“The blockade is eminent and has been hitting Cuba for over 60 years. We resist and we will overcome: from Latin American Summary platform we strongly condemned such a brutal blockade,” Ms. Ramírez said in a statement.
On January 27, while we were preparing different articles on national and international issues, our website htpps://cubaenresumen.org was blocked, and we were unable to upload any information to the page, she added.
At first, she said, we thought it was due to a technical problem, but one hour later we were alerted that we could not have access from any of our devices.
Correspondents in Havana began to receive messages via WhatsApp from Argentina, Brazil, Honduras, Venezuela, Spain, the United States and Italy to find out what was really happening with the website.
“We immediately contacted the server hosted in Canada – Ms. Ramírez explained -, asking what was going on, since we couldn’t access the data either.” We received a terse and hypocritical response: “We are aware that this account is linked to a country that is subject to US blockade laws. This is a violation of Linode’s Terms of Service and as such we must ask you to stop stay with us.”
And it continued: “Thank you for your understanding. You will have 48 hours from this notice to backup your data and/or migrate to another service provider before your account is eliminated.”
“Those of us who work in Cuba are witnesses to the cruelty of the US blockade against Cuba. We experience it every single day in our daily lives, in our homes and at work,” Ms. Ramírez stated.
The first time they tried to block the website was in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, when we covered the arrival of the British cruise Braemar in Havana, which was sailing through the Caribbean and could not dock at any port because it had a great number of Covid-19 cases on board.
The company that blocked the webpage on that occasion was Siteground, which currently does not allow access to any of the websites hosted by it from Cuba.
It was not an easy task to save the data, migrate to another server and find someone who wanted to host us, she added.
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