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Jose & Ziva from “Cubanology’s Speak Your Mind,” a show on BlogTalkRadio, will be interviewing me today, Saturday, at 1:00 p.m. (PST). You can listen to Speak Your Mind live or replay after the fact. “Cubanology’s Speak Your Mind” focuses on Cuban issues but this time will be talking about freedom for bloggers worldwide.

Cuban bloggers frequently type up their posts at home, copy them onto a Sandisk, then duck into a resort hotel to use their Internet connection to post it.

San in Spanish means “saint” and “cruz” means cross.

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Thanks to Jose at Cubanology.

We have an opportunity to travel to Cuba and interview Cuban bloggers for a possible presentation on the Washington Post’s PostGlobal series. Please help us get there and get the information on these bloggers to the wider world. They’ve blossomed over the last year but have recently begun to see blocks and shut-downs. They occupy an interesting place in the history of their country and its current possible transitions.

If you’re interested in helping defray some of the costs of this undertaking, please visit our CPB Facebook Causes page to donate or contact us directly at committeetoprotectbloggers at gmail dot com.

Yoanni Sánchez’s Generación Y blog has been blocked within Cuba, according to USA Today’s On Deadline blog (via Reuters).

This is the most prominent of the first generation of Cuba’s blogs. It reportedly got 1.2 million visitors, especially after media in the U.S., France and elsewhere started writing about it.

Several times over the last couple of years we tried to find any evidence of blogging in Cuba, the last time was about a year ago. Then, there were none I could find (though they may have been out there somewhere). Now, there are a number of them, the best known of which is probably Yoani Sanchez of Generacion Y. Yoani created Consenso Desde Cuba, a blog site for Cubans and has been featured in media outside Cuba.

We are trying to create an exhaustive list of Cuban bloggers (specifically, Cubans blogging from within Cuba). Here is what we have so far. If you know of any other bloggers, Cuban citizens blogging inside Cuba, regardless of political affiliation, please let us know in the comments. If we list a blog not written by a Cuban inside Cuba, please let us know that as well. We anticipate this list will grow over time.

Desde aquí
El Blog de Dimas
El Blog del Forista ‘El Compañero’
Generación Y
mi isla al mediodia
NotiCuba
Regalado
Retazos
sin EVAsión

When 32-year-old Yoani Sanchez wants to update her blog about daily life in Cuba, she dresses like a tourist and strides confidently into a Havana hotel, greeting the staff in German.

That is because Cubans like Sanchez are not authorized to use hotel Internet connections, which are reserved for foreigners…She and a handful of other independent bloggers are opening up a crack in the government’s tight control over media and information to give the rest of the world a glimpse of life in a one-party communist state.

“We are taking advantage of an unregulated area. They can’t control cyberspace out there,” she said…Once inside the hotel, Sanchez has to write fast. Not because she fears getting caught but because online access is prohibitively expensive. An hour online costs about $6, the equivalent of two weeks’ pay for the average Cuban.

Independent bloggers like Sanchez have to build their sites on servers outside Cuba, and they have more readers outside Cuba than inside.

That’s not surprising, since only 200,000 Cubans, or less than 2 percent of the population, have access to the World Wide Web, the lowest rate in Latin America, according to the International Telecommunications Union.

Only government employees, academics and researchers are allowed their own Internet accounts, which are provided by the government.

Some Cuban bloggers mentioned in the article include Yoani Sánchez, mi isla al mediodia, Gente, Hechos y Cosas de Cuba and Havanascity.

Leave links to more Cuban blogs in the comments.