Cuban Doctor Blog Goes Missing

Some kind of post-Berlin lack of energy depression is effecting everything I do lately. Not sure the cause yet, though experts seem to agree.. sleep would help. But before I try to head off to sleep at a slightly more reasonable hour than normal, I wanted to share some disturbing news that Warwick of Nimbin radio alerted me to in the comments yesterday.

Photo Hosted at Buzznet.comYou may recall a few weeks ago I did a podcast on the troubles in East Timor, during which I referred to a few bloggers who are working there. One of them was a Cuban Doctor, working in Timor. His blog, written in Spanish, was one of my particular favorites for its honest observations and especially for the photos. The latest of which were particularly graphic with the many injured in the recent violence. Fingers missing, bloody headwounds, etc… as he described “the pain” in his own words:

El dolor no se siente por la TV, ni tampoco se puede percibir a través de la mejor de las fotos… el dolor se siente solamente en uno mismo…

His blog has recently gone down. Seemingly, someone has taken it down, perhaps even he himself. But why, I still don’t know. I emailed the author – Alexis – wishing him well and thanking him for his work. I generally hope he is ok, perhaps it’s nothing more than the Cuban authorities telling him those images and stories are not allowed to be shared through a blog. That at least would be better than hearing something bad happened to him physically or mentally. Naturally I also hope his blogging resumes, somehow, somewhere, as his first hand testimony was far better than much of what one finds in the big media outlets.

Fortunately for those who use RSS, his feed still works and you can read some of the text and some of the images. I’ve saved a few for my own records, so that his blog lives on, in some form.

bm134 East Timorese Problems and the Bloggers That Observe First-Hand

+++ Fixed+++
In late May, violence erupted in the streets of Dili. For many, memories of the nightmare of 1999 resurfaced. But beyond that, the question of what will become of this tiny and young nation also returned. In this podcast I attempt to look at the economic and social factors that are working against East Timor, and how violence fits into the puzzle.

In this show I focus on 3 Timor based blogs:

El Diario de la resistencia – Alexis Oriol Caceres of the Cuban Medical Brigade
Dili-gence, with the subheading Random Observations from an English Speaking Foreigner in Dili,Timor-Leste
Dili-Dalying (Two Years in Timor Leste), an Australian Couple
who work in East Timor and were evacuated to Australia around may 25th

And here’s the item on Coffee in East Timor