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Monday, February 13, 2012

Cuban blogger riles with her weapon of words

Cuban blogger riles with her weapon of words
Last updated: February 7, 2012 7:02 pm
By John Paul Rathbone in Havana

Yoani Sánchez is Cuba's best-known blogger and, for many outside the
island, also its opposition's most important voice. She is also,
however, a philologist whose refusal to mangle the Spanish language is
matched only by her love of 140-character tweets.

Resolving that contradiction is one of the lesser challenges Ms Sánchez
faces as an internet-based activist in a country that, by some metrics,
has less internet connectivity than even Haiti.

"I try to tweet with the brevity and elegance of classical Spanish,
while only using whole words," she jokes of herself on a recent evening
in Havana.

Such humour is characteristic of the 36-year-old, whose mordant and
highly personal vignettes of Cuba's quotidian drabness have long angered
the regime – even as her writings' literary and political merits have
turned her into an international star.

Her blog Generation Y, begun on a whim in 2007 but now visited up to 14m
times a month, ranges from piquant observations about lemon shortages to
the human rights implications of the visit to Havana by Brazilian
president Dilma Rousseff last week. She has 200,000 followers on
Twitter. Last year, Foreign Policy magazine voted her one of the world's
Top 100 Thinkers.

Cuba's state-run media meanwhile accuses Ms Sánchez of conducting
cyberwar. Fidel Castro has called her the leader of a group of "special
envoys of neo-colonialism, sent to undermine" the Castro brothers' rule.

Sitting in a Havana state-run restaurant with independent journalist
Reinaldo Escobar, her longtime partner and collaborator, Ms Sánchez,
with her slight frame and toothy grin, hardly cuts a typical figure of a
counter-revolutionary agent.
Tale of the tweets

Jan 29 Detained: Ladies in White and other activists in Guantánamo when
they went to mass in Cathedral. Call this # for more info.

Jan 31 Brazilian journalists all over Havana today. Contrast their bold
professionalism with Cuba's docile official press.

Feb 3 No surprises. They've denied me a visa to leave and return to my
country – the 19th time. Breathe, count to ten. Don't respond to an
insult with an insult, I tell myself. Better a hug! Dilma: what's the
point of having a port as big and modern as Mariel if we can't use it to
come and go?

Feb 2 Hearing, but can't confirm, that Abel Prieto, culture minister,
has been freed from his post.

Feb 4 Fidel Castro presented the first two volumes of his memoirs.
Threats of m-m-many more to follow ... Abel Prieto has reappeared in
public, although rumours growing in Havana's streets he's been fired
from culture ministry.

Feb 5 I ask myself: what advantages does my denied exit bring? There is
so much to do here!

Feb 6 Amnesty International has released an announcement about my denied
exit visa [www.amnesty.org].

Feb 7 Very little information about Syria, and Cuban official TV seems
partial and in favour of Bashar al-Assad. What's going on? It has been
raining all afternoon in Havana – happy trees, but collapsing sewers :-0

"I consider myself an independent citizen," she says, pointing out that
in Cuba's one-party system there are "no crimes against thinking or
opinion – only against the state".

Precise attention to language is a hallmark of her conversation. Ms
Sánchez puns that Cuba's irregular Communist party congresses are "less
a parley-ment than a listening-ment: there's not been a single "No" vote
in 50 years".

But perhaps the greatest puzzle about her work is technology. How does
social media operate in Cuba given the state's information monopoly,
only 2 per cent of people have access to the internet and sending a
single Tweet can cost up to $1 – a fifth of the average weekly state wage?

Critics say that explains why Cuba's fragmented opposition movement is
better known outside the island than inside. Even a copybook Facebook
site is a government-run intranet.

Ms Sánchez, who earns her living from a bi-weekly column in El País, the
highest-circulation newspaper in Spain, says mobile phone technology,
and the "echo chamber of abroad", amplify social media's local impact.

"I send an SMS text to 70 people, they send to 70 more, and so on. Texts
can also be uploaded directly on to the internet. It is tweeting blind,
but the tweets get mentioned in news stories abroad, which are broadcast
by Hispanic TV and watched by Cubans on illegal satellite dishes here.
The echo chamber is crucial."

She writes the blog only once a week, she adds, "to let myself breathe".

This ingenious network works both for incoming and outgoing news. "We
were the first to learn of Gaddafi's death," she says. "My phone was
red-hot with texts." As Etecsa, the state telephone company, has just
cut phone charges, she adds her "text newspaper" may get more effective
still.

Even so, the system has limits. Ms Sánchez rolls her eyes at suggestions
made by Republican party candidates campaigning in the Florida primaries
last month that they wanted to reverse President Barack Obama's
loosening of travel restrictions, tighten the US embargo and promote a
"Cuban spring".

"It is far too early for that," she says. The Arab world "spent years
integrating technology into their lives. We are still in an embryonic
state". About 10 per cent of Cubans use a mobile phone; in Tunisia, it
is more than 75 per cent.

"I've also learnt that the more restrictions there are, the less people
have and the more subservient they become to who dispenses it – the
state," she adds. "We are a long way from the banality of internet
ubiquity – although I am all for a bit more frivolity."

Pope Benedict XVI's scheduled visit in March, Havana's recent freeing of
political prisoners and her own international profile help protect Ms
Sánchez. Pluck and a sense of humour meanwhile seem to keep her spirits up.

She says she was not realistically expecting Ms Rousseff to voice any
human rights concerns while in Cuba – or for Havana to allow her an exit
visa to visit Brazil, the 19th time permission has been denied.

"I never want to become bitter," says Ms Sánchez. "I tweet, I blog, I
write. I wake happier than most. Everyday is a new scenario."

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/478caf9e-5181-11e1-a9d7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1mHdItPMa

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