Yoani Sánchez
Yoani María Sánchez Cordero is a Cuban blogger who has achieved international fame and multiple international awards for her critical portrayal of life in Cuba under its current government.
Sánchez attended primary school during the affluent time when the Soviet Union was providing considerable aid to Cuba. However, her high school and university education coincided with the loss of financial aid to Cuba following the Soviet Union's collapse, creating a highly public educational system and style of living that subsequently left Sánchez with a strong need for personal privacy. Sánchez's university education left her with two understandings; first, that she had acquired a disgust for "high culture", and second that she no longer had an interest in philology, her chosen field of university study.
Sánchez, disillusioned with her home country, left Cuba for Switzerland in 2002, and it was during this time that she became interested in computer science. When she finally returned to Cuba, Sánchez helped to establish Contodos, a magazine that continues to act as a forum for Cuban free expression, and a vehicle for reporting news. Sánchez is best known for her blog, Generación Y ; which, despite censorship in Cuba, she is able to publish by e-mailing the blog entries to friends outside the country who then post them online. The blog is translated and available in 17 languages.
Time magazine listed her as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2008, stating that "under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot; freedom of speech". In November 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama, wrote that her blog "provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba" and applauded her efforts to "empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology".
Biography
Yoani Sánchez was born September 4, 1975, in central Havana, Cuba, one of two daughters, to William Sánchez and Maria Eumelia Cordero. Her father worked, as his father had before him, on the state railroad system, first as a laborer and later as an engineer. As the nation's railroad system fell apart after the collapse of communism in Europe, William Sánchez, out of work along with many of his colleagues, became a bicycle repairman.Sánchez grew up and attended school in central Havana during the years when the Soviet Union was supporting the island and its communist revolution with tangible aid, nearly $9 billion in the final year. Sánchez's secondary and university years coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its subsidies to Cuba that had for nearly three decades provided about 80 percent of Cuba's international trade. During her high school years, she attended a "school in the countryside" about which she wrote:
Sánchez studied for two years in the Instituto Pedagógico with a major in Spanish literature. She transferred to the Faculty of Arts and Letters in 1995, and gave birth to her son in August of that year. Sánchez graduated within five years with a degree in Hispanic philology and a specialty in contemporary Latin American literature. Her thesis was titled Words Under Pressure. A Study of the Literature of Dictatorship in Latin America. Sánchez says that by the end of her university studies she "understood two things: the first, that the world of intellectualism and high culture disgusted me and the saddest, that I no longer wanted to be a philologist." By September 2000, she had found a job with Editorial Gente Nueva, a publisher of children's literature. After a short period of employment with Gente Nueva, Sánchez asked to be released from her position, then focused on a higher paying job as a freelance Spanish instructor for German tourists visiting Havana. According to Sánchez, this was during a time "when engineers preferred to drive taxis, teachers worked as hotel desk clerks, and store counters were tended by neurosurgeons or nuclear physicists."
In 2002, claiming disillusionment with her home country, Sánchez decided to leave Cuba and emigrated to Switzerland. She was eventually joined by her son and husband. Two years later she decided to return to Cuba citing "family reasons". However, since she had been out of the country for more than eleven months without special permission, Sánchez had lost the right to return. Sánchez states that she then flew home to Cuba "for a two-week family visit" on a round-trip ticket, and by destroying her passport was able to avoid being forced on a plane back to Switzerland. The Cuban government says that she was granted a waiver allowing her to recover her permanent resident status in Cuba. She finally resettled in Havana. During this time, Sánchez discovered her current profession, computer science. In 2004, she founded, together with a group of Cubans – all based on the island – a magazine, Consenso, based on reflection and debate. She also helped establish the web portal Desde Cuba, an on-line magazine and collection of individual blogs, of which Sánchez's was the first. Sánchez began to sign her posts in 2008, abandoning anonymous blogging. That year, she requested permission to travel to Spain to receive the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award but permission was denied. Her request for permission to travel to an international documentary film festival in Prague, of which she was a member of the jury, was also denied.
In October 2009, Sánchez was awarded Columbia University's "Maria Moors Cabot prize" and was invited to New York to accept the award. The Cuban government denied her permission to attend. Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, criticized the decision, stating that "The Cuban government ought to value Ms. Sánchez's work as a sign that young Cubans are ready to take Cuba into a better future – one that will have the free press the Cuban people deserve."
A journey to South America and Europe
Sánchez flew to Prague in the Czech Republic, where she was received by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and former presidential candidate Karel Schwarzenberg who was particularly interested in discussing the reforms that took place in Cuba during 2012 and the state of civil society there. Schwarzenberg remarked that he was not as enthusiastic regarding the reforms as representatives of some other countries, as he could still remember reforms from the communist era in former Czechoslovakia that "changed nothing, but to the West looked amazing".Sánchez was also a guest of the One World human rights festival, organized by a non-profit humanitarian organization People In Need. A film by a Swiss director Barbara Miller, Forbidden Voices: How to Start a Revolution with a Laptop, was among the films shown during the festival. The film presents three women - one of them being Sánchez – who use blogs and social networks to spread information from their countries living under authoritarian regimes, thus fighting for women's rights or human rights in general. Sánchez was also invited to a discussion at the Charles University about independent journalism in Cuba.
Blogging and digital publishing
Sánchez established the magazine, Consenso, on her return from Switzerland. The magazine continues to be published today as a "forum for free expression" from the island, and as a vehicle for the reporting of news such as Father Jose Conrado's February 2009 letter to Raúl Castro Ruz. The magazine's editorial board consists of Dimas Castellanos, Miriam Celaya, Marta Cortízas, Reinaldo Escobar, Eugenio Leal, and Yoani Sánchez. Sánchez is also involved with the digital magazine Convivencia.In January–February 2007, Sánchez participated in an event referred to as the "debate of the intellectuals", described as a "discussion among intellectuals and writers on Cuba's repressive cultural policies". She, along with several others, was not allowed into the formal conference being held in the House of The Americas. The debate of those who were excluded, and included, in the formal sessions, was captured in several hundred pages of emails exchanged between the participants. These emails—exchanged by over one hundred participants—are preserved in the digital magazine Contodos, under the title: Polémica Intellectual 2007.
According to Sánchez, what pushed her to write a blog was the bad taste left at the end of the controversy of the intellectuals in January 2007. The meeting in the House of the Americas would try to channel and institutionalize a debate that had been raising the temperature of Cuban emails for a couple of weeks already. A select list of guests began entering the "Che Guevara Room", while our "group of impertinents" watched, from outside, as midnight arrived. The protesters were blocked from entering by the custodians in order to keep them from debating and discussing their encounters with "censorship and dogmatism". The protesters chanted "Desiderio, Desiderio, hear my criteria", but this had no effect, while inside, the voice of the Minister of Culture repeated the idea that in a place under siege, dissent is treason. Sánchez believed that the "debate was hijacked by the institutions, jailed by an academic world full of concepts and fancy words, and condemned to take the course of the imminent conference of the UNEAC .
In the end the protesters left with the conviction that they could not wait to be allowed inside for the next debate. For Sánchez, this added a push to start what she terms "this exorcism called Generation Y". Sánchez launched her blog, Generation Y, on April 9, 2007. The national baseball playoffs were underway, and the first post used the baseball fever to compare what Cubans are allowed to shout, and display on homemade posters, "Santiago, Go Santiago!" and what they are not: "Internet for all!" The blog was hosted in Germany on an Internet domain by Cronon AG, and was designed by Sánchez. Later, the blog was transferred to WordPress, and was eventually upgraded to allow comments by readers.
When the blog had been active for six months, Sánchez expressed her reason for blogging, saying that her initial inspiration had been to create an aid to help her deal with the frustrations she felt with the situation in Cuba, and of trying to go along with the advice of friends who suggested she be cautious and wait, rather than more "noble motives". She tried "silence and evasion", yoga, tai chi, and going to the gym, all with no results. She finally found a means to express these frustrations, by blogging. Even so, she admits "I can both get discouraged have sudden starts. I alternate between "It's working!" to "It's not worth the pain"; alerting her readers to not be "surprised if the catharsis rises in tone, if I become incendiary, or show a streak of pessimism".
According to Sánchez, when she began blogging, Cubans, by law, were not allowed into tourist hotels, but with her "European" appearance, and ability to speak German, she routinely managed to get past the gatekeepers to work on her blog. Due to the difficulties in accessing the Internet, her access speed is determined by the speed of the bus that connects to La Víbora at Línea and G. "Each post depends on a countless chain of events that normally don't go well. From my isolated PC to a flash memory and then to the public space of a cybercafé or a hotel. For this, without detailing all the complications, the elevator does not work, the gatekeeper asks me to show my passport to sit at the computer, or there are frustrations to sign on, plus the slow-speeds imposed by proxies, filters and keylogger."