CDMX, Mexico. – The ladies in whiteaccording to says the official Cuban encyclopedia EcuRed, are “a mercenary disturbance group.” The “Cuban Wikipedia” assures that these women “since their public appearance they began to carry out acts of contempt and public disorder” when what they were really trying to do was exercise their right to peaceful protest and march towards the church with a flower in their hand.
Knowing that there are dozens of videos and photos that document the beatings that State agents have inflicted on them, EcuRed builds a parallel and easily removable reality. Its authors dare so much that they even sentence that “they were confronted in a peaceful and constant manner by the common citizen of Cuba.”
The images and the testimonies of the victims and witnesses show that EcuRed lies shamelessly because in public spaces agents of the Police and State Security have beaten these women with their fists or tonfas around the abdomen, extremities, face… Also the Several of them immobilize and lift the weight to throw them to the ground or into vehicles that take them to detention centers where the nightmare continues.
“They attack you, they handcuff you on the same public road, they drag you, they beat you,” that’s how it sums up the lady in White Jackeline Boni the arrests she suffered.
How does this qualify as peaceful confrontation and uniformed policemen as ordinary citizens?
The misrepresentation with which EcuRed (that is, the regime) describes this opposition group is far from being an isolated case. When it comes to the Cuban opposition or figures critical of the regime, the digital encyclopedia presents them as Antichrists or even deletes them from its pages.
Regardless of where reality points, EcuRed promotes its own version of events, which convolutes and omits information that is politically contrary to its interests. It does not matter how many videos, journalistic materials or academic texts refute what he presents. The “Cuban Wikipedia” closes its eyes and tells what the official discourse would approve, practically the same thing that the official media ecosystem has done for six decades. The EcuRed, as part of this propaganda system, is inserted in the binary practice that characterizes the dictatorship: either with me or against me. In the second case, dissent is punished with slanderous information or ostracism.
But that’s not all: an EcuRed profile can go from defining you as one of the promises of Cuban journalism, to deleting each praise and recognition with one click, if you disagree. Then they forget what they wrote before and reduce you only to what is convenient for them to tell, just as they did with the writer and journalist Carlos Manuel Alvarez (To whom, moreover, they award a book written by a Spanish author in 2003, when Álvarez was barely a child. Not only ideological supervision defines this encyclopedia, but also lack of rigor).
Something similar was denounced by the playwright Yunior Rodríguez and the essayist Juilo César Guanche; both from one moment to another went from being praised by the EcuRed, to not being well seen.
What is the EcuNet?
Launched in December 2010, this project is managed mainly by the Computing Youth Clubs, although they also have the support of the National Office for Computerization (ONI) and the Institute of Scientific and Technological Information (IDICT). From the beginning, it was thought of as a collaborative program where you can access without being registered, but if you want to create content or edit it, you must have an account. Of course, the published contents are supervised (ideology, not precision or quality). It is unthinkable that the encyclopedia of the Cuban dictatorship would publish an entry that questions the regime or praises an opponent.
This alternative project to Wikipedia arises not with the premise of sharing ecumenical knowledge, but with the mission of “counteracting politicized information about the Island.” Or what is the same, trying to control historical and cultural memory by defining what content should be disclosed and in what way. A goal that was much easier to achieve in the early years of the project, when there was hardly any Internet on the Island, and the Castroite version of Wikipedia was available on the intranet. Now, with a much more connected society and with more access to a plurality of sources, it is no longer so simple.
Perhaps for this reason certain changes in the contents of EcuRed are visible. although years ago was pointed out by various intellectuals for their “large omissions” especially of characters not close to the regime, little by little they have begun to add them, although in a very biased way.
Given the current accumulation of information and the penetration of the Internet, apparently the managers of the encyclopedia have changed their strategy and mutated from silence to insult. In some cases lacking the slightest subtlety o Proof: Dagoberto Valdés is a “known CIA collaborator”, for example. Raphael Rojas “He has obtained various awards and academic positions “supported by income and contacts” and not on his own merits. The Cubalex team decided to emigrate spontaneously and not because they were forced into exile as an alternative to prison. One of the longest entries that the opposition has won was deserved by the journalist Yoani Sanchezalthough for the EcuRed “she is one more simple mercenary”.
In many cases, the profiles are written inconsistently or with spelling and punctuation errors, such as the one dedicated to Laura Pollán.
In this specific case, they also question meaningless data, such as the name with which her husband was registered, or question her moral values due to the number of marriages she had. They wrote about the leader: “At the end of the 1990s, she married a certain Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez, who had four children from different marriages.” This seems like a line that is written when there is not much more to say, but it is coherent with the style of one of the main managers of the Cuban collaborative encyclopedia. This is Iroel Sánchez, a Cuban blogger and official, known for his hate speech against the Cuban opposition and any space that does not resemble the most orthodox group of the regime.
Even so, the EcuRed assures on its own page that its articles will not admit “contents considered as: discriminatory, obscene, disrespectful, aggressive, propaganda or advertising, tendentious, defamatory.”
It is not the only totalitarian encyclopedia
Just in the first quarter of 2023, 14 years after Cuba, Russia will launch the Znániya (Knowledge) portal, an analogue of the Wikipedia, which Moscow accuses of spreading “false information” about the invasion of Ukraine.
“We are creating it, the Znániya portal already has more than 100,000 articles. It is scheduled to be released at the beginning of the year.” reported Russian Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev.
In the case of Cuba, the Havana regime must be recognized as one of the first governments to devise its alternative and “politically correct” version of Wikipedia. China, that giant internet censorship expert, had beaten him to it. Since 2006 the Asian nation presented baidubaike, your EcuNet. This resorts to the services of volunteers, but its online content is constantly reviewed.; a model that is quite similar to the Cuban one.
Although in the case of China, the censors have gone one step further: in 2018 they presented a new encyclopedia prepared solely by experts and where more than 20,000 university students worked. At the same time, they have blocked pages where there is content that they do not want their inhabitants to know about (like in Cuba), and have penalized the use of VPNs.
Like the Caribbean government, its Chinese counterpart ensures that the internet is scrupulously clean of all politically sensitive content. Only that they have more resources to improve the “digital wall” and better encyclopedias.
