The Cuban Regime Lost Its Monopoly on Information With the Arrival of ’14ymedio’

In the last ten years, the will for change has reached the majority of the Island’s citizens.

14ymedio, Ariel Hidalgo, Miami, 23 May 2024 — If I were to describe in words what has happened in Cuba in the last ten years, I would say: a desire for change. An awakening to the reality in which Cubans lived had already occurred among the greater part of the population, although  hidden by the veil of double standards. Almost no one believed in a promising future under that system, but except for a small minority, the only hope for liberation was solely individual: leaving the country.

In that decade from 2014 to 2024, the will for change began to gradually arrive for that majority, and I think we could identify three key years: 2014, 2018 and 2021. The fact that we are celebrating the ten years since the birth of 14ymedio is significant in that process, because it was the first independent digital newspaper made in Cuba. The totalitarian regime began to lose its monopoly on information.

The era of the information society had arrived in the world, but countries like Cuba and North Korea tried to put obstacles in the way of the spread of this technology among the population, because by its very nature it was antagonistic to the dominant totalitarian powers, a mechanism  whose general form Marx himself had discovered almost a century and a half ago: the development of the productive forces entered into contradiction with the relations of production, only now these productive forces were no longer represented by the machinery of the typical factories of industrial society, but by personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet.

These relations of production, represented by totalitarian structures, became a brake on their development

These relations of production, represented by totalitarian structures, became a brake on their development, because their leaders realized the eminently subversive nature of those inventions. In 1991, there had been a massive protest in Regla,