Posted: April 02, 2008, 5:25 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The Cuban government has finally blocked access to a Web log written by
Yoani Sanchez, a young woman who has caused a sensation on the
communist-ruled island with her daily postings about life in Havana. But
she says she has found a way to outsmart her censors. In the spirit of
Soviet-era samizdats and Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, her blog,
www.desdecuba.com/generaciony, lives on.
Sanchez is a linguistics graduate in her early 30s, with a husband more
than two decades her senior and a 12-year-old son. Her parents sent her
to a revolutionary school in rural Cuba, where she became a young
communist "pioneer." But once she graduated from college, she was unable
to pursue an academic career because her thesis on dictatorships in
Latin American literature sounded, to the authorities, like a chronicle
of life at home. She and her husband eke out a living by providing
services to tourists.
In order to blog, Sanchez has been sneaking into Internet cafés in
hotels reserved for foreigners. A typical visit involves quickly
uploading her blog entries from a flash memory card to her Web site,
which is linked to a server in Germany.
Since only 200,000 Cubans — out of a total of 11 million — have access
to the Internet, it is unclear how many of her compatriots read her
postings. But apparently many do. Apart from legal users, mostly
government employees and researchers, there are countless clandestine
Internet links in homes around the country. The blog has become so
popular inside and outside Cuba that it received 1.2 million visits in
February alone.
A measure of her popularity is how quickly the word spread that the
government had blocked access to the blog last week. "It will seem
amazing that with such a limited access to the Internet, Cubans have
noticed the censoring of these Web pages so quickly, but it was so," she
wrote. "After being warned by many nervous readers, I went to a
cybercafé and confirmed the censorship."
It is ironic that the clampdown should have taken place precisely when
Raul Castro is lifting restrictions on the sale of computers, DVD
players and cell phones. After all, the brother of Fidel Castro has been
encouraging Cubans to debate problems openly — the reason why, in a
famous incident depicted on YouTube and other sites, Eliecer Avila, a
student from Havana's University of Computer Science, confronted Ricardo
Alarcon, the head of the National Assembly, over restrictions on travel
abroad. With a straight face, Alarcon explained that there are six
billion people in the world and that it would be impossible for all of
them to fly at the same time.
Sanchez's blog has responded to the challenge in characteristic style:
"The anonymous censors of our famished blog have tried to lock me up in
the room, turn my lights off and prevent my friends from coming in. ...
However, the punishment is so useless that it invites pity and so easy
to elude that it becomes an incentive."
What has probably unnerved the regime is not so much her attacks on the
Castro brothers as her vivid description of daily life — how Cubans
register their cows as oxen to avoid having to sell the milk to the
government, how people get paid in worthless Cuban pesos but have to
obtain "convertible pesos" on the black market in order to buy soap and
how the timid reforms put in practice by Raul Castro so far amount to
the legalization of global technology that is beyond his control. Still,
she despairs the pace of reform. In one entry, she says that the toaster
will come "in two years' time ... satellite dishes will arrive in the
middle of the century and my grandchildren will get to know GPS in their
teen years."
Where does this woman get her courage? A little anecdote from a recent
entry in her blog perhaps contains a clue. Referring to her family's
Easter celebration, she regretted that there would be an empty chair
because of a missing relative — Adolfo Fernandez Sainz, one of the 75
independent journalists jailed by the Castro regime five years ago. And
she expressed the hope that no one would deserve the phrase hurled at
her by her young son when he learned of those detentions: "So, you are
still free because you are a bit cowardly."
— Alvaro Vargas Llosa is the author of Liberty for Latin America: How to
Undo 500 Years of State Oppression.
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