Cubaverdad

Posted on Sunday, 10.18.09
Cuban blogger bound but not gagged
BY MIRTA OJITO
mao35@columbia.edu

On the night Yoani Sánchez received a prestigious award from Columbia
University, she celebrated with diluted Cuban rum — she doesn’t like
the taste of it — and crackers with mayonnaise, surrounded by family
and friends in her apartment overlooking the Plaza de la Revolución in
Havana.

They were celebrating the extraordinary fact that Sanchez, a 34-year-old
Cuban blogger with no formal training in journalism, hardly any access
to the Internet and no institutional support, was being recognized
Wednesday with a Maria Moors Cabot citation for her blog, Generación Y,
which chronicles in simple, elegant but visceral language daily life in
Cuba.

She’s happy even though the Cuban government’s refusal to allow her to
leave Cuba to receive her prize made her miss a larger party that same
evening in another island, Manhattan. More than 1,300 miles from Havana,
Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger invested Sánchez, in
absentia, with her prize “for her courage, talent and great achievement
in such a brief period of time.”

The room exploded in sustained ovation for two minutes.

The guests had just finished a dinner of filet mignon with a smattering
of vegetables and a dollop of mashed potatoes. There was plenty of wine
and a puffy, flaky dessert with strawberry ice cream, followed by coffee
and chocolate truffles.

And then Sánchez joined us, virtually. Her face, devoid of makeup and
framed by thick dark hair harnessed in a braid that rested on her white
blouse, filled a large screen on the stage. The guests in the opulent
rotunda of Columbia’s Low Library fixed their eyes on the screen.

“Unfortunately, I’m unable to be with you all tonight at the Maria
Moors Cabot Prize Ceremony,” Sanchez said into the camera. She seemed
to be sitting on a park bench.

“However, I’ve grown accustomed to the idea that I cannot leave my
country,” she said.

“We Cubans are like small children who must ask for Father’s permission
to leave the house. And, in the case of the little girl Yoani Sánchez,
well, the personal and social price I’ve had to pay for posting my views
of my reality on a web page has been, simply, to be condemned to
immobility, to have become an immobile pilgrim on this island.”

Blog reaches millions

And yet her immobility is only physical because Sánchez, more than
anybody else in recent Cuban history, reaches millions of people all
over the world, thanks to the power of the Internet and to the ways in
which journalism is evolving today, transforming citizens into
journalists and journalists into crusaders.

Bollinger noted that Sánchez is the first blogger to be recognized by
the Cabot program, the oldest international prize in journalism,
conferred for the last 71 years to the best journalists in the Americas.
He said that in the United States, “where press freedom is well
established, blogs and citizen journalists cannot be expected to take
the place of the traditional press.”

And then, there is the rest of the hemisphere, where the press is not
always as robust as it is in the United States.

According to a report by Cabot program director Josh Friedman, which
Bollinger cited in his speech, “news and opinion sites are making up
for inadequate traditional media” even in digitally undeveloped
countries such as Haiti and El Salvador. In Peru, Mexico and Venezuela,
bloggers have stepped in where traditional media have faltered.

“But Cuba,” Bollinger said, “is probably the most extreme case of
blogging in the face of poor Internet access, narrow bandwidth and
government control.”

I called Sánchez Thursday morning and told her about the event, the
food, the applause. I forgot to mention there were flowers on the table:
a beautiful fall display with large pink roses and tiny yellow buds. The
round tables shimmered with the glasses, the lights, the sparkling
silverware and the silky tablecloths.

Internet access costly

She told me about her worn shoes and how she hardly eats. She earns some
money from columns she writes for publications in Italy and the United
States, and from “teaching the subjunctive to tourists.” The bulk of
her money, she said, goes to pay for access to the Internet in the
hotels of Havana. An hour costs between $7 and $9, a fortune, she said.

But she doesn’t mind. Her weakness is technology. Her priority: to
communicate and to inform. We hung up quickly. She had work to do. She
is now tweeting even as Cuba’s “geriatric leadership,” as Bollinger
called it, tries to find ways to stop her from doing what most young
people can do anywhere else.

As she told an immigration worker when she was denied a travel visa to
New York (view the video on her blog http://desdecuba.com/generaciony/):
“What do you fear? That this little person of 110 pounds could start a
tsunami?”

She already has.

Cuban blogger bound but not gagged – Other Views – MiamiHerald.com (18
October 2009)

http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1287090.html

Yoani Sánchez: Virtually Outspoken in Cuba
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: October 17, 2009

Yoani Sánchez is a 34-year-old Cuban writer, editor and linguistics
scholar who last week became the first blogger to win one of the Maria
Moors Cabot Prizes given by Columbia University for journalism that
advances inter-American understanding. Her two-year-old blog, filled
with personal observations and sardonic social commentary from Havana,
is called Generación Y; it now gets more than 14 million page views a
month, routinely inspires thousands of comments and can be read in an
English version. But it circulates far more freely outside Cuba than
within, where the Castro dictatorship regards it as counter-revolutionary.

Internet access is tightly limited in Cuba, and Ms. Sánchez has often
had to play cat-and-mouse with the authorities to make her writings
available, either inside Cuba or outside of it. And when the Cabot
awards were announced, she was denied an exit visa to travel to New York
to receive hers, a process she chronicled on her blog.

But she made a video recording from a Havana park regretting the
restrictions on her movements and managed to transmit them out of Cuba;
they were posted on her site and played at the award ceremonies
Wednesday night.

“We Cubans are like small children,” she explained in the message, “who
need Father’s permission to leave the house.”

Here is an excerpt, translated by The New York Times, from one of Ms.
Sanchez’s posts this month, titled “The Architecture of Urgency.” Like
much of her work, which she describes as an “exorcism” or “therapy” for
her frustration, its bleak poetry does not focus overtly on politics,
but instead conveys the texture of daily life in a crumbling
totalitarian system:

On an island where acquiring cement, cinderblocks or steel is comparable
to obtaining a bit of lunar dust, destroying in order to build has
become a common practice. There are specialists in removing bricks of
clay intact from the walls in which they have been embedded for 80
years; experts in disengaging blue ceramic tiles from demolished
mansions; and skillful “deconstructors” who extract metal beams from
heaps of rubble. They use what they have recovered to create their own
living space, this in a country where no one can legally buy a house.
The main “quarries” where they obtain their material are houses that
have collapsed or workplaces that the state’s inactivity has left
abandoned for many years. They fall upon these with an efficiency in
their plunder that one would wish to see in the lethargic bricklayers
working for a salary.

Some of these skillful recyclers have died when a roof collapses or when
a wall too riddled with holes at its base falls. But sometimes luck
smiles on them, and they find a toilet without cracks or an electrical
outlet that the owners of the demolished house could not — in their
haste — take with them. A kilometer from the looting site, a small house
of tin and zinc slowly begins to change. They have added the tile
pavement from a building that collapsed at the corner of Neptuno and
Aguila, a piece of the exterior grating from an abandoned mansion on
Linea Street and even a stained-glass window plucked from a convent in
the old part of Havana. Within this home that is the fruit of looting, a
family — equally ravaged by life — dreams of the next factory to be
dismantled and carried away on their shoulders.

Accompanying the post is a video in which a 40-year-old Cuban poet and
performance artist, Amaury Pacheco, recites one of his works, “Economic
Plan,” as images of buildings being looted and demolished flash by on
the screen. Mixing street slang, mordant humor and official jargon, he
mimics the Castro brothers delivering one of their rambling speeches
extolling the achievements of the revolution. Because much of the word
usage is idiosyncratic, there could be differing translations; here is one:

Economy! We have fulfilled the annual plan:
1,100 street hustlers; 2,000 young prostitutes; 8,000 opportunists.
Plus, 300 non-mentally disabled and the syndrome of mediocrity.
Economy! In times of a Havana that is unrecognizable,
By sweeping the house, you cleanse the economy.
Strong legs for the rocky path,
Legs that are only for the percentages of economic shame.
Shameful economy! Economy of shame! Economy of shame!

Yoani Sánchez – Virtually Outspoken in Cuba – NYTimes.com (18 October 2009)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18rohter.html