With wit as her weapon, Sanchez dents Castro regime

By MCT Information Services/Miami

When a hostile questioner pushed Yoani Sanchez in New York last month to explain how she dared criticise a Castro government that provides free health, education and welfare services, Sanchez compared Cubans to birds in a cage.

“Yes, the food and water are free,” the Cuban blogger and journalist replied calmly. “But those things are not worth more than our freedom.”

It’s that kind of lacerating yet cool language, and the simple yet powerful ideas it delivers, that have made Sanchez the spearhead of a burgeoning digital dissident “blogostroika” in Cuba and won her international fame and prizes.

The 37-year-old, who jokingly describes herself as merely an “impertinent little girl,” has in fact become a powerful player in the binary guerrilla struggle against Cuba’s communist rule.

Her Generacion Y blog gets well over 15mn hits a month and is translated into 20 languages. Her Twitter account has nearly 500,000 followers, and Fidel Castro as well as Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela, both took the time to criticise her.

Sanchez has been in Miami last week for a string of public appearances and a family reunion during a stop in her whirlwind tour of a dozen countries in South and North America and Europe that started February 17 and is expected to last about three months.

It’s the first time Cuban authorities have allowed her to leave the island since 2004, when she returned from a two-year stay in Switzerland and began launching a string of digital publications.

Sanchez’s digital sword regularly skewers Fidel and Raul as well as their policies and acolytes. And her Tweets - at times fierce, funny or mocking - are like 140-character thumbs-in-the-eye to the government.

Her power lies in “language that cuts through the hypocrisy and myths that have clouded the truth about Cuba for so many years,” said Ted Henken, a Baruch College professor who studies social media in Cuba and has written several articles about her.

She describes herself as a political “free electron” that gravitates toward conservatives or liberals depending on the issue and does not insult the other side. Her husband, journalist Reinaldo Escobar, 65, says that’s part of the secret of her success.

“Yoani writes from a point of moderation, a middle point that many people can agree with,” said Escobar, who was fired from the newspaper Juventud Rebelde in 1988 for criticising the government and now works as an elevator repairman.

She opposes the US embargo, Escobar said, because the Castro brothers use it as an excuse for all their failures. And since she favours unlimited travel abroad for Cubans, he added, she also favours unrestricted US travel to the island.

Havana calls her a “mercenary” paid by Washington, and Castro supporters threw fake dollars at her in Brazil in February. She denies accepting improper money, and Escobar says they live off their work for foreign newspapers. Sanchez is the Cuba correspondent for Spain’s El Pais newspaper.