Cuba's blogosphere welcomes another player

The Cuban Bishops’ Conference has just announced the launch of their own blog, www.creerencuba.org (“Believing in Cuba”), a space for Catholics to “enrich their experience of God” through the Internet. Reverend Jose Felix Perez indicated that this blog was a way for the Church in Cuba to acknowledge the advancement of digital culture and its important role in people’s lives. Still, it’s not clear how much reach the blog can have in Cuba, where only a small fraction of islanders are online and Internet access is slow and prohibitively expensive for most.

What importance does the launch of a Catholic Church blog have in such a context?

1. Human rights and media freedom groups have called on Havana to allow broader Internet access, and this is one example of a move in that direction.
2. A senior Vatican official asked the Cuban government in November to allow the Church more greater access to media and Internet, indicating its importance as a way to reach the faithful. Their allowance to launch a blog is a sign of better relations between the state and the Church, which were strained for years but have improved considerably since Pope John Paul II toured the island in 1998.
3. Since the government tends to distrust most bloggers in Cuba, labeling them “foreign mercenaries,” the apolitical blog of the Catholic Church could help change the stigma that currently plagues Internet and blogging in Cuba.

The point: the practical impact of this new blog might not be huge (readership and participation from the island will likely be low), but it is at the very least a signal of the expansion of Internet participation and an inherent acknowledgment of its potential future on the island.