On Friday, 16 July, on the White House lawn before boarding the helicopter for his Camp David retreat, Joe Biden told CNN that "misinformation on the networks is killing us". In particular, the US President was referring to posts on the digital network Facebook about the vaccination against COVID-19 and accused the company of doing nothing to prevent them.
Facebook is the same company that operates WhatsApp, and on both networks there have been many false news stories related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Cuba. But if the President, the Prime Minister or any other Cuban leader were to say what Biden said, the media and influencer apparatus that his government funds against the island would immediately set about lynching the author of such a phrase in the name of "freedom of expression".
Whether it is the "expression" of the old traditional media, those created in the Bush era, those created in the Obama era or in the Trump era, the participation in the disinformation war against Cuba is unanimous for those who claim plurality. From the UPI agency saying that the "harbour" of Bayamo and the Habana Libre Hotel had been taken over by the invaders from Playa Giron to the "Rey, you know I'm a biologist" at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the one who pays for disinformation is still 90 miles north of Cuba.
However, all digital social media companies (Twitter, Facebook and Google) have spared no means to block Russian media accounts such as RT and Sputnik, and in the case of Google, even to temporarily remove them from internet searches. It is also a fact that many Cuban media accounts, officials and journalists on Twitter have been blocked by the US at times of political relevance. The same fate has recently befallen the account of the Cuban Students`Federation (FEU) which groups hundreds of thousands of young Cubans.
The organic links of these companies with the US special services and State Department are well documented by the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations, and reached particular prominence in the two Obama terms during which Biden was vice-president. The Obama-Biden administration has been singled out as the one that has persecuted whistleblowers the most in the US, even ahead of Richard Nixon's, until then considered the most obsessive in this regard.
It was the alliance with the big tech companies that led the executive headed by the aforementioned Democratic duo to viciously persecute, to the point of suicide, the brilliant and very young computer scientist Aaron Swartz for becoming a leader in the free dissemination of knowledge on the internet. Swartz, harassed by the FBI, was subjected to a federal prosecution, in which the government made him face 35 years in prison and a million dollar fine. His crime? Downloading a database of scientific research results funded by public money with the intention of releasing it on the internet for anyone to access. Unlike Biden, who talks about freedom and pursues it, Aaron was consistent: in 2008 he had published a manifesto denouncing "the private theft of public culture".
There was no clemency from those who now claim to care about Cubans' access to information, and use conveniently mayamised media figures to talk about freedom. It didn't matter that Swartz, as a teenager, had contributed substantially to elements that are now commonplace for sharing information on the internet, such as RSS and Creative Commons, which have contributed far more to humanity than those who pay for songs as well as Molotov cocktails as part of a plan to unleash something that will contribute as much to the US national interest as a bloodbath 90 miles from the US.
The only freedom that interests a government whose ministers were appointed by a banking corporation, according to emails between Citibank and Barack Obama's transition team leaked by Wikileaks, is the freedom to make money, and Aaron Swartz was a threat to that.
As Vice President, the current US President did not lift a finger so that Cuba could access the internet via the various undersea fibre-optic cables that pass within a few kilometres of its shores and which have remained off-limits to Cuban companies. A 1 062 km long connection had to be financed, at a cost of 70 million dollars, stretching from Camurí, near the port of La Guaira in Venezuela, to Siboney beach in Santiago de Cuba. Nor did it unblock the many scientific and technological information sites blocked to Cuban computer developers.
Eric Schmidt, someone who knows both Aaron Swartz and Biden well, visited Cuba in 2015 when he was Google's CEO. He was at the University of Computer Science (UCI), where several students and professors complained to him about not being able to access his mega-company's software development sites. Schmidt said he would give them access "from the left", as they say in Cuban, and a professor present replied: "”We don't want to jump over the fence, we want to enter through the door like everyone else", and the US executive promised to discuss this with his government, precisely the same government of which Biden was a member. What has happened since then until today is that the situation, far from improving, has worsened, but Joe Biden has promised to give "uncensored internet to Cuba" and for free!
One more business for tech companies like the ones that filled their pockets with US taxpayers' money, saying you'd see television in Havana that you've never seen before? Most likely. Biden calls Cuba a "failed state", but there is nothing more failed than the US government's 60-year "creative" attempts at regime change on the island. Sorry, yes there is, it's the way Miami terrorists and extortionists have duped US governments over the same period.
