CULTURE-CUBA: ‘La Jiribilla’ Responds to Cyber-Attack

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Aug 14 2001 (IPS) - The Cuban cultural e-magazine ‘La Jiribilla’ retaliated with a show of local humour against a cyber- attack that left its Internet site completely blank just three months after the publication was inaugurated.

“For those who don’t want digital soup, there are four Internet addresses,” announces the editorial of the latest issue of La Jiribilla, which in popular Cuban slang means someone who is restless and mischievous.

Starting this month, the digital magazine can be found at its original address (www.lajiribilla.cubaweb.cu), but new addresses also have been added, “just in case”: www.lajiribilla.cu, www.lajiribilla.com, www.lajiribilla.net.

La Jiribilla “returns as hyper-kinetic as ever,” says the editorial, commenting that the perpetrators of the attack could not stand the success of the Cuban digital publication: “It stung too hard.”

“It seems that 48,000 hits in a day are too many for just one heart,” referring to the number of Internet users who access the site, which itself was highlighted in June by the renowned US- based publication Wired (www.wired.com).

Approximately 75 percent of visits to La Jiribilla are made by Latin Americans residing in the United States, many of whom are Cubans who do not hold a grudge against the island’s government, unlike some of the more radical exiles, say sources at the e- ‘zine.

“The webpages went blank and we couldn’t enter the site anymore. The outcome was that the number of visits plummeted just when the publication was at its peak,” one of La Jiribilla’s staffers told IPS.

The cyber-pirates who attacked La Jiribilla belong to extremist sectors of the Cuban exile community in the United States that oppose the Fidel Castro government concentrated in the US city of Miami.

The attack was directed against Cubaweb, the portal that is home to the Internet sites of the island’s leading media outlets, such as ‘Granma’ newspaper, official voice of the governing Communist Party, and ‘Juventud Rebelde’, the weekly published by the Communist Youth Union.

But in the case of La Jiribilla, which is sponsored by Juventud Rebelde, it was particularly unusual given the publication’s role in maintaining dialogue with Cuban emigrants and its rather progressive editorial line.

Juventud Rebelde promotes La Jiribilla is an “attempt to provide an in-depth look at certain aspects of the country’s artistic and literary life, which is often manipulated or unknown outside Cuba.”

But, among other things, the publication also aspires to “study and disseminate the works and contributions of Cuban creators, wherever they live and independent of their political ideas,” stated Rosa Miriam Elizalde, one of the digital magazine’s editors.

One of the most-read issues of the publication is one dedicated to historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals, who died May 9 in the United States, where he had sought political asylum in 1994 after obtaining a scholarship.

La Jiribilla has dedicated a great deal of space to the matters of emigration, religious attitudes among the Cuban population, literature, fine arts and the cultural policy that has overcome several decades of ignoring the work of Cubans in exile.

“We do not reject the direct political discussion that has its place in the spheres of literature and culture in general, but when it comes to Cuba, it tends to be tainted by prejudices and stereotypes,” said Elizalde.

La Jiribilla aims to refute the campaigns against the Cuban government that have arisen in the cultural field, but “not out of hate, which describes the attacks against us, but rather from the basis of the cleanest adhesion to the truth, and with a sense of humour,” said the journalist.

The publication is seen as the response by Cuban intellectuals living on the socialist-run island to the appearance last year of ‘Encuentro en la Red’ (Encounter on the Internet) (www.cubaencuentro.com), the digital version of the quarterly review “Encuentro de la cultura cubana” (Cuban Cultural Encounter).

This journal has been published in Madrid since 1996 under the directorship of Cuban novelist Jesús Díaz, author of “Las iniciales de la Tierra” (The Earth’s Initials) and “Las palabras perdidas” (The Lost Words).

Díaz has been a focus of attention at La Jiribilla, which has attempted to demonstrate through the author’s statements and fragments of some of his works that he is a proponent of “socialist realism” turned into anti-Castro activist. He even served as the subject of a recent contest organised by La Jiribilla.

“Who is he really? Moralistic censor and homophobe or broad- minded intellectual? Primitive theoretician or “creator”? Westerner or the Soviet-backer? Sharpshooter or ministerial jester? Hard-line communist or a who-will-finance-me social democrat?” asks the e-magazine.

The website offers users the opportunity to view photos, listen to music samples, and watch fragments of films, all selected by the journalists and intellectuals who, since May, have taken on the task of maintaining La Jiribilla, “without receiving a cent in exchange,” says Elizalde.

“It is a shame that this publication cannot reach a broader public on the island,” one member of the collective running the Internet journal told IPS.

There were only 3,625 computers in Cuba with Internet access last year, according to data from the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications.

Experts estimate that as many as 10 people use each one of these computers, but even so, the total is insignificant given that the population of the island is more than 11 million.