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
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