Cuba’s Yoani Sánchez barred from award
p2pnet news | Freedom:- “On a recent morning, Yoani Sánchez took a deep breath and gathered her nerve for an undercover mission: posting an Internet chronicle about life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba,” said the Wall Street Journal just before Chritstmas last year, going on:
“To get around Cuba’s restrictions on Web access, the waif-like 32-year-old posed as a tourist to slip into an Internet cafe in one of the city’s luxury hotels, which normally bar Cubans. Dressed in gray surf shorts, T-shirt and lime-green espadrilles, she strode toward a guard at the hotel’s threshold and flashed a wide smile. The guard, a towering man with a shaved head, stepped aside.
” I think I’m able to do this because I look so harmless,’ says Ms. Sánchez, who says she is sometimes mistaken for a teenager. Once inside the cafe, she attached a flash memory drive to the hotel computer and, in quick, intense movements, uploaded her material. Time matters: The $3 she paid for a half-hour is nearly a week’s wage for many Cubans.”
Cuba’s Yoani Sánchez, already named by Time as one of the top 100 most influential people, was awarded the Ortega and Gasset prize for digital journalism, one of Spain’s top journalism awards, says the Havana Journal, going on:
Spanish newspaper El Pais, which awards the prize annually, said Sanchez won it for her ’shrewdness’ in overcoming hurdles to freedom of expression in Cuba, her ‘vivacious’ style and her drive to join the ‘global space of citizen journalism’.”
Hosted in Germany, her Generatión Y blog in February garnered 1.2 million, hits, says the story,
But the Cuban authorities are neither impressed nor happy, refusing to allow her go to Madrid to accept the award, says NPR, going on >>>
On Wednesday afternoon, Sanchez gathered with her husband and friends in their Havana apartment. It was Wednesday evening in Madrid, where she was supposed to be receiving the Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism. But her request to travel to Spain to accept the award was not approved by the Cuban authorities; they are clearly annoyed by the attention her critical writing has received.
Sanchez had to send a tape-recording of her acceptance speech. At the very hour she would have delivered it in Madrid, she read the speech to her friends in Havana.
“The fact that I am not there is more revealing of the Cuban reality than all of the posts I have written in my blog in all these months,” she said. “But some day, it won’t take courage to put down in writing all these things we are living today.”
Sanches calls her blog Generatión Y.
It’s, “inspired by people like me, with names that start or contain a ‘Y’,” she says, adding:
“Born in the Cuba of the 70s and the 80s, marked by the ’schools to the countryside’, the Russian cartoons, the illegal exits and the frustration. So, an invitation goes especially to Yanisleidi, Yoandri, Yusimí, Yuniesky and others that drag their Ys, to read me and write back.”
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Wall Street Journal - Cuban Revolution, December 22, 2007
Havana Journal - Yoani Sanchez awarded Spain’s Ortega and Gasset prize for digital journalism, April 5, 2008
NPR - Cuba Bars Blogger from Accepting Award in Spain, May 8, 2008
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May 13th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
“The fact that I am not there is more revealing of the Cuban reality than all of the posts I have written in my blog in all these months”
I can’t imagine living like that.