The Blogging Revolution
By Antony Loewenstein
Melbourne University Press, 2008
294 pages, $32.95 (pb)
Antony Loewenstein is confused. Flushed with the success of his first book, My Israel Question, he has ventured into the wider world of global politics and has stumbled.
His second book, The Blogging Revolution, attempts an analysis of the cyber-media and democracy, by reference to six countries: Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China.
This choice of countries alone should ring warning bells. China remains the subject of a broad US strategy of "containment" and the US State Department maintains Cuba, Iran and Syria are "state sponsors of terrorism". All six countries are amongst the fifteen listed by the US government-funded group Reporters without Borders (RSF) as "enemies of the internet".
The Bush administration, in turn, has trumpeted these RSF "findings" in support of its campaigns to de-legitimise regimes and, at the right moment, overthrow them.
In its efforts to create a "new American century" the US administration has focused heavily on domination of communications systems and the "embedding" of mass media, in attempts to attach moral legitimacy to their appalling interventions.
In 2005, US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld said that the Pentagon was going to use the internet "as if it were a weapon of war". US concern for absolute surveillance of the internet has seen it develop Operation Echelon, which, for two decades, has intercepted most telephonic and digital communications in the world.
And having blocked Cuba's internet fibre-optic cable access for many years, the US now criticises it for denying widespread internet access.
There is little hint of such geopolitics in Loewenstein's book, which, on the contrary, shadows RSF's "enemies of the internet" campaign, and their Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents, and adopts much of that ideological baggage.
His "blogging revolution" thus seeks to "unite" otherwise marginalised and repressed individual voices as beacons of hope. No mention of the differing interests and politics of these bloggers. No mention of organised resistance. The perspective is standard Western individualism, tagged as cross-cultural "revolution".
The principal basis for Loewenstein's assertions on the internet and general politics of each country is that he spent a week or two in each of these six countries. Yet it seems he barely speaks a word of any of the relevant languages (Persian, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese).
I will comment more on his chapter on Cuba, as it is the only one of these countries I know, having travelled there five times in the past decade, using the internet on each occasion. I maintain email contact with about forty people in Cuba.
Loewenstein begins his Cuba chapter with the assertion that famous novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, because they have expressed strong admiration for Fidel Castro, are "either deluding themselves or lying". No evidence precedes this striking judgement.
In the following two pages his references are to President George Bush, a remark by a UN official (who appears not to have visited Cuba) and his own experience with Cuban officials.
This direct contact with the "repressive regime" is the one light moment in a chapter that relies mostly on encounters with a few of the famous Cuban "dissidents".
Having been informed by a US journalist that the Cubans had "tightened the screws on gaining information from sources", Loewenstein finds himself interrogated "in a windowless room" at his hotel by immigration officials. In the event they "seem[ed] friendly enough", he says he is just a tourist, and they leave.
The background to this official scrutiny is not made clear, but the chapter helps explain it. Loewenstein was in the country not as a tourist but as a journalist. Further, he was in Cuba to interview a group of self-titled "independent journalists", who do not work as journalists in Cuba but are paid by Miami-based groups.
In 2003, several of these people were charged and convicted of collaborating with the US to overthrow the Cuban constitution. Lowenstein notes that several had been jailed but does not explain the charges.
Loewenstein was not alone in ignoring such details, and accepting the "dissidents" denials at face value. The US-based Human Rights Watch and Amnesty USA (whose members are banned under US law from visiting Cuba) also supported the jailed "dissidents". However this is an example of the "western-centric perspective" Loewenstein purports to reject. Certainly the US and Australia would arrest any person paid by organisations that specifically aimed to overthrow their constitution.
What of the internet in Cuba? This was supposedly the subject of the chapter. Well on my anecdotal experience, since the year 2000, internet access is slow and expensive, except in workplaces where it is slow and free.
The satellite connections have sped it up a little, between 2000 and 2008, but not by much. Home computer and internet usage rates are very low, but almost all professionals and all the university students I have spoken to in recent years have internet access at work or at college.
As Loewenstein correctly notes, the US economic blockade of Cuba is the main stricture on access and bandwidth. The debate is really over how much more the government might be restricting access, or blocking sites. Loewenstein produces no evidence on this, just hearsay assertion.
I have not personally experienced any limits, either from hotel internet, public internet cafes or when using a computer at a workplace. My experience does not mean no restrictions exist but, where they exist, we need to consider whether these are for reasons of bandwidth or of censorship.
Any serious analyst (as opposed to a lazy journalist) must look beyond anecdotes and hearsay to the broader evidence.
What is the available evidence? On the UN figures, which Loewenstein quotes, internet usage in Cuba seems very low — around 2% according to the 2007-08 Human Development Report. However the UNDP acknowledges that these figures "can be misleading owing to multiple prepaid internet accounts, free internet access accounts or public internet access such as internet cafes". That is, what has been measured is personal access.
However, in Cuba shared facilities are given priority, and measures that relate to individual benefits do not always fit. There are more than ten times the number of computers in workplaces (79,636 in 2006) than in private houses (7402 in 2006) and there are youth centres with free computer access (600 in 2006).
Internet cafe costs range from US$1 to $6 per hour but a number of libraries also provide free internet access.
About one third of people have some access to computers — mainly through workplaces, schools and colleges — and an increasing number of these are being connected to the internet. Cuba estimated the number of people with access to email as 990,000 in 2006. That would put over 10% of the Cuban population on email today.
Based on this data, I would estimate that, while only around 2% of Cubans have personal or home access, the number of people with access through schools, libraries and workplaces seems to be about five times this.
The central problem is bandwidth or capacity and, given the US blockade, this will not be solved until the fibre-optic cable between Venezuela and Cuba is laid, in late 2009 or early 2010.
None of this is to say that there is no censorship in Cuba. But journalists should cite proper evidence to back their claims. The most obvious and visible forms of censorship come from the US, and one of these receives brief attention in Loewenstein's chapter. He notes that Google Earth has been "made inaccessible by Google itself and apparently not by the [Cuban] authorities".
Indeed, access to Google Earth is not just blocked to Cubans; US law blocks access to residents of Syria, Iran and other countries.
Further, a number of US-based companies, including McAffee, under US law, block browsers from Cuban-identified servers. The US government has even closed down third-party websites that advertise travel to Cuba.
Loewenstein's ignorance of Cuba is extensive. There would be little wrong with this if he did not pretend to know so much.
Lowenstein's assertions on Cuba, if they are read, will add reassuringly to the cloud of misinformation actively promoted in corporate media monopolies, which oppose any system that rejects privatisation. This is hardly subversion of the "western-centric" view of the world, as he claims.
He quotes the anti-Cuban "dissidents" and Miami-linked bloggers. Yet for good critical yet pro-socialist blogs on Cuba the reader is advised visit Circles Robinson's site and/or the I Am My Own Reporter website
Roberts has some pertinent advice: "I don't advise you to go to Cuba at all if you don't speak Spanish, haven't seen enough of the horrors of the Third World to realize you're not seeing them in Cuba, and haven't got enough sense to know when you're being conned by a hustler who tells you what he thinks Americans want to hear hoping you'll adopt him for a week."
[Abridged from a review originally published at http://www.links.org.au]