Meet Cuba‘s best-known Generation Y blogger

Yoani Sanchez won the Spanish equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, but her government wouldn‘t allow her to leave the country to receive it.
BySara Miller Llanafrom the July 25, 2008 edition
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In Pictures: Creeping capitalism in CubaCuba under Raúl: Creeping toward capitalism?
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In Pictures: Cuba‘s dissident fight
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Meet Cuba‘s best-known Generation Y blogger

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Reporter Sara Miller Llana discusses why dissent is uncommon on Cuban college campuses.
Monitor staff photographer Alfredo Sosa and staff writer Matthew Clark show how Cubans try to make ends meet.
Havana - Blogger Yoani Sanchez had just found out that she had won an 2008 Ortega y Gasset award – essentially the Pulitzer prize of Spanish journalism – and she was nervous. Would Cuban officials give her the exit visa to fly to Madrid and accept the prize for digital journalism?
At a cafe in Havana, as she talked about the origins of her blog and the risks she takes chronicling daily life in Cuba, she seemed distracted. No wonder; at that moment her husband was standing in a line at a government office seeking instructions on the proper visa protocol.
Ms. Sanchez‘s no-nonsense – and often contentious – slices of life that she posts on her blogGeneraci?n Y (www.desdecuba.com/generationy/) have suddenly catapulted her into the world spotlight.
On a recent post, she talks about the wave of Cubans rushing to prove their Spanish heritage in order to gain citizenship in Spain amid "a lack of expectations and material hardship" in Cuba. With irony and wit, she mocks the tangle of Cuban bureaucracy, the senseless privation of its citizens, and the way the state media views all of it through rose-colored glasses. Her entries are translated into English, French, Italian, German, and Polish.
In other words, she is not exactly the ambassador that Cuba – with a tight grips on dissenters – wants to present to the world. And yet, she reasoned, permission denied might garner so much media attention as to backfire in a Cuba trying to present its more tolerant face. After all, the Raúl Castro administration had just dropped bans on owning cellphones and computers. How could they deny a week-long trip to a well-known blogger who recently was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine?
On the day before she was to leave for Madrid – May 3, World Press Freedom Day – she kept her readers abreast of the process: Her permit to leave was "stopped" for reasons unknown to her. That entry alone got nearly 3,000 responses.
The government may physically be able to stop her, she says, but the technology that has made her – inadvertently from her perspective – the spokesperson of her generation is well beyond their grasp. She writes from her home, pulls out her memory flash, and slips into Internet cafes.
Back in March, she said, when suddenly she could no longer access her blog from public cafes in Havana, she began e-mailing her entries to friends who e-mail her back the thousands of commentaries she receives. She‘s a "blind blogger," she writes in a recent post, but a determined one. "Against all the limitation, there is the popular voice, and there is technology," she says.
Her year-old blog is part of a new crop of commentary leaking from the island. "This has become a civil space for citizens seeking change," she says. "They can try to restrict the technology, but we Cubans are very adept."
This Cuban library lends DVDs about state torture
A government critic‘s collection includes Bibles, books by Cuban defectors, and positive biographies about Fidel Castro.
By Matthew Clarkfrom the July 24, 2008 edition
E-mailPrintLetter to the EditorRepublishdel.icio.usdigg

 

In Pictures: Creeping capitalism in CubaCuba under Raúl: Creeping toward capitalism?
After Bush: A new Cuba policy?
Florida rancher: Havana will be Hong Kong of Caribbean

In Pictures: Cuba‘s dissident fight
Why women now lead the dissident fight in Cuba
This Cuban library lends DVDs about state torture
Cuba‘s youth: restless but not often political
Meet Cuba‘s best-known Generation Y blogger
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Staff writer Matthew Clark talks with CSMonitor.com‘s Pat Murphy about reporting on the Monitor series ‘Cuba: Winds of Change.‘
Monitor staff photographer Alfredo Sosa and staff writer Matthew Clark show how Cubans try to make ends meet.
La Demajagua, Cuba - Carlos Serpa Maceira‘s ramshackle home on the outskirts of a rural town on an island that once served as a prison for Fidel Castro is not easy to find. And that‘s how he likes it.
The tireless sprite of a man is always on the move, finding creative ways to shuttle banned books and DVDs from Havana to the tiny independent library he runs out of his home.
"My library is called the Ernest Hemingway Library," he says puffing out his chest. "My criteria is not to have any censorship. I have Bibles, US State Department literature, books written by high-level Cuban defectors, fiction – and positive books about [Ernesto] Che [Guevara] and Fidel [Castro]."
But the library he started in 2003 isn‘t what it used to be.
In 2005, he says, police came and took all the books and warned him he would soon go to jail. Last year, the government took away his collection of movies, mostly documentaries about Cuban human rights violations or nonviolent reformers such as Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
"It‘s a process of awakening," says Mr. Maceira. "Fidel always said that people don‘t get tortured in Cuba, but when former [Cuban] prisoners talk about how they were tortured and people see that in the films, they start questioning whether anything the government tells them is true. One guy who milks cows saw the torture film and his face changed when he saw what people have to put up with. He was touched."
Maceira was raised in a revolutionary household and was spoon-fed pro-Castro ideology, he says. In the late 1980s and early 90s he was a reporter for state radio, but was increasingly censored for writing about everyday problems that affect Cubans, such as lack of clean drinking water or electricity shortages. At one point, the state‘s journalist union told him to quit. He wouldn‘t, so they fired him. He‘s been blacklisted and prevented from getting a job since.
Now, in addition to running the library, he works as a freelance journalist and his work appears onMiscelaneas de Cuba, a website run by anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Sweden. The Cuban government and pro-Castro critics abroad often claim that dissidents like Maceira are merely US pawns, paid by the American government to foment dissent. Maceira does receive books, DVDs, and small radios from the US Interests Section in Havana, but he denies receiving any money from the US.
"José Martí is the president of my library," he says proudly, gesturing at the miniature bust of Cuba‘s 19th-century independence hero that sits on his bookshelf. "The name Martí is badly used by the government," scoffing at the fact that Martí is held up by Fidel and Raúl Castro as a model for their revolution. "Martí fought against repression. If he were around today, he‘d be fighting the political repression of the Castros."
"Now that Fidel is not running things, it‘s easier to get people to open up to me as an independent journalist," he says. "I think political dissent is gathering steam, because the government is attacking us more now.
"I have lots of faith [that things will change] because I know that I‘m on the right side and I‘ll succeed," he says backing up that assertion by paraphrasing a famous line from Martí: "A just principle from the deepest part of a cave can beat a whole army."