Yoani Sanchez arrives at the Jose Marti airport in Havana.
Reuters/Havana
Dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez, wearing a brightly coloured dress and a big smile, returned to the homeland she both loves and lambasts, after more than three months on a tour through the Americas and Europe.
Her family and about a dozen supporters applauded loudly and shouted “welcome home” as she emerged from the customs area at the Havana airport.
With tears in her eyes, she hugged them all as curious Cubans awaiting other passengers looked on and asked reporters who she was.
In brief comments to the press, the 37-year-old who has dark, waist-length hair said she had had a “marvelous trip, a trip that’s going to change my life in many ways.”
“I’m here with many projects,” Sanchez said. “The future is wide open.”
Even though the Cuban government considers Sanchez public enemy No 1 because she regularly blisters the country’s leaders and socialist system in her Generation Y blog, she whisked through immigration and customs and was one of the first passengers off the Air Europa flight from Madrid.
Her trip was made possible by a newly liberalised travel law that ended the requirement for an exit visa from the government, which she has said was denied to her 20 times.
After leaving Cuba on February 17 she travelled to a dozen countries, including the US, where she collected previously won prizes for her work, gave speeches criticising the Cuban government as well as US policy toward the communist-led island and occasionally was the object of protests.
In Mexico City, opponents threw fake US dollars at her, implying, as the Cuban government does, that she is funded by Washington. Sanchez deflected their antagonism by saying she wished such open protests were permitted in her own country.
The trip raised her international profile and gained her 100,000 new followers on Twitter.
In the past, she has been subjected to a steady bombardment of government derision and has been detained on a number of occasions, and it appeared the derision, at least, would continue.
A government blogger, Yohandry Fontana, sent tweets about her arrival saying that the US government had paid for her trip. “How much must the more than 90-day trip of Yoani Sanchez have cost USAID,” he said, referring to the US Agency for International Development. “They say it was more than $250,000.”
“Can someone tell me how a trip of 90 days through I don’t know how many countries can be financed with a blog? So I can learn, ha ha ha,” Fontana said in another tweet.