PANEL DISCUSSION
Promoting Democracy in Closed Societies

Presentation by Annabelle Rodríguez
Asociación ENCUENTRO de la Cultural Cubana

Since my arrival, I have been confronted with the perception of some of my colleagues here that Cuba is not such a closed society. So, before starting my presentation, I would like to put forward some points that may be useful for the audience:

• The Cuban government does not allow the existence of political parties nor any type of associations other than the official ones. Therefore, none of the NGOs sharing this Assembly would be able to work in Cuba.
  
  
• Only official press, radio and television are allowed. There is no possibility to publish any independent opinion or exert any public control over the government. By means of Law 88, seventy-five writers and journalists are now in prison with sentences of up to twenty-six years.
  
  
• A special permit is required for citizens to travel outside the country. For those who live abroad, a visa is required to enter their own country and it is frequently denied on political grounds.
  
  
• No labor legislation protects workers. Strikes are forbidden. Cuban workers are paid in local pesos, while foreign enterprises must pay in dollars to the official agency that hires them forcefully. The government keeps the dollars.
  
  
• The use of new technologies is not allowed to common citizens, and that includes even fax machines, the purchase of photocopiers, and of course the Internet. Anything that may disseminate opinion different from the government's is considered a crime.

I- Obstacles and Strategies
It is a common characteristic of all closed societies that the government tries to establish a barrier between those who leave the country and those who remain inside for whatever reason. This barrier may not be as visible as the Berlin Wall, but it is not less violent when imposed by other means.

The most perverse outcome of this policy is always to create the perception among the population inside, that those who left are now their enemies and a potential danger. This perception contaminates all the spheres: politics, culture, academic exchanges, and civil society.

When confronted with this situation, Jesús Díaz and the other founders of Encuentro, who refused to accept this division, understood that the only intelligent way to reach the entire Cuban community, regardless of their place of residence, was to ignore this false division, as stated in the first Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana issue: "One of the most unfortunate circumstances of the current national situation is resorting to divide the Cuban population in two sides, usually presented as irreconcilable, of those who live in the Island and those living in exile.

On the other hand, the temptation of groups in exile is to consider those staying in the country as regime's collaborators. Although there is an important number of active collaborators, we have always considered that the majority of the population has been kidnapped and, as a victim in captivity, may suffer serious consequences if they show their disagreement. This, against what might be expected, also extends to wide areas of the state apparatus.

So Encuentro set out to become "a space open to a scrutiny of our national reality", by publishing "the works by Cubans living in the Island, as well as by those living in other countries, and also foreign experts' reflections on our country and its situation." We got in touch with a wide group of writers, artists, economists, and academicians inside and outside the Island, and obtained their enthusiastic support to launch our project. It is important to stress that they represented a large universe of different ideas and aesthetic positions, and that the only conditions requested were criterion of quality and our rejection to publish personal attacks and claims for violence.

We also had to break the codes of the regime's official language, and find inside the Cuban society a down-to-earth language dealing with the real problems that worry the ordinary people. This meant, in addition, breaking the codes of the harshest language employed by some members of the exiled community, which were perceived as aggressive inside the Island and used by the government to frighten the population.

In short, we decided to create a platform for an open debate on the future of Cuba, a revision of the official version of our history, the analysis of subjects considered taboo: political prison, Angola war, military power, intervention in Latin America, etc., introducing in the Island a truly democratic publication. This proved to be much more subversive than the usual anti-Castro discourse, and found acceptance in a surprising number of readers in Cuba, who appreciated a non-prejudiced reflection and analysis of the critical situation they were living. From the first issue, we managed to send to Cuba an important number of copies, that today reaches the amount of 2,000. Samizdat-like chains of readers reach around 50 people per copy. Important members of the government seek and read the journal, and the impact this publication has had inside/outside Cuba has resulted in the stronger intellectual challenge to the Cuban government, and a severe damage to its international image.

In 2000, we launched our portal cubaencuentro.com, where our online newspaper Encuentro en la Red is hosted. We worked on the same pattern of ignoring the division inside/outside, covering the Cuban present affairs from the island and elsewhere, in news, oped, economy, sports, cultural, humor, ecology, and social areas.

The newspaper came to fill the gap of information and daily analysis to the extent that personalities close to the regime have learned of many events, such as the presence of talibans in Guantanamo, through it, making more evident the high level of censorship even they are under, which caused restlessness among some groups.

A crucial role of the newspaper is that it has widely covered views and activities of the diverse actors of internal dissidence, something that was always ignored in the official press. We began to disseminate this sector's opinions among academicians, writers, artists, opinion and decision makers all over the Island, building a bridge among this demonized area of the civil society, and the intellectual and academic elites of the country.

As a result, we deserved the most virulent attack ever launched by the Cuban authorities against a Cuban means of communication, through a portal La Jiribilla expressly declared by them to be created in order to neutralize Encuentro's "damaging influence".

However, despite all the Internet controls imposed by the Cuban government, we have set up an emailing system to send to the Island a text version of our newspaper, which keeps on reaching Cuba. These emails carry an important multiplier effect, since they are forwarded in turn to other email addresses inside the Cuban intranet, and are also printed and distributed by those who have the means to do it.

Our third project, Encuentro Connections, is an interactive platform where different Cuban communities will be hosted starting this year. The interests that may link these communities are of all sorts: political, social, professional. We intend to develop workshops for architects, engineers, economists, who may wish to contribute in a hopefully near future to a peaceful and articulated transition towards democracy and to the reconstruction of the country.

II- What can the world democratic community do for us?
Although we have already received great support and encouragement from institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy, The Ford Foundation, The Open Society Institute, the European Commission, the Olof Palme Center, and in Spain, the Spanish Cooperation Agency (AECI), and others, there is much more that we could do if we had a larger budget, so the first obvious answer is funding. This would allow us to:

• make CD copies of our journal and our newspaper and forward them to Cuba;
  
  
• hire the professionals needed to coordinate each of the areas of our project Connections, as well as the programmers needed to classify and organize the information;
  
  
• travel to present our project in different cities where we have been invited to, such as Stockholm, Paris, Mexico, and New York; and,
  
  
• follow up on the signatories of Encuentro's Open Letter Against Repression in Cuba so that, eventually, we could organize a Platform of Culture for Democracy in Cuba.

• We would like to suggest the organizers, to consider the creation of a Software Developing Center, gathering programmers and supporters within a platform that could render services to all members of this movement as well as to a large number of NGOs all over the world.
  
  
• We also suggest to help creating an interphase to further interaction via email with different platforms and applications. This is extremely necessary and urgent for countries with high levels of censorship where individuals, even if they count on an email service, are not allowed to navigate freely on the web, as is the case of Cuba. With this interphase, the email address owner would be able to interact with a platform in order to search in the web the services and information he or she may need.

• sending us a mailing list of personalities in their area who we should make aware of the Cuban situation and by sending them our journal Encuentro;
  
  
• advising about media in their area that would welcome our oped, articles, reports on the Cuban real situation;
  
  
• in turn, sending us analysis and information about their countries that may be published in our newspaper.