Comrade Fidel, Web Junkie

Can it be long until he's blogging at the HuffPost?

Fidel Castro is back from the dead (his words) and has been reincarnated as an Internet junkie. Not only is he a prolific blogger on Cuba's online Granma newspaper but, it turns out, the 84-year-old greybeard consumes 200 to 300 news items a day on the Web and is fascinated by the WikiLeaks site, with its trove of 90,000 formerly secret U.S. documents on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "resuscitated" revolutionary is smaller and shakier than he was before the intestinal illness that prompted him to hand power to his younger brother in 2006, but no less verbose. He spoke with the editor of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada for five hours, during which he raved about the profound impact of the Web. "Do you know what this means, comrade?" he asked, like some sort of Rip Van Winkle waking up in the 21st century. The Internet, he said, "has put an end to secrets.... We are seeing a high level of investigative journalism, as the New York Times calls it, that is within reach of the whole world."

Not only is the hero of the left blogging it up, hundreds of other "bloggers" are also in business.

Besides Fidel Castro, Cuba has about 300 bloggers, about 100 of them unauthorized, including several who are highly critical of the government. They have a terrible time communicating with the world and have to resort to all sorts of tricks to circumvent government barriers, including phoning the information to friends abroad for posting on servers outside Cuba. The most famous blog is Yoani Sanchez's Generation Y, which nets more than 1 million hits a month and is available just about everywhere but in Cuba, which may explain why she hasn't been muzzled; another reason may be that she is equally critical of the U.S. and its trade embargo. (She was, however, beaten and her blogger husband was attacked by a mob.) Sanchez helped Jose Luis Pardo and others establish Voces Cubanas, an independent site with about 30 bloggers who chronicle the trials, deprivations and beauty of Cuban daily life in words and pictures.

The rest of this mashnote posing as journalism blames the U.S. for lack of Internet access, of course, rather than blogger Fidel Castro.

I wonder if the approved government bloggers have their own Journolist?