Web Platform Reflejos Closes the ‘14ymedio’ Blog
La Habana/The new Cuban blog platform, Reflejos, has decided to close the 14ymedio blog for “repeatedly publishing content that does not conform to the objectives with which the platform was created,” according to an email sent this Friday by the administrators.
The daily is accused of “failing to meet [the site’s] the conditions of use” with no other details. Nevertheless, when it was launched March 18, Kirenia Fagundo Garcia, a consultant on Reflejos, explained that there were no “restrictions as far as topics addressed on the blogs and users interested in the service.”
The blog opened by this daily on the digital platform was designed to bring its contents to Cuban readers since our site has been blocked on the Island’s servers since its creation in May of 2014.
During the few days in which it was active, the blog published a varied group of texts that ranged from culture to recipes to opinion columns. Neither verbal violence nor personal attacks were used, and the majority of commenters were internet users very interested in the topics that the posts covered.
The 14ymedio blog has been the object of many criticisms by bloggers associated with the Cuban government. At the beginning of this week, the official site for CubaSí news lamented the presence of “mercenaries in service of the US” on Reflejos. The writer of the article, M. H. Lagarde, accused 14ymedio in wrathful terms of having “contaminated” the platform with “counter-revolutionary propaganda.”
The digital platform is part of the Cuba Va project of the Computer and Electronic Youth Club. Set up on the free content manager WordPress, it has several technological deficiencies such as slow operation, low storage capacity (barely 250 megabytes per blog) and problems with the image upload tool. Nevertheless, in spite of these technical difficulties, we had managed to create a functional “mirror” of 14ymedio, on a service that calls itself Reflejos (Reflections) and that was announced from the beginning as a space for the blogs of the Cuban family.
Translated by MLK