To friends in Cuba...

To all my friends in Cuba and to the entire Cuban blogosphere, please take care and have a really really safe holiday!

Another Country, Another Journalist, Another Jail Cell

A Sri Lankan court has sentenced Tamil journalist J.S. Tissainayagam to 20 years in prison because he "criticized the government's conduct and accused authorities of withholding food and other essential items from Tamil-majority areas as a tool of war."

The government of Sri Lanka claims that although “the constitution guarantees media freedom, but no one has a right to deliberately publish false reports that would lead to communal violence.” All the while Mr Tissainayagam's defence lawyer upholds that the journalist has been a tireless fighter for Human Rights and has been jailed for simply doing his job.

Both Amnesty International and US President Obama seem to agree, as they have both singled out this reporter as an example of journalists being jailed for simply doing their jobs. Amnesty International also states that 14 journalists and media workers have been killed since 2006 and that 11 journalists were forced to flee the country since the end of the 25 year civil war in May of this year.

I don't really know what to add exactly to all this, I mean how many times can one speak of anger and outrage and shock at situations like these? God knows I've written about prisoners of conscience over and over again on this blog and I'm pretty sure that everyone who reads this agrees with me that it is wrong. The good part in all this is that being Canadian, I have never had to worry about being jailed for expressing my opinions and I've never had to watch over my shoulder for fear government assassins were following me around.

So my heart goes out, again, to all those who are jailed for expressing their thoughts, their opinions and all those who fight for the rights of others despite the possibility of losing the very rights they are fighting for.

There is No Border Here

Recently a good friend of mine gave me a picture she took in Havana. On the picture (seen above) you see yellow tape that's made to look like police tape, this was placed somewhere in Havana as part of the Bienal art festival and it reads: There Is No Border Here.

This picture, what it says, what it represents and the friend that gave it to me all make me think of one thing that I remember hearing for the first time back in 1994 (even though it was written in 1986, by +++The Mentor+++)... It makes me think of two paragraphs of the Hacker Manifesto which read:

"We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for."

And it gives me chills, both the Manifesto and the picture. Even though I am not a hacker, I am still a netizen, a citizen of the internet, as is everyone else who reads, comments or posts here. Everyone with a facebook, with a blog, with a myspace or anyone who has contributed to forums or websites. We are all the same. This place, this cyberspace, provides us with a borderless world, the true global village; it gives us a place where color, age, race, location and religion don't really matter.

Oppressive and regressive governments try to limit access to cyberspace because they see it as dangerous, but the more they say no the harder we push to hear yes. It might seem like something simple and insignificant to some of us, but for those living behind the walls of aggression cyberspace is their gateway to a world they've never seen and a place to say things that people would otherwise never hear.

So this post goes out to everyone who fights everyday to exist in this global community and to have their voices heard among so many others. This post goes out to anyone fighting and writing for their cause and for the cause of others. This post goes out to everyone who tries to make a difference.

Remember there truly is No Border Here.

Muchacho Enfermo

Worst Places to Blog From

There were no surprises for me when I first saw the list of Top Ten Worst Countries to be a Blogger to find countries such as Iran, Myanmar and Cuba included in the infamous list.

At number 2 Iran has a fairly large blogger population and most of them aren’t afraid of the things they say, I know that I follow a few Persian blogs and most of these people don’t mince words. However, the Iranian government has been holding an Iranian-Canadian blogger known as the Blogfather since October on charges of being an Israeli spy or something along those lines. The government there apparently isn’t afraid to stick bogus charges and throw due process out the door to silence offensive bloggers.

Myanmar (Burma) is a scary place if you’re a blogger... Right up there on the list at number 1 it has handed down ridiculously long prison sentences to blogger ranging in the 40-50 years behind bars (and please remember that these are not the nice Canadian jails with cable and a gym and 3 meals per day). But they forge on, the Burmese in exile publish blogs and write and get the news that even the international press can’t get. I’m fortunate enough to know one of these bloggers, Ashin Mettacara, who has a blog, a news site and has helped launch a social network called Smile Club to help Burmese and people from all around the world connect.

Cuba is the place that I’m most familiar with on this list. It sits at number 4 only because bloggers haven’t yet been given lengthy prison terms. Access to the internet is restricted in Cuba, especially for locals who can mostly only access it from government run “internet cafes” at the ridiculous price of 5 or 6 Cucs per month when the average wage is 18-20 Cucs per month. The government there has blocked access to all the blogs hosted on desdecuba.com (among others) and has forced the sites to be hosted outside the island with the help of friends living abroad.

Again, I wasn’t surprised by any of the members of the list and I’m glad to say that I live in a country where I’m free to say whatever I want whenever I want to whomever I want. I can safely have the internet at my house without worrying that a team of special ops soldiers will kidnap me in the night for what I’ve said or simply for being online. As much as I complain about our politics and our justice system, I’m eternally thankful to be living here.

Muchacho Enfermo

Buried in the Sand

I am totally ripping this off from Claudia Cadelo's blog because it broke my heart to read this and since misery likes company... I figured I'd share this with you all.

Muchacho Enfermo









Buried in the Sand
By Claudia Cadelo
(translated from the original Spanish)

I can’t, at times, shake the idea of being immobilized in the middle of time. A feeling similar to what I felt as a girl when my Papa played at burying me in the sand, I couldn’t stand it for more than a few seconds. The concept of absolute freedom is an illusion, but our ability to measure and to understand it is not an illusion; to understand that being buried in the sand unable to move is not the same as standing in front of the sea, looking at the far horizon, so distant that it almost makes no sense to call it a limit.

In my country, while the thoughts are nice and warm below the sand, one can feel safe not to be literally locked behind bars; but when we decide to put our ideas into an empty bottle and throw them into the sea, headed for the distant horizon, our body runs the risk of relinquishing, for an indefinite time, swimming along the shore.

Friends speak to me of changes, I get emails that say little, and a botero comments to me, stupidly optimistic, that they are fixing the streets (later, faced with my apathy and pessimism, he confessed to me that he was in the program for “political refugees” and, in passing, advised me for some strange reason that I should sign up too). I look all around me and I see an expectation that I not feel the slightest friction; the truth is I have no Faith, I don’t believe in these changes, I can’t help it.

More than 200 people are in prison for thinking differently, and have been for six years; the news is a vomit of lies; the newspaper Granma is a joke in bad taste; we still have the same problems, the same lack of freedom as always, with the same party, the same mass organizations, the same politics and ideology. I’m sorry but the truth is that I don’t see anything new with some ministers more and some less, and a younger brother up and an older brother down.

I would like to be able to say that the only one responsible for this situation is Fidel Castro, but I can’t. I remember when he gave up his power, in the interim before Raúl took charge, that Randy Alonso was always saying on The Round Table television show, “The Leadership of the Revolution” had ordered this, “The Leadership of the Revolution” had decided that, and I wondered, half jokingly half serious, under what new abstract concept were we being governed.

I don’t care whether the model is Chinese, Russian or Martian; at this point I can only think, and really hope, to be wrong, that until the whole “The Leadership of the Revolution” is no longer in power, nothing will change very much for those of us down here.

Burmese Monk has website hacked.

As I just reported on Ashin-Mettacra.com:

The news site Ashin-Mettacara.com, of Burmese monk in exile Ashin Mettacara, was attacked twice in the past week with DDoS attacks. The first attack came on March 11th and the second on March 15th. A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) usually aims at flooding a web server with so many queries to requests as to render it unable to process further requests. The query limit on Ashin-Mettacara.com, which is designed to accept huge volumes of traffic, was exceeded within the span of an hour on both of these dates.

This is not the first time a Burmese news site in exile has been hacked using this method; last fall the news sites Mizzima and Irrawaddy were both victim of DDoS attacks. The perpetrators of these attacks are still unknown and have yet to be brought to justice. The attacks of March 11th and March 15th were the second attacks on Ashin-Mettacra.com, the first wave of them occurred January 20th and 21st 2009 shortly after the launch of the website.

The attacks on Ashin-Mettacara.com took place at a time when Ashin was lecturing on web programming to over 50 monks and could not monitor his site. The site, which gathers news from all over the world and is crawled by Google News, has the slogan “Free Press for Freedom of Thought, Belief and Expression”. It is clear that whoever is behind these attacks does not share the values of the writers that publish their news on the site daily or those of their readers. It is unclear whether the Burma’s military junta is responsible for the attacks.

Muchacho Enfermo

Ottawa is delaying our right to access information

A tiny little article appeared in today's Globe and Mail, it was an article that talked about how "The Harper Conservatives now routinely delay requests for government documents – a right of Canadians under the law – well beyond the 30 days that the Access to Information Act requires." (a quote from the article)

I find this story somewhat alarming, as Canadians we have a right to hold our government accountable, we have a right to see what decisions are made on our behalf and we have a right to obtain this information within 30 days of having sent a request through registered mail.

Why aren't we obtaining our information and why people aren't speaking up about it just boggles my mind... I knew the previous Liberal government wasn't the greatest in this department, but they weren't staling, ignoring or delaying any requests beyond a reasonable period.

According to our Information Commissioner Robert Marleau speaking of a report he presented to parliament “I do believe that its results provide a grim picture of the federal government's access to information regime.”

Is this a sign of more to come under the current leadership?

Muchacho Enfermo

Muslims removed from plane in DC

The Associated Press reported that 9 Muslims were removed from a flight after having made suspicious comments in regards to place safety. These comments were made between Atif Irfan, a 29 year Virginia based lawyer and his sister. They were discussing the safter places to sit on the plane. Mr Irfan was going to a retreat in Florida with his wife, his 3 children, his brother, his sister in law and his friend.

“My wife and I are generally very careful about what we say when we step on the plane,” he said, adding that they have received suspicious looks in the past. “We're used to this sort of thing — but obviously not to this extent.”

The above statement is the saddest thing I have heard today. Is this what the world has come to? Giving people suspicious looks because of the color of their skin or where they were born? This kind of thing turns my stomach. What kind of values are we teaching our children?

Let me tell you, it's a sad day for the "land of the free" when people a free to be prejudiced.

Muchacho Enfermo

Resolutions.

Normally I like to keep my blogs as short and as to the point as possible but today I'd like to get a little more personal and I'd love it if you read to the end of this post and commented.

I woke up this morning after a night of tossing and turning feeling guilty. Feeling guilty because I woke up in my warm house, my fridge with food and my espresso machine ready to grind out the finest Cuban coffee known to man. I felt guilty because I have all this, because I have two cars and three bedrooms, because I have hot water, because I have power, because if I'm hungry I just go to the store and buy whatever I want.

While I complain to my friends about the quality of programming on cable people half way across the world are being blown up, human beings are starving, people are having their opinions stifled, women are being raped, children are being turned into soldiers. My main concern today was: damn it's cold and I don't feel like walking the dogs. Compared to dodging bombs on the Gaza strip or scrounging in landfills for food it is a very insignificant concern to have.

Then after having a few coffees my feeling of guilt turns into anger.I can't feel guilty for the things I have or where I was born. The only thing I can feel guilty about is being a spectator, sitting by and doing nothing. Long ago I decided that I wasn't going to be a bystander, that I was going to do something and I have. I have gone places, sent money, been a volunteer and started this blog. I have nothing to feel guilty about.

But the anger... that is a feeling I never want to lose. The sheer outrage at the injustices of the world is my fuel and it should drive us all to act in some way. No matter if your cause is Darfur, Palestine, Cuba, Tibet, world hunger, homelessness or battered women; run with it. Do something, anything. From your anger will stem compassion and a renewed sense of purpose. Trust me, it works. Let yourselves be inspired by others, by the world, by people who are doing something concrete. Draw on their strength and make it your own.

Well... for me, this is the year. I'm not sure what 2009 will bring economically or politically to Canada or to the world. I'm even sure which direction this blog will take in 2009, the only thing I am sure of is the direction I am taking in 2009. I am bringing the fight to those who need to be fought, I am finally going to step up and do my part.

We, all of us bloggers and people of the internet, are not bound by borders or religion, color or creed, left or right, we have no borders, no government, no age or sex. We truly are a society of equals, in every sense of the word. Chuck D once said "It takes a nation of billions to hold us back"... show the world what we are made of, show thew world that we are united by our differences, show the world that we speak for the voiceless and that we are watching.

Muchacho Enfermo

New book on Castro... again?

Propoganda author extraordinaire Luis Baez has done it again... He's collected even more useless quotes of people around the world praising Fidel Castro in his latest book Asi Es Fidel.

My loathing for this author began last time I was in a Cuban airport waiting for my flight home. I had nothing to read and had 12cucs (convertible pesos) left. So I bought a TuCola and I bought a book from a little stand. The only 10cuc book they had was a little book called Absolved by History by Luis Baez.

As the plane took off into the sunset and I was once again leaving my adopted home I opened the book and decided to start reading. The first thing I read was an introduction about Fidel Castro called: Maestro of Generosity. It talks about Fidel's giving nature and his deep love and commitment to his people. Despite my instant surge of anger I read on. Each quote more ludicrous and out of context then the next. None of the quotes are dated, none of them properly documented, but they're mostly by great political minds such as Kevin Costner and Naomi Campbell.

Later when I came home and was finally reunited with my beloved high speed internet I did some research and found out that in his long list of pro-Castro titles was a book called dissidents. A book which talks about the 75 conviction of the 2003 of "dissidents". His book supports the regime and back up their tactics and even attempts to justify the reasons these people are still jailed.

His latest stab at journalism and authorship promises to be equally as great. It was read December 22nd at the opening of the Reading History Festival in Havana along with Che notebooks and the book 50 Songs in Time of Revolution.

Although I am loathe to say this, I can't bash him just because he's a crony and a biased author... Heck I'm a biased author and most of the people I read and support are also biased. The only thing I have going for me that he doesn't is that I do it out of my own free will and not at the behest of a dictatorship.

Muchacho Enfermo

China block access to NY Times website

As of late last Friday the New York Times website has been unavailable in China and could only be accessed from a virtual private network. As we all know China has taken great pains to try to explain to the world that it has the right to censure material it deems illegal or offensive. I'm guessing the Times had reported on something China didn't like.

For more see the Globe and Mail or Reuters.

Muchacho Enfermo

New legislation in Russia brings back ghost of the KGB

New Vladimir Putin backed legislation would make it treason to pass "state secrets" to an NGO. Now we all know Russia and we all know Putin so the term "state secret" is a very loose term. Basically it means that anyone who criticizes the government or opposes them would be punishable by a 20 year term in prison. Russia has over 200 thousand NGOs according to wikipedia.

Let me put this in perspective: If this law were put in place in Canada, I could be arrested for my blog. Or if I criticized the government and donated money to Canadian Feed the Children.... Bam! 20 years in prison.

Between this law, the state appropriation of almost all the oil fields, that whole Georgia business and the talks of having a military presence in Cuba it feels like we're almost back in the bad old times of the Soviet Union.

Also check out The Jurist for a short and very concise explanation.

Muchacho Enfermo

Cuba passes new Anti-Blogging law?

I was reported this morning by Claudia Cadero on her Octavo Cerco that the Cuban government has passed an anti-blogging law, check it out. Good job, yet again, on your progressive views Cuba! (please note the sarcasm in that last sentence)

Muchacho Enfermo