Commentary: Yoani Sanchez and her blogging comrades are now the targets
of the Castro regime's censors—and police.
By Marc Cooper
December 8, 2008
Havana-based writer Yoani Sanchez was recently named by Time magazine as
one the 100 most influential people in the world, and she won the 2008
Ortega y Gasset award for digital journalism. But that didn't stop Cuban
authorities from directly threatening her with jail last week.
Or maybe that's precisely why the dictatorial Cuban regime finds the
33-year-old Sanchez so intolerable. Her lyrically and masterfully
written blog, Generacion Y, is the most prominent online site in Cuba—if
such a thing even exists. Access to the Internet is severely restricted
there, and the Havana government shows no hesitation in censoring a long
list of sites, including Sanchez's.
Now things are getting even tighter. Just as Sanchez was preparing to
travel to the western edge of the island to participate in a first-ever
two-day blogging workshop this past weekend, she was summoned to appear
before state security officials. She posted the police warrant on her
blog and then detailed the tongue lashing and direct threat she received
when she showed up at the police station.
She reports on what she was told by the police, whom she referred to as
"intimidation professionals":
We want to warn you that you have transgressed all the limits of
tolerance with your rapprochement and contacts with
counter-revolutionary elements. This totally disqualifies you for dialog
with Cuban authorities.
The activities planned for the coming days cannot [be] carried out.
We, for our part, will take all measures, make the relevant
denunciations and take the necessary actions. This activity, in this
moment in the life of the Nation, recuperating from two hurricanes, will
not be allowed.
What recent natural disasters have to do with muzzling free speech is
inexplicable. It's not just Sanchez who got squeezed. So did blogger
Claudia Cadelo, who was also called into a meeting with state security
but didn't make an appearance due to illness.
Last week the Castro government also imposed a new measure ordering
Internet service providers to "prevent access to sites where the content
is contrary to the social interest, morals or good customs; as well as
the use of applications that affect the integrity or security of the State."
The estimated 20 bloggers who planned to attend the workshop in the
province of Pinar del Rio decided it would be more prudent to conduct
their conference online instead of all showing up in one place and
risking arrest. Writing on her blog, Sanchez celebrated the ingenuity of
her blogging comrades, saying, "We ended up finding the cracks between
the fingers of the censors, through which the fine sand of information
and understanding managed to slip." A press release on Sanchez's blog
from the workshop participants promises a contest among Cuban blogs.
As it stands, Sanchez and other Cuban citizens can only indirectly blog.
She sends her dispatches from the island out by email to a network of
foreign friends. They, in turn, translate her writing into several
languages and maintain her popular blog, which has a worldwide audience.
None of Sanchez's writing is overtly political. She crafts mostly highly
styled, often heartbreakingly simple descriptions of daily life in
Havana, an existence often marked by longing, disappointment, and
frustration aggravated by an ossified society.
Here are the moving words she wrote a few weeks ago, soon after the
election of Barack Obama:
For weeks, there are words like "ballot box," "votes," and
"candidates" that persecute us everywhere. First there were the
elections in the United States and now the issue has been revived with
what happened on Sunday in Venezuela. It's as if at the end of the year
everything conspires to remind us of our condition as non-electors, our
limited experience in deciding who leads us. You become accustomed to
not being able to choose what to put in your mouth, under which creed
they will educate your children, or to whom to open the door, but that
resignation shatters when you see someone else vote. Because of this it
has risen up, these days, the desire to fold the ballot, to push it into
the slot and to know that with it goes my stentorian shout that demands:
"to choose."
In the recent past, the Cuban government has not flinched from jailing
independent journalists it has accused of being
"counter-revolutionaries." Until now, it has refrained from locking up
bloggers. But unless Sanchez and her fellow bloggers can mobilize
support, they may soon face the full wrath of a regime that continues to
criminalize free thought.
Marc Cooper is associate director of the Institute for Justice and
Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and a
contributing editor to The Nation.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2008/12/cuba-blogger-crackdown-yoani-sanchez.html
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