Is Fidel Castro seriously an obsessive blogger?

Fidel Castro near Havana in 2002.
(Jose Goitia / AP)

Last week, Tina Brown's news and culture site, The Daily Beast, featured a scoopy piece called "Fidel the Blogger," which explored the astonishing premise that Cuba's jefe emeritus has jumped on the Internet bandwagon and begun spewing out posts in earnest.

Castro, wrote author Maria Ospina, "has discovered a new way to spread his opinions. In the last year, he’s written more than 150 blogs posts," and is "posting furiously about the Wall Street meltdown, sports, and his soft spot for [Barack] Obama’s kids." We learned that Castro is dressing the part too. "The politician-turned-blogger has traded his military getup for an informal tracksuit, a more appropriate choice for someone who works at a home computer."

Because I speak a poco bit of Spanish, and also write about Web trends, I followed the links in Ospina's story with interest, curious about how a major historical figure like Castro might approach this most pajama-friendly of mediums. Like such as, did he have anybody copy editing his musings before he posted them? Did he crop his own images? Mix it up with readers in his comments section? And what kind of link love was the guy giving? 

Thing was though, I could never actually find the blog. Ospina had linked to two different sites -- one called Cubadebate, a site run by Cuban journalists that featured an archive page with 150+ links to pieces written by Castro, in chronological order (as opposed to the newest-first order blogs use) up to late September. The description of this page reads, "all of the articles published by Fidel which have appeared as 'Reflections of the Commander in Chief.'" 

A screen grab from the page referenced in the Beast article. The last entry, #156, is several weeks old.

The second set of links the article provides point to Granma, the official news organ of Cuba's Communist Party, where some of Castro's articles are also archived. 

Looking around a bit more, I found another similar list on the site on ACN, the Cuban News Agency, and another one on Cuba.cu, a big Cuban Web portal.  But they all seemed to be versions of the same list of print articles. 

I contacted The Daily Beast to see what exactly their definition of a blog was, and whether the Cuban government, the newspaper editors involved or Castro himself had suggested that this was a weblog in any generally understood sense.

A publicist replied that the Daily Beast follows Wikipedia's definition of a blog, the first sentence of which is:

A Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

I'd argue that this definition does not cover Web pages that archive dozens of links to newspaper articles -- none of which contain images or links, comment sections or any other bloggy accouterments. The idea that an individual "usually maintains" his own blog seems key too, and I'm having trouble conceiving of Fidel as in any sense behind the wheel of this page. Yes, Fidel's "entries" are definitely regular, and you can find all of them in one place. But that would probably also mean this page listing transcripts of President Bush's radio addresses is a blog too.

As for who else is out there calling this a blog, Ospina explained via email that Castro "has a section on this government sponsored website called 'Reflections of Fidel' where he shares informal thoughts musings etc., so it is thought of as his blog." This could well be the case, though Ospina didn't say who thinks of it that way.

She did however acknowledge that "everything he publishes online is also published in newspapers -- and is carried by newspapers around the world."   

Which to my ear sounds like a syndicated print column, not a blog. But tell me if I'm splitting hairs.

— David Sarno

Comments

[dePaul Consiglio NYMetroCityState US]

You are not only splitting hairs but you' ve got split ends on this one before hand.
A blog by any other name is a blog,
or to quote Bill Shakespere "A Blog is a Blog is a Blog...."
Furthermore, Former President Fidel Castro always has something important to say and that's the reason so many people read his blog.
Everything else is just "ear say".

Regards from AroundTheWorldin88Minutes
dePaul Consiglio

dePaul Consiglio
http://iconsiglio.blogspot.com
htttp://www.iconsiglio.com

[pat]

why would it surprise you that he's blogging a lot?
don't you know his fame has always been his obsession with talking!