ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the Web-based voice as part of fundamental citizenship rights that are at the very heart of digital media activism in Cuba, as it is in other authoritarian regimes that curtail freedom of speech and pluralist media. It explores the dictator's dilemma in the digital era: the authoritarian governments need to adopt the new information technologies for the sake of economic development, which conflicts with its desire to control the potentially corrosive influences of these technologies. The chapter shows how horizontal voice increased e-mail communication between peers led to the emergence of vertical voice protest against state policies. It also shows how horizontal voice was precisely the exclusion from traditional forms of public articulation that led to the search for autonomous spaces of expression, beyond the filters of the authorities, which in turn gave birth to Cuba's first independent blogs.
