A new kind of dissident has appeared in Cuba: the hashtag. (WLRN)
, killing four people and wrecking much of the city’s east side. In the past, state TV reports – usually aired well after the event – would have been the first most Cubans heard of the disaster. But a month before, their government had finally granted them mobile Internet access. So this time many Cubans knew about the tornado even as it was happening.
Omar Gonzalez with Cuban university students and other volunteers mobilized by social media to help tornado victims this year in Havana's Regla neighborhood.“I saw an old lady sitting in what used to be her living room with nothing but the front door," says González."And she was still sitting there because she didn’t want to lose the little things she had left.”
But it also seems to have encouraged something bigger in Cuba – something playing out this summer that's engaging if not sometimes challenging the country's totalitarian regime more openly.In May, the government mysteriously cancelled an officially sanctioned march – perhaps because a new Cuban Constitution ratified this year did not approve gay marriage. Either way, LGBTQ activists took to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and other apps to organize their own march.
On the front lines of that unauthorized effort were Norges Rodríguez and his husband Taylor Torres,who run a tech website from Havana“This is an unfamiliar scenario for authorities here,” Rodríguez said from Havana. Unlike traditional dissident movements,"this doesn’t have an identifiable leader. The social media itself is the leader.”
“A friend came over to my place, and he’s like, ‘Your neighbors are protesting,'" says Rojas, who has since returned to Miami. and other top officials now have Twitter accounts – so thousands of Cubans last month began gathering atIt stems from the fact that Cuba’s mobile Internet prices start at about $7 a month for 600 megabytes of service. That’s a big chunk of most Cuban’s incomes, which means most Cubans aren’t yet in the social media mix. Rojas says themovement reflects how important being in that mix suddenly means to Cubans.
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