If you’re reading this right now, chances are you’re sitting down on a nice comfy chair in a nice, well lit, air conditioned room. You’re probably typing or working with a relatively new computer replete with all the whoozits and whatsits with all the bells and whistles. You probably have a reliable and relatively fast connection - DSL, Cable, possibly a T1 - to this wonderful thing called the internet.

And since you’re here, reading this, on the internet, chances are that you are here to get the scoop on the latest news, to read about what’s happening around the country, to find out what’s going on in the world. And many of you will in turn go to your own particular home on the internet, your own cozy blog, and you will use the information you gleened here and elsewhere on this wonderful thing called the internet and you will write about it. You will share what you have learned, what you have just read about, along with possibly your own take on the issue with your faithful readers. And your faithful readers will, in turn, quite possibly do the exact same thing you’ve just done.

You and I, we, are all here to disseminate information. Because that’s all we do here, really. Spread information. We are, in essence, independent journalists. Each and every one of us.

And we can sit in front of our turbo charged computers in our well lit, air conditioned rooms with our lightning speed internet connections and disseminate news, thoughts and opinions because we are free to do so.

Yet right now, in dark, dank, and fetid jail cells almost two dozen men and women languish. Their crime, what put them there to rot away from the rest of society, is that they are us. They are each and every one of us who sit here in front of our computers and disseminate information. They are independent journalists, just like the rest of us.

Their only misfortune, the only thing that distinguishes what they do and who they are from all of us is that they happen to be Cuban. Cuban independent jounalists. They live in a world most of us cannot even imagine and for simply reporting on that world, for trying to open some eyes as to their realities, for doing exactly what we do here freely, they have been stripped of their lives. They have been stripped of their voices.

But tomorrow, as fellow independent journalists, you and I, we, all of us, can be their voices. We can use our own cozy blogs, our personal soapboxes, to help these fellow independent journalists, these now muted but one day when they are free to be future bloggers.

From Editor and Publisher:

IAPA Calls For Mass Editorials Urging Cuba To Free Journos

CHICAGO With Cuban President Fidel Castro apparently on the mend but still ceding power to his brother Raul, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) says now is the time for newspapers around the hemisphere to urge the immediate release of some two dozen imprisoned journalists, and an end to government harassment of the tiny independent press on the island.

IAPA is suggesting newspapers publish the commentary simultaneously on Friday Aug. 18.

We have a chance tomorrow to help some peers we’ve never met. Fellow independent journalists in dire need. Please, do what you can. Write about them on your blogs and webpages. Write your local media. Send out emails, make phone calls. Get the word out.

Speak for those whose speech has been systematically stifled and whose names - so you can meet them personally - are below the fold.

More:

American Thinker
Uncommon Sense
Wall Street Cafe
Instapundit

Ricardo González Alfonso; Víctor Rolando Arroyo; Normando Hernández González, Julio César Gálvez; Adolfo Fernández Sainz; Omar Rodríguez Saludes; Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez; Mijaíl Barzaga Lugo; Pedro Arguelles Morán; Pablo Pacheco Avila; Alejandro González Raga; Alfredo Pulido López; Fabio Prieto Llorente; Iván Hernández Carrillo; José Luis García Paneque; Juan Carlos Herrera; Miguel Galván Gutiérrez; José Ubaldo Izquierdo; Omar Ruiz Hernández; José Gabriel Ramón Castillo; Léster Luis González Pentó Alfredo Felipe Fuentes; José Manuel Caraballo Bravo; and Oscar Mario González

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