Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez to meet the public in Miami on Monday

Posted on Sunday, 03.31.13

Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez to meet the public in Miami on Monday
By MIMI WHITEFIELD
mwhitefield@MiamiHerald.com

After a quiet weekend with her family, Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez
returns to the public stage Monday with a full agenda that takes her
from The Miami Herald editorial board to institutions of higher education.

It will be a day of questions and accolades for Sánchez, an independent
journalist and author of the Generacion Y blog, which chronicles daily
life in Cuba and is translated into 20 languages. She also reaches more
than 460,000 people around the world via her Twitter account.

She'll start the day with an 8:30 a.m. meeting with editors and
reporters from The Miami Herald and then appear before some 800 people
at a 2 p.m. event hosted by Miami Dade College at the Freedom Tower, a
former processing center for Cuban refugees.

Miami Herald Editorial Page Editor Myriam Marquez will lead a public
conversation with Sánchez, who also will be receiving the MDC
Presidential Medal for championing human rights. The conversation will
be live-streamed on the college website.

At 7 p.m., she's scheduled to deliver a lecture on "Can Technologies and
Social Media Accelerate Cuba's Democratization?" and receive the FIU
Medallion of Courage, a prize awarded to an individual pursuing a noble
cause at personal cost.

The event will be broadcast live on Univision America radio stations,
including 1140 AM in Miami, and live-streamed at
http://sites.fiu.edu/yoani in English and Spanish.

All tickets for the Monday events have already been distributed.

Monday also could be a day peppered by protests against the 37-year-old
blogger who left Cuba for the first time in a dozen years in February
after Cuba changed its travel policy and issued her a passport. So far
her worldwide tour has taken her to Latin America, Europe, New York and
Washington.

While she has attracted crowds of supporters, detractors also have tried
to disrupt some of her appearances, pelting her with fake dollar bills
and accusing her of being in the employ of the CIA.

She has taken the criticism in stride, saying she looks forward to the
day when people in Cuba are as free to protest and express their opinions.

The past few days in South Florida, which has the highest concentration
of Cubans outside Cuba, have been a time of discovery for Sánchez.

"I am really very happy,'' she said when she arrived in Miami Thursday.
"I feel in the air and in the people a lot of respect and freedom. I
feel like I'm in Cuba but free. This is like Cuba but with democracy.''

In Generaciün Y, she noted: "Our diaspora, our exile is preserving a
Cuba outside Cuba.''

Sánchez spent the weekend catching up with her sister Yunia, who lives
in Miami with her husband Jose Antonio Garcia and daughter, taking
photos and, as usual, tweeting.

But after announcing her arrival via Twitter and chronicling her reunion
with her family and a visit to La Ermita de la Caridad del Cobre, the
Coconut Grove shrine dedicated to Cuba's patron saint, Our Lady of
Charity of El Cobre, the tech-savvy Sánchez went silent Friday.

On Saturday, she resumed her Tweets from Key Largo and posted a photo of
the ocean ("It's the same sea, the same").

It is the first time Sánchez has seen her older sister since Yunia and
her family left the island in 2011 after winning a spot in the U.S. visa
lottery, which allows around 20,000 Cubans a year who don't qualify for
refugee status or family reunification to settle in the United States.

"Yunia was always very lucky in games of chance, so I knew what to
expect from the outset,'' Sánchez wrote of her sister's departure. "…
this island seemed too narrow to contain the good fortune of my older
sister. And more than twenty years ago she reached the same conclusion
as the majority of my compatriots: How can one set down roots in a
country where so few can bear fruit?"

In an interview with Radio Nederland, she said that her sister bought
her plane ticket to Miami after saving for two years.

Although many have tried to cast her as a potential political figure in
Cuba and Sánchez met with Ricardo Zúñiga , presidential advisor for the
Western Hemisphere, at the White House and had meetings with Republican
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New
Jersey, both Cuban-Americans, Sánchez has said that her future lies in
journalism and as a teacher.

She has said she wants to launch a digital newspaper with some of the
money she has won from international prizes and teach more Cubans how to
speak up via the Internet.

Despite her large international following, Sánchez's voice is relatively
unknown in Cuba.

"She's a very good writer, a very smart blogger but she doesn't
represent a political movement,'' said Jorge Dominguez, a Cuba expert at
Harvard University. "She has behaved for the most part as a journalist.
The closet thing we might have in the United States would be an op-ed
writer.''

Sánchez is expected to depart Miami Thursday for her third trip to
Europe on this tour, and to return to Cuba in mid to late May.

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