BEST OF BLOGOSPHERE
Generación Y
Yoani Sánchez has won the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot award issued by
Columbia University for her Generation Y blog exposing Cuba's harsh
reality. Generación Y (desdecuba.com/generationy/) reaches millions
worldwide but not in Cuba, where the communist regime blocks it. Here's
an excerpt:
Years ago I turned my back on the academic and intellectual world, tired
of seeing, so frequently, the masks covering the faces of my teachers
and fellow students.
Today begins my journey back to the university campus, bearing in hand
the special citation in the Maria Moors Cabot Journalism prizes with
which I've been honored by Columbia University. An award that I've
received for -- among other things -- refusal to take part in this
``cultivated'' complicity that I was so frustrated to discover on the
part of Cuban [academia].
Escaping from a bookish erudition detached from reality, I went to the
opposite extreme: that of circuitry and binary code. There are roads,
however, that lead us always to the same place and that can make a
renegade philologist re-embrace the habits of the academy. Particularly,
if this return to the world of gowns and diplomas happened for having
behaved as a free person in cyberspace.
I think I will use the prestige and protection that the Cabot Prize
brings with it to continue to grow the Cuban blogosphere. . . . As I
don't plan to wait to be allowed to open a school of digital journalism
in order to realize this project, I will begin it with bureaucratic and
legal formality.
The distinction that I have received today can contribute to the birth
of a new kind of instruction here, one without ideological conditions,
and without those ugly costumes which at one time made me distance
myself from the academic world.
Generación Y - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com (30 July 2009)
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1163408.html
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