Castro makes his presence felt through blogging

Blogging isn't just confined to the young in Cuba, and someone other than the island's star blogger, Yoani Sanchez, is generating attention abroad with their cyber-scrawls.

The 82-year-old former President Fidel Castro may be out of the real-life spotlight, but his public musings are alive and well in the online world, as Bruce Wallace reports here on Foreign Exchange.

"Castro blogs with the frequency and energy he once devoted to his exhaustive and exhausting speeches," Wallace writes. "His Reflections by Comrade Fidel is translated into seven languages, and remains a fascination for Cuba watchers trying to measure the island's political mood -- though the extent of his remaining influence is unclear."

Click here to read extracts from Castro's online writings.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: Fidel Castro. Credit: Associated Press

*Edited Friday 6:25pm Mexico City time - AP video embedded.

Comments

[Generation Y]

The old pots and pans for feeding the family can be transformed, in the event, into the ballot we can’t leave in the box and into the hand we dare not raise in the assembly. Any object can serve, if given the space required: a piece of fabric hung from the balcony, a newspaper waved in public, a pot banged along with others. The great metallic choir made up of spoons and pans could be—on May first at 8:30—our voice, to say what we have stuck in our throats.

Restrictions on coming and going from Cuba have lasted too long. So I will ring my pot for my parents, who have never been able to cross the sea that separates us from the world. I will join the symphony of pans also for myself, forced to travel only in the virtual world in the last two years. I will pound out the rhythm of the spoon while thinking of Teo, condemned to permanent exile if he happens to board a plane before the age of eighteen. I will beat the drum for Edgar, who is on a hunger strike after seven denials of his request for permission to leave. At the end of the metallic concert I will dedicate a couple notes to Marta, who didn’t get the white card to meet her granddaughter who was born in Florida.

After so much beating on the bottom of the pan, it probably won’t serve me for frying even one more egg. For the necessary “food” to travel, move about freely, leave home without permission, it’s well worth it to break all the equipment in my kitchen

[Luis Avellana]

There is a big difference between the two bloggers. Castro has all the power of the state behind him, while Yoani has to sneak and find foreigners with access to cybercafes to post her writtings. I have read both and what a difference between both of them. Castro's writtings are old tired and moribund while Yoani's is fresh and sharp. Talk about a generation Gap. Out with the old and in with the New.

[Jugulator]

Why Castro block,Yoani Sanchez Generation Y,

Blog in Cuba. ?

www.desdecuba.com/generationy

[michaelnash]

Castro is a blogger? This explains a lot about bloggers in general. We already know that we are completely unable even to judge a beauty contest without some form of controversy. This leaves open the question of whether Stalin or Hitler would have also been bloggers had the technology been available.