Also in the Miami Herald, Syra Ortiz-Blanes reports that this week Cuban dissidents were briefly able to use Google to undermine the communist dictatorship before the Alphabet subsidiary restored the regime’s preferences:
For a few hours, Cuba’s storied Revolutionary Square, where Fidel Castro once gave hours-long speeches to the masses, had a different name on Google Maps this week: Freedom Plaza.
A group of Cubans on the island and in the diaspora launched a campaign to change the name of the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana to the Plaza de la Libertad — and succeeded, though only temporarily.
User requests for the switch made it through Google’s system, the company confirmed, but were eventually flagged and the name reverted back to its revolutionary idiom.
Osmani Pardo, a Cuba-based activist, said the loose-knit network, whose exact size is unknown, aims to empower the Cuban people to assign new words and language to government-run institutions.
Now this is the kind of renaming project all Americans should support. Certainly few historical figures are more deserving of cancellation than the murderous Castro.
Imagine if social media networks could somehow be used to undermine tyrants and open closed societies. But how?
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