba, which is consistent with other revelations by U.S. journalist Tracey Eaton proving that between 2012 and 2014, the U.S. spent more than half a million dollars to pay journalists in Latin America and Spain for that purpose.

The money is in addition to what the mainstream press pays columnists and bloggers within Cuba, who are aligned with the campaigns of Washington’s interests. With their biased reports, they are charged with coloring the reality that the economic blockade — the persecution and fines on those banks and companies that do business with Cuba — seeks to create, always presented in its effects but never its causes.

Thus, none of the informants murdered in the last half century in Latin America is Cuban, but there are a very select few born on the island to whom the mainland media give the — well paid — privilege of explaining what is going on in their surroundings. And it isn’t an accident that an ex-official of the CIA named Dan Gabriel, with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, was hired to organize journalists in Cuba to submit five stories a week matching the vision that Washington needs to impose.

Following the revelations about ZunZuneo, Glen Greenwald — holder of the materials Snowden obtained — reported on how the U.S. and its allies are using the Internet for “crafting messaging campaigns to go ‘viral.'” Greenwald revealed — because of the scandal sparked by what the media have called “Cuban Twitter” — top secret documents of the headquarters of the British government communications, showing their work together with other Northern governments that “threaten the integrity of the internet itself, as state-disseminated propaganda masquerades as free online speech and organizing.” Even knowing this, or perhaps because of it, the British Broadcasting Corporation has not hesitated to go ahead with a blog exclusively for Cuba.

A look at our continent shows a counteroffensive against the processes of change on the continent; the mainstream press coordinates actions, not only to impose its candidates, as O Globo did with Collor de Melo in Brazil and Televisa with Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico, but also to overthrow those who have managed to sustain and boost benefits for the majorities.

When for the first time there was legislation on the continent to modify the oligarchic control over the media and especially television, the Inter American Press Association, Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House began tearing out their hair because cracks were opening in fulfillment of the missions that powerful interests assigned to these organizations decades ago. They are worried because there are pro-government media that don’t hide their desire to keep pro-media governments, an aspiration already achieved in some of our countries and that encounters its non plus ultra in a character like like Silvio Berlusconi. The closed thermodynamic cycle in which politics functions in a so-called representative democracy — corporation, money, media campaign, government by the rich — starts to break down in some scenarios and spreads alarm among those who until recently were deciding who should govern.

” … I will finish my term without having dined with an owner of a newspaper, television channel, or business magazine,” President Lula said in an interview. How many others can proclaim the same when there exist not only presidents, but even bloggers, “alternative” and “independent” writers turned spokespeople for big media corporations?

Only information on earthquakes and hurricanes is spontaneous. Everything else stems from an agenda. As in the airport corral, some make the rules, and others comply. In the media, a few set the agenda, some are hired to carry it out, and many consume or even criticize without seeing the essential: the economic system that decides who can own and invite whom to eat, and who should sleep on the street without knowing how to read or write the word “Internet.”

The problem is not the media or the Internet, but the economic and social inequality that these can contribute to, amplify or diminish, as part of a system where only organized collective action by those who have hitherto been excluded — the “barbarians” as always — will create progress in the sense of justice and freedom. An example of this is the work of Brazilian bloggers and their Encounters BlogPro. That government has embraced a global forum on the need to democratize the governance of the Internet and has denounced the use of technology as a tool for espionage and interference at the United Nations.

To denounce is always easier than to build. As in the poem by Kavafis and Coetzee’s novel, the empire is expecting the barbarians and wants to move its borders. The Internet — where boundaries seem to disappear — can be a tool for liberation or domestication, and could serve to move toward more justice or the extension of existing inequalities and domination.

Converting the network of networks to a path for the construction of alternatives is only possible through organized collective action and the inclusion of the excluded, as active participants, not consumers, in the real world, which is what we must ultimately transform.

Text originally read at the IV National Encounter of Bloggers and Digital Activists of Brazil, Sao Paulo, May 16, 2014.