Within hours of signing up to Twitter, the daughter of the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, has got into the online equivalent of a shouting match with a prominent dissident blogger, Yoani Sánchez.
Mariela Castro called Sánchez and her supporters "despicable parasites" in a brief exchange that may have been the first direct confrontation, verbal or otherwise, between dissidents and a member of the Castro family after years of mutual animosity.
Sánchez, who regularly criticises the lack of freedoms in communist Cuba in her Generation Y blog, touched off the dispute by sending tweets that welcomed Mariela Castro to the "plurality of Twitter" where "no one can shut me up, deny me permission to travel or block entrance".
"When will we Cubans be able to come out of other closets?" she asked, alluding to Mariela Castro's championing of gay rights as head of Cuba's national centre for sex education.
"Tolerance is total or is it not?" Sánchez tweeted.
Castro, 49, replied coolly: "Your focus of tolerance reproduces the old mechanisms of power. To improve your 'services' you need to study." » | Reuters in Havana | Wednesday, November 09, 2011
