If you haven’t yet heard of the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez (pictured below) and her Generacion Y blog, it’s time to become familiar with a courageous woman who is proving that one determined individual with a computer, a blog, and limited access to the Internet can single-handedly challenge the entrenched communist regime in Cuba by bringing international attention to the struggles of daily life there.
Examples of Yoani’s blog postings about life in Cuba under a repressive dictatorship include descriptions of the years of paperwork and “verification of ideological purity” required to purchase a car in Cuba, the hardships of climbing 14 floors of stairs for more than seven months because the Russian elevators weren’t working in her apartment building, frequent power outages, and the harassment of a Cuban entrepreneur whose restaurant was closed by Cuban authorities.
For those unfamiliar with Yoani Sanchez, she was featured in the Wall Street Journal article (December 22, 2007) “Cuban Revolution: Yoani Sánchez Fights Tropical Totalitarianism, One Blog Post at a Time”:
While there are plenty of bloggers who dish out harsh opinions on Mr. Castro, most do so from the cozy confines of Miami. Ms. Sánchez is one of the few who do so from Havana.
Not only does she write from Cuba, she even signs her name and posts a photo of herself on her Web site. Most Havana bloggers are anonymous. “Once you experience the flavor of saying what you think, of publishing it and signing it with your name, well, there’s no turning back,” she says. “One of the first things we have to do, a great way to begin to change, is to be more honest about saying what you think.”
The problem is, saying what you think in Cuba can be dangerous.
Freedom of expression in Cuba is a real danger for Cuban bloggers like Yoani Sanchez, who was detained and beaten as she walked to a peaceful demonstration last week in downtown Havana—see a Miami Herald report here and Yoani’s own account in her post “Gangland Style Kidnapping.”
And it’s not just the media that have recognized the growing influence of the Cuban blogger (Generacion Y gets more than 1 million visits a month and is translated from Spanish into 16 languages), she was recently awarded Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism 2009 Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean, but was denied permission by the Cuban government to travel to New York City to accept the prize in October.
And now Yoani Sanchez can add another major accomplishment to the growing international influence of her Generacion Y blog—she captured the attention of President Obama, who responded to seven questions she sent him in an effort to engage in some “popular diplomacy.” In a preface to his answers, President Obama wrote:
Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely, and I applaud your collective efforts to empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology. The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals.
Obama next answered Yoani Sanchez’s questions, such as “For years Cuba has been a U.S. foreign policy issue as well as a domestic one, in particular because of the large Cuban American community. From your perspective, in which of the two categories should the Cuban issue fit?” See Yoani Sanchez’s post “President Obama’s Responses to Yoani Sanchez’s Questions.”
Yoani also posed six questions for Cuban President Raul Castro, but has not yet received a response, and probably won’t ever get an answer.
When the history of Cuba’s freedom movement is written, it’s likely that Yoani Sanchez will be recognized as a national hero and freedom fighter, the equivalent of Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic. Yoani Sanchez demonstrates that we should never underestimate the power of one courageous individual with a computer, a blog, and intermittent access to the Internet, or the individual’s power to change the world in the Information Age, especially with a message of freedom and individual liberty. The fact that the president of the United States, who is often recognized as the most powerful person in the world, has praised Yoani Sanchez’s blog and responded to her questions is a remarkable and historical event. Intellectual figures like Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of Yoani Sanchez and her powerful message of individual freedom in one of the only remaining regimes of totalitarianism left in the world.