The Conservative Revolution

Pajamas Media has a great story about the rise of anti-regime bloggers in Cuba.

A few months before Yoani blogged her first post, Cuba’s communications czar, Ramiro Valdés, told an audience “the wild colt of the new technologies could and must be controlled.”

But such pronouncements by Cuba’s totalitarian leadership did not deter Yoani Sánchez. Today she is arguably the most well-known critic of the Castro regime, with well over 1 million visitors to her blog, Generación Y, each month.

It’s great to see blogs play an important role in getting out information to an oppressed people. Try as they might, the communist thugs in Havana won’t be able to stop the flow of information via the internet. The nexus of freedom and technology is too powerful to suppress.

The Washington Post reports that Zimbabwe’s resident tyrant Robert Mugabe finished second in the first round of voting for president. There will likely be a runoff between Mugabe, who is believed to have gotten 42% of the vote, and Morgan Tsvangirai, who seems to have gotten 50% of the vote.

The resolution to Zimbabwe’s five-day-old political stalemate remains unclear. Some members of Zimbabwe’s jittery ruling elite have concluded that President Robert Mugabe must step down after apparently losing an election last weekend and have begun reaching out to opposition leaders to resolve the four-day-old political standoff, according to ruling party members, diplomats and political observers here.

Anne Applebaum, who has written extensively about communist repression in world history, has a piece on Slate today that links to cell phone footage from the political protests in Tibet this past week or so.

The communist government of China can’t keep their brutal tactics secret in the age of the internet. Thank God for that.