Censorship

This morning I emailed a friend in Santiago an article in La Jornada, a left-leaning Mexican newspaper, about political prisoners--one being released after 17 years in prison and two others being sentenced. The message was returned with the explanation "PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 552 Message delivery denied. Your message is filled with evil things (tm)." (Curious that it was in English when the message, ie, the article, was in Spanish.) Do you think this means that things are getting more repressive under Raul?

It actually said, "Your message is filled with evil things?!?!"

Sorry, but that's pretty funny...

Cheers,
Terry

I was copying from the return message. It's not so funny when you can't communicate with a friend.

My guess is your friend has a great sense of humour...

Yes, it's a drag if you can't communicate with a friend.

But it's hilarious if the automated censorship software in Cuba really does spit out, "Your message is filled with evil things" and throws the message back to you.

Lastly, perhaps you should use a little more common sense regarding the content of your emails to Cuba - or perhaps you're the victom of a little Cuban joke?...

Cheers,
Terry

OP

A couple of specific questions if you will entertain them. Was the offending piece an attachment to your e-mail or included in the body? Did you send the e-mail to a Cuban ".cu" address or is your friend smart enough to maintain an offshore e-mail account in Spain or Mexico as many Cubans do?

Fido & his younger sibling can't censor what they can't see.

Before I went to Cuba the first time I emailed a couple people and a couple of the emails got returned to me. One had some gobblygook & returned mail message amongst which said something like, (in English) "Sorry, can't reply right now, my head's in the cupboard." No joke. It was weird! And I think it turned out that the email had been received as well, despite the error message. Totally weird. Made me mistrust email there for a long, long time. And there was nothing worth censoring there either, that I remember.

To davfitz, the offending piece was not an attachment, I just copied it from the newspaper's website into a message. My friend gets email through the Universidad de Oriente, so her address ends in .cu.

OP

Thanks. It might help if your friend obtained a "Hotmail" or "Yahoo" account offshore.

If she had access to the internet, she would. She actually has a yahoo.es address for reservations for her casa particular, but I have to open it and forward messages to her at her .cu address because she can't access the internet, unless she's in Spain visiting her kids.

I have ever changing email addresses for friends in Cuba, very often the addresses of socios and friends of friends. The internal addresses are definitely the least reliable. When they fail, I don't get "non-deliverable" messages, just dead ends.

I don't send controversy, although one game I do like to play is to include a line that tells them the date and time I actually sent the message and asking them to let me know how long it took until they got the message...this is interesting to me as an IT guy.

The message Luisa recieved about "evil things" sounds like a joke from Cuba, or very bad programming that sent text not intended for her.

I would love to hear other peoples details on trying to maintain email communications.

Luisa - I know you have good intentions. But did you consider that passing messages critical of this thuggish regime to your Cuban friend might get her into hot water? A tourist might be forgiven not to notice, but this a 1st class police state, the 'state security system' of which was built by one of the best in this field, namely East German Stasi.
My advice: enjoy Cuba, but stay well clear of politics - if only for the sake of your Cuban friends.

There is no freedom of speech in Cuba.