Winds of change

Posted on Thursday, 04.04.13
The Miami Herald | EDITORIAL

Winds of change

OUR OPINION: Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez's visit has brought together
Miami exiles of all political stripes, generations
By The Miami Herald Editorial
HeraldEd@MiamiHerald.com

As Yoani Sánchez departs South Florida to continue her tour through
Europe and Latin America before heading back to Cuba, the dissident
blogger has managed to bring together exiles of all generations and
political philosophies to focus on the one truth they can all agree on:
The 54-year-old dictatorship must end.

At virtually every Miami event this week, Ms. Sánchez, whose Generation
Y blog and tweets are followed by millions worldwide, was greeted with
respect and affection. The few protesters (we counted at most a dozen
about to be rained upon) outside the Freedom Tower on Monday practiced
that all-American right to disagree peacefully while the blogger
exhorted Cuban Americans inside the iconic tower not to let the Castro
regime divide them.

Indeed, dissidents in Cuba disagree on the embargo and a whole manner of
issues, but they are united in their peaceful quest for democracy and
fresh leadership.

Cuba's opposition leaders have set an example mirrored in Miami this week.

Disparate groups like the 2506 Brigade (veterans of the failed Bay of
Pigs invasion) and the politically connected Latin Builders Association,
both opponents of lifting the embargo, joined anti-embargo
organizations, like the Cuban American National Foundation and the Cuba
Study Group, to sponsor events welcoming Ms. Sánchez. Leaders of
pro-embargo groups like the U.S.-Cuba PAC and the Cuban Liberty Council,
which finally was able to award Ms. Sánchez its 2009 "Heroes of Freedom"
medal, were eager to show they support the blogger. And Roots of Hope, a
national group of college students that holds no official position on
the embargo, has been at the forefront of connecting young Cubans on the
island with technology and donated cell phones.

The diversity of groups has been a recognition that democratic change
must come from the Cuban people and that exiles and all people of good
will want to help.

Not that exiles who vehemently oppose lifting the U.S. embargo of Cuba
have changed their minds instantly by the visit of one dissident
blogger, no matter how internationally renown she has become in the past
five years or how well she has blogged and tweeted about every abuse by
the communist regime she has witnessed or experienced directly. But Ms.
Sánchez does offer a perspective that comes from living all but two of
her 37 years in a crumbling country where the Castro brothers have used
the embargo to excuse every abuse, every failure of their totalitarian
state. She speaks from experience.

In the next few weeks other Cuban women who are valiantly exposing the
regime's abuses will be in Miami. Berta Soler, who heads the Ladies in
White, will bring her own perspective as to why she believes keeping the
embargo in place is best. Rosa María Payá, the daughter of the late
Oswaldo Payá, has been in Spain to lobby for an investigation into her
father's death last summer in a car crash that some witnesses have told
her involved a Cuban security vehicle running the car off the road and
into a tree. She, too, will be meeting with Miami's exiles.

These three women offer an opportunity for Cuban Americans to consider
the possibilities and new approaches to help those peaceful dissidents
who are risking their lives every day.

The regime already is under pressure to make it appear it is opening up.
Americans ought not be fooled into complacency. Cubans on the island
know they are still, as Ms. Sánchez put it, "birds in a cage."

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