Cuba Accuses the U.S. of Producing “Cyber-mercenaries”

Yoani Sanchez is identified as a “counter-revolutionary” in a TV report. Cuba labels the international awards she has received as “manipulated.”

Cuban officials on Monday accused the U.S. of creating a new type of counter-revolution, composed of “cyber-mercenaries,” including the blogger Yoani Sánchez, who in turn denounced the “demonization” of the Internet and new technologies on the island on her website.

On Monday Cuban state television broadcast a new program as part of a series that began several weeks ago to denounce the alleged subversive plans and “cyberwar” waged by the U.S. against the island, dedicated this time to “cyber-dissidents,” with special attention to Yoani Sánchez.

According to the program, the projects of these independent bloggers are instruments “created” by the U.S. to generate sources of internal conflicts through the use of new technologies.”

In the report Yoani Sanchez is identified as a “counter-revolutionary,” and the numerous international awards she has won are labeled as “manipulated,” the total sum of which, according to the program, is half a million dollars.

The program also includes how the U.S. president, Barack Obama, and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, have publicly endorsed Sanchez, whose links to foreign embassies in the island and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana were highlighted, as well as her support to opposition groups like the Ladies in White.

According to the report, the “faces” of this new form of “counter-revolution” are not “elderly, resentful and tired” people, referring to the traditional dissenters, but bloggers, self-proclaimed “fighters for freedom of online expression who demand free access to information for the Cuban people.”

For her part, Yoani Sanchez put up a video on her blog on Monday where she appears in a discussion with other dissidents claiming that the Cuban government “has no political desire to allow widespread access to the Internet” on the island.

In her view, the authorities of her country “demonize technology and the Internet” because they are concerned that social networks “can play a similar role in Cuba” to what has happened in places like Egypt and Tunisia.

“It is alarming because access to the Internet is a human right in the world today. A government that restricts and demonizes this knows that it is compromising the development of its nation in the long term,” Sánchez maintains.

In the program broadcast on Cuban television, “media campaigns” that large international communication groups maintain against Cuba were also denounced.