Over the last few weeks since the start of widespread protests by Cubans against their Communist government there have been a number of measures taken by the Communists to prevent Cubans talking to one another and from talking to others from overseas. We’ve seen allegations of the Cuban government involvement of deliberate curtailment of internet services and the harassment of foreign journalists attempting to report on the protests that are occurring.
One vital ‘off network’ information source being used by Cubans to speak to others, especially Cuban-Americans in places like Florida, has been amateur radio, most notably the 40 Metre (7.0 – 7.2MHz) band. This band which is a very popular and heavily used band which can reliably both day and night carry signals between Cuba and the Southern states of the US is now being targeted by the Cuban government who are jamming the band.
Judging by some of the audio clips that I’ve heard the jamming sounds very much like the ‘woodpecker’ jammers once used by the Soviet Union to prevent their citizens from listening to Western radio broadcasts. The jamming appears to be using pretty powerful and is considered by some American radio hams to be frequency agile in that it jumps around and jumps on whatever frequency in the 40M band is being used. I get the impression that whenever a Cuban radio operator starts up on the band on what they think is a clear frequency the jammer moves to stop the signal on that particular frequency. Other US Hams have reported that the signal strength of the jamming is incredibly high and one was reporting that he was receiving an S9 level of jamming signal. For those who don’t know signal strengths are usually judged audibly on a scale of 1 to 9 with 1 being the weakest with 9 in most cases being the strongest). I don’t know where that particular ham was located but to get such a high signal level does suggest that the jamming is of very high power.
I have found two Ham radio operators who have put up videos about the jamming but there are many more similar videos out there. One of these operators,the operator in the first video, used remote Software Defined Radio receivers in South America and in the USA to attempt to triangulate where the jamming signals were coming from and he found that they appear to emanate from Cuba. Because of the distances between the SDR stations he was not able to pin down the exact locations on Cuba the jammers are operating from but he has managed to at least establish that Cuba is the jamming location.
Here’s the videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtICIDDvnPw
and the second video about the jamming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCxcryv8FTI
This second video shows that the jamming is right across the 40M band you can hear it as he spins through the band.
All this jamming along with the shutting down of the internet for Cuban citizens is the sort of thing that dictators normally do when their nation is facing a crisis. The fact that the Cuban Communists are now trying to suppress every single method of communication that Cubans could use to talk to outsiders including amateur radio signals, suggests very much to me that the protests are not over and may even be causing the Cuban Communists severe problems. The Cuban Communists do not want information getting out about how bad things are and that could indicate that the regime is getting shaky and might even be on its last legs. We can but hope, for the Cuban’s sake, that Communism is going through the process of dying on its arse on the island of Cuba.
73’s
I find it spine chilling that at one point there was a chance of Corbyn becoming PM. He supports the Cuban regime as his cronies like John McDonnell, Seamus Milne and Andrew MUrray do. I don’t however believe that a Corbyn government would have lasted more than a few months at most before he was ousted. The Covid crisis alone would shown him wanting. He would have wanted to stay in the EU despite having to break many EU rules in order to attempt to carry out his manifesto. His young middle class’s Momentum fans of course cannot grasp this. A Corbyn government would also in my opinion trigger massive civic unrest by ordinary Britons making the Poll Tax disturbances look like a lover’s spat. Corbyn is spelt WOKE on steroids.
You are spot on there. We dodged a very nasty Corbyn bullet. Despite the obvious problems that this country suffers from and will suffer from because of Johnson and his wife Princess Nut Nut, Corbyn would have done far worse. His Momentum fans would have become the equivalent of Mao’s Red Guards and there would indeed have been mass civil unrest. He would have crushed the vote to leave the EU and made links with some of the most terrible dictators around not out of expediency, but because they are his friends. As an aside I have personal experience of seeing Andrew Murray in action at the memorial for Jean Charles Menezes in South London. He and his Communists hijacked the memorial and clashed with another unpalatable far left group the Wages For Housework campaign and turned a memorial into a chaotic bun fight. Something tells me that Murray if given influence in real politics rather than lefty street politics, would have done the same to the country.