by Rigoberto Diaz Sat Jun 21, 3:16 PM ET
HAVANA (AFP) - Time magazine named her one of the world's 100 most
influential people and Yoani Sanchez won Spain's top online journalism
award, all while living in communist Cuba where the state controls the
media.
Now her husband has sprung to her defense online, after Cuban leader
Fidel Castro dismissed her award as "just another prize" supported by
his nemesis, the United States.
In Sanchez's blog, her husband and journalist Reinaldo Escobar boldly
asks how Castro can reject his wife's prize after he dared for decades
to bestow awards on "dictators" like Nicolae Ceausescu.
It is an Internet-age scenario the 81-year-old ailing Castro probably
never foresaw, since most people in Cuba -- who earn an average of some
17 dollars a month -- have no access to the web.
But Sanchez's work has earned her a global audience, spotlighting the
Internet's role as a key alternative venue when traditional media are
off-limits to those not on the same page as the government.
Cuban authorities last month refused to give Sanchez permission to
travel to Madrid to receive the prestigious Ortega y Gasset prize,
awarded by the daily El Pais, for her blog "Generacion Y" chronicling
everyday Cubans' daily woes.
And in a prologue Fidel Castro wrote June 4 to the book, "Fidel, Bolivia
and Something More," Castro said the prize was "just another one of so
many prizes the United States fosters to try to serve its purposes."
He further lamented "that there were young Cuban people who think" the
way she does.
Sanchez, 33, says her blog "is an exercise in cowardice because it lets
me say in this space what I am barred from expressing in civil society."
She said in a recent entry that she has always struggled with machismo
in Cuban society.
But "since I feel myself attacked by someone whose power is infinitely
greater than my own, more than twice my age, and as the girls in my
neighborhood used to say, an ultra-Alpha male, I decided my husband,
journalist Reinaldo Escobar, should be the one to respond to him," she
wrote.
Escobar defended Sanchez's freedom of speech and directly challenged
Castro to defend bestowing Cuba's highest honor on men he called
"corrupt" and "dictators."
"The name of the philosopher Ortega y Gasset might be linked with some
elitist and even reactionary ideas, but at least, unlike those on whom
awards have been bestowed by (Castro), he never set tanks loose against
fellow citizens who disagreed (...) or jailed anyone for thinking
differently than he," Escobar wrote in the blog.
In more than 48 years in power, Fidel Castro, Escobar said, "placed (or
ordered placed) the Order of Jose Marti on all the evil and unworthy
collars he could: Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceausescu, Todor
Zhivkov, Gustav Husak, Janos Kadar" and Erich Honecker, among others.
"I would love to read, in light of the times we are in now, a column
(from Castro) justifying those inappropriate honors that sullied the
name of our apostle" Marti, Cuba's independence icon and poet, Escobar
added.
Castro, who writes editorials for the Communist Party daily as he
recovers from major intestinal surgery, released a new column Thursday.
It was another classic wide-ranging reflection on topics from Marxism to
Cuba's international medical assistance, eschewing any references to
media or free speech and thought.
"Our country has demonstrated that it can resist all pressure," wrote
Castro, who stepped down earlier this year and was replaced as president
by his brother, Raul Castro.
Despite recent social and economic reforms enacted under Raul Castro,
Cubans will so far have to wait for greater access to the Internet.
"Cuba is not concerned with the individual connection of its citizens to
the Internet," deputy minister for Computer Science and Communications,
Boris Moreno, said last month.
"We use the Internet to defend the Revolution and the principles we
believe in and have defended all these years," he added, quoted by the
official Prensa Latina news agency.
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