On Launch, Cuba's Answer to Wikipedia Immediately Crashes

Ecured.cu, the Cuban government’s answer to Wikipedia, promises to give a users knowledge “with a democratizing, not-for-profit, objective, non-Colonial” viewpoint.

But today, the official day of its launch, what it gave users was another typical Cuban experience: Outages and frustration. Various Internet users reported difficulty getting onto the site, or accessing its now over 19,600 entries, and the self-explanatory site downforeveryoneorjustme.com confirmed, “It’s not just you! http://ecured.cu looks down from here.”

Dan Kubiske, who writes the blog “Journalism, Journalists and the World” wrote: “Damnedest thing is that I can get to the main page but any searches come up with an error message. Guess the server in Cuba is being overloaded with people looking for a non-colonial view of the world.”

This is too bad for anyone looking for the Cuban government-approved biography of Daddy Yankee—which a brief access window this morning revealed to be quite extensive at this point, and illustrated with photos—or the entry on George W. Bush—which reports “a long family history of dirty business, tricks and government intrigue” and says he “applied all possible dirty war tricks: clandestine jails, kidnappings, extrajudicial processes, wiretapping.”

But it might be no big deal if you’re looking for info on Cuban dissident groups like Damas de Blanco. Users must be approved by the site’s administrators before they can create or edit entries, and as of last night, the Damas were AWOL.

We’ll let you know if that changes. If anyone can load the site, that is.