Havana denies blocking Cubans' Internet accounts

Havana, Agency
The Cuban government denied Wednesday that access was being limited to Internet social networks after blogger Yoani Sanchez denounced the possible involvement of the authorities in blocking her access to Twitter.

"Cuba is not blocking the access of any citizen to sending messages to the social networks on the Internet such as Twitter or Facebook and that is slander that has been raised against our country," Deputy Informatics and Communications Minister Jose Luis Perdomo told the official Prensa Latina news agency.

"Any person who wants to send that type of message can do so, since we're not impeding that possibility in any way as a policy, nor do we have anything set up to do that," Perdomo said while traveling in Russia.

Although he did not directly mention Sanchez's case, the deputy minister seemed to deny the complaint made on Tuesday by the blogger after several days of not being able to access her Twitter account from Havana.

Sanchez, who has received several international prizes for her blog Generacion Y, asked Twitter to clarify what had happened to determine if the Cuban government had been blocking her access to the online social network.

In remarks on Tuesday to Efe, the blogger said that Twitter had become a kind of alternative news channel for Cubans and she emphasized that, if it were to be proven that the incident was "censorship," it would mean that "a means of citizen expression for Cubans is being cut off."

Sanchez said she had trained "more than a score" of bloggers who use Twitter, and she emphasized that this was something significant on "an island where the monopoly of the Internet was in the hands of the state."

Perdomo said on Wednesday that online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook do not have agreements with the Cuban Telecommunications Company to allow free service for sending messages to those networks from cell phones due to the economic embargo that the United States has imposed against the communist island since 1962.

That, he said, is the "true cause of why at times communication is complex," and he noted that Cuba cannot access other services like Google Maps because Washington included the country on its list of sponsors of terrorism.

"Such is the real cause of why the immense majority of Cubans lack free access and the possibility of benefiting from the aforementioned social networks," he added.