cuba – Citizen Reporter

Cuban Medical Talk

My friend Chris Lydon posted an excellent Radio Open Source recently, as he is making his way around Cuba. As opposed to the highly revered personalities and voices he usually offers us, this time Chris runs into three American medical students who have been studying medicine in Cuba for the last 4 years.

The three ladies have great stories of how they came to study in Cuba and even better tales of how things work or don’t work in their day to day lives. They not only talk about what is unique and effective about Cuban style medicine, they also talk about how they will bring it home to the United States, to communities in need.
There’s much more in this interview then these few lines can properly capture. Do what you do best: listen for yourself.

Cuban Blogger Crackdown

Part of visiting the US and my homestate of New Jersey, means constant visting friends and quality family time, hence the reduced posting.

I did want to point out the issue of the Cuban bloggers and a recent crackdown on their work and collective activities.? I’ve noticed reports about this on Global Voices and then recently Marc Cooper wrote a piece on it for Mother Jones:

Havana-based writer Yoani Sanchez was recently named by Time magazine as one the 100 most influential people in the world, and she won the 2008 Ortega y Gasset award for digital journalism. But that didn’t stop Cuban authorities from directly threatening her with jail last week.

Reading the content on the Cuban blogs, highlighted on GV, you’ll see statements by government agents who confronted the bloggers with threats and warnings that they had overstepped their freedoms, being accused of being on the side of so-called counter-revolutionaries.

It is, to a limited extent, surprising that the Cuban government is going about things this way. Especially when they could have built some momentum towards being more open domestically and internationally, to free-speech, self-criticism, and new ways of communicating in general.? When Raul first took the reigns, little things the the availability of mobile phones and some change in travel restrictions may have been a sign of a new direction to come. Alas, when it comes to blogging and citizen reporters, they’ve taken a sharp turn in the wrong direction.

Still technology and the voices using technology, will find a way.

Layers of Cuba

Im a news hound. Especially for certain topics, certain parts of the world, or certain journalists…. I virtually clip tons of things on the average day. Lately one of the frequent topics that I’ve paid extra attention to, is Cuba.

Surely Im not alone, but unlike people who are only hoping for a collapse of the political system there, I’m more interested to hear about people’s experiences, and learn about the different layers that make up today’s Cuba.

One of my favorite sources, who’s podcast interviews lately have me rewinding and listening twice or three times even, just to hear the details again, is RadioOpen Source. Chris has been speaking with different people with very different connections with Cuba, and it has made for some educational and eye opening audio.

The first guest was Patrick Symmes. I love this author for a book that mr. D-Rock gave me many years ago, Chasing Ché. Well, he’s been working on a book about Cubans and Cuba and spending alot of time there, he has some very interesting things to share from those adventures.

The second is a man by the name of Adrian Lopez Denis, a social historian and son of a Cuban doctor, who’s descriptions of Cuba dispel alot of the stories we’ve always heard. He also points out the very symbolic fact that while after his stepping-down, big news magazines used images of cigars to represent Fidel, the man had actually quit smoking 40 years ago. But beyond that he uncovers alot of facts about culture and society that are really worth listening to.

And while all this is going on, I’ve been amazed to watch my blogger friend Alexis Oriol, go from being a doctor for the Cuban medical corps in East Timor, to being a refugee without a country, to being a new resident of Miami. An unbelievable turn of events that has me asking out loud sometimes, “did this really happen”. But the answer is yes, and if you read spanish at all, I recommend reading through the blog. OR you can wait a few months because Alexis is sure to become an english language blogger and more American than most Americans (like me, for example)

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.

You 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.