A Cuban newspaper has deleted an online column harshly attacking the government's tight controls on information and arguing that a well-informed citizenry is required for a ``more full and democratic socialism.''

José Alejandro Rodríguez's column was posted Friday on Juventud Rebelde's online page. It was removed Saturday -- and did not appear in the print edition -- but not before it was republished on a Spanish blog. The Miami Herald's Cuban Colada blog first reported the removal.

Titled ``Against the demons of sequestered information,'' the column was a surprisingly public complaint by a journalist who writes regularly for the government-run paper. Rodríguez did not reply to an El Nuevo Herald e-mail seeking his comment on the column's disappearence.

``Information is the duty of a journalist and the right of a citizen, of that . . . person who has backed the revolution and who today like never before needs to know the ground that he walks on . . . amid multiple complexities,'' Rodríguez wrote.

That description of information as a public right is common in the West but not in Cuba, where the government has long owned all the mass media and tightly controlled the information that can be published.

After Raúl Castro replaced brother Fidel at the head of the government, Juventud Rebelde, traditionally aimed at a younger audience than the Granma newspaper, has published several stories on the system's shortcomings, including the massive black market, official corruption and lousy service at government-owned shops.

Rodríguez argued that Cubans have a special need for information at a time when Raúl Castro's government is asking them to debate the profound changes needed in a communist system that can no longer deliver cradle-to-grave benefits.

``Never before has there been such a need for information [to allow a citizen] to interact with and participate in society as an active person and not a `baby bird' -- a phrase very much in vogue these days -- that waits to receive the exact amount of information from above,'' he wrote.

The reference to ``baby bird'' appeared to be an especially daring reference to Communications Minister Ramiro Valdés, a hardliner who last month declared Cubans must produce more and stop acting like ``baby birds'' who must be fed by their parents.

``It is true that information is a double-edged weapon, because it reveals the lights as well as the dark holes,'' Rodríguez wrote. ``But information is public property, and we cannot replace it with the . . . permitted information, with the virtual information, with the information-propaganda or with the convenient information . . . however you want to call it,'' he wrote. ``Information is information.''

``The problem . . . is that information does not escape the excessive centralization of our economy and of society in general, something that has nothing to do with a . . . genetic part of socialism, as some believe,'' he wrote. ``Rather, it obstructs [socialism's] democratic potentials.''

Rodríguez noted that much of the important information made public in Cuba is unveiled on Mesa Redonda (``Round Table''), an evening television news and talk show that essentially sets the tone for all official political and social discussions on the island.

The use of Mesa Redonda ``as the stage for supreme information is an assault on the necessary versatility and variety that distinguish good journalism,'' he wrote. `` `Round Table-ization' is a major contribution to the bureaucratization of journalism.''

Rodríguez also complained that it took Granma a week to confirm reports in the foreign news media -- ``divisive and tendentious in certain cases'' -- that the government would do away with workplace cafeterias in order to cut back on expenses.

A reporter goes to the Ministry of the Economy to ask if the cafeteria report is true, he wrote. The minister sends him to a deputy minister, who tells him she must check with the minister and after a while replies that the issue is indeed under study but that no publicity is wanted ``for now.''

``A week later a story on the subject appears in Granma and the reporter feels he's been fooled,'' Rodríguez wrote. ``Could it be that in Granma the information achieves a supreme majesty?''

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