President, Human Rights Foundation
Cuba's Yoani Sánchez Will Not Collect Her Award; Denmark's CEPOS Freedom
Prize Presented in Absentia
Posted: 05/ 5/11 03:38 PM ET
COPENHAGEN -- Tonight, Yoani Sánchez -- the world-renowned Cuban blogger
and philologist -- will be honored here with the inaugural Freedom
Award, in the amount of $50,000, by the independent Danish think tank,
CEPOS. Human rights defenders, members of the Danish parliament,
prominent Cuban exiles, and members of the international media will be
in attendance at the ceremony.
But there's one oddity: Yoani will not be there.
Yoani is in an enormous prison -- the island of Cuba -- forbidden to
leave her country to accept the award.
I was at the Royal Palace in Holland on December 17, 2010, when Queen
Beatrix of the Netherlands presented Yoani with the Prince Claus Award
for her role as a "leading figure in the use of social networking
technologies to breach imposed frontiers in Cuba." Again, Yoani was not
there. The hall where the ceremony took place was cold and the chill was
unbearable in the silence when her nonattendance was noted. Instead, a
video of Yoani, filmed in Havana and smuggled out of Cuba by one of my
colleagues at the Oslo Freedom Forum, was played in her absence.
Through her blog, Yoani provides a window into the brutal reality of
life in Cuba. Her elegant and astute criticism of the totalitarian state
earned her the 2008 Ortega y Gasset Prize for Journalism and the 2009
Maria Moors Cabot Prize. She was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most
Influential People in the World" in 2008, and was selected as a 2010
World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute.
CEPOS could not have selected a more deserving individual to receive
this prize. (Full disclosure: I nominated her on the basis of her
courageous work.) Yoani is an extraordinary woman who has repeatedly
overcome great obstacles and risked serious consequences to make her
voice heard, as she struggles against a dictatorship that systematically
represses freedom of expression. Yoani has been beaten and kidnapped by
plainclothes state security agents for her work.
She lives every day in a world where ordinary citizens cannot invite
their friends over, or hold any kind of meeting, for fear of being
accused of subversion. Cubans cannot even host something as innocuous as
a book club. Few of them even own books -- leading to the creation of
underground "independent" libraries which risk prosecution and prison
for such a subversive acts as owning a copy of a banned novel or history
book.
Cuba's woes are routinely attributed to the U.S. trade embargo. But
anyone visiting Cuba can buy Chilean wines, Spanish ham, French cheese,
and Italian pasta. Visitors can also find American goods exempt from the
trade ban (which applies to U.S. companies). The embargo is an ongoing
propaganda weapon -- wielded by the Castro regime and by its
international ideological allies--used to blame everything that happens
in Cuba on an external enemy, rather than the true source of its misery:
the 52-year dictatorship that has ruled the island with an iron fist and
wants to maintain power at all costs.
When I was last in Cuba, I was appalled by the level of poverty:
overcrowded houses jury-rigged with makeshift additional floors a mere
three feet in height, teenagers selling themselves for sex because their
ration books are grossly inadequate, malnourished children in the
streets with swollen bellies. The list goes on.
Anyone who doubts the misery of life for Cuba should visit Havana, talk
to the local population, tour a hospital (a real one -- not those
reserved for foreigners), and witness the ghastly horror that is the
much vaunted Cuban health care system.
Cuba is a place where you cannot own your own home; you cannot move
without permission from the government; property rights do not exist
(your stuff isn't yours); you aren't allowed to switch jobs without
government permission; and most jarring: you cannot leave the country
without the government's authorization. I draw the line between the free
and unfree world if you cannot vote with your feet and get out. Those
who try often end up drowning after days on a raft in the ocean.
Those who wish to see a disparity between the rich and the poor, the
powerful and the powerless, should visit the areas where the
overwhelming majority of the population lives and then take a taxi to
the neighborhoods where the Castros and their henchmen live. It is a
contrast that few anti-poverty activists can even fathom. Even more
shocking is the material dissimilarity between rural areas and Havana.
2011-05-04-Yoani.png
The reason the Castro brothers are still the wardens of eight million
people and the owners of everything on that island is because democratic
societies -- like Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, France, and Italy --
treat Cuba as a member of a happy family of nations, rather than
treating Cuba's rulers like they do the criminals that run North Korea,
Burma, or Sudan.
Cuba's totalitarianism would not survive without the support of the
world's democracies. If those same governments gave their support to
outspoken and independent voices like Yoani Sánchez, Cuba would be on
the road from serfdom to freedom. For now, civil societies like CEPOS
serve the cause of liberty by shining a light in the darkness.
Thor Halvorssen is president of the New York-based Human Rights
Foundation and founder and CEO of the Oslo Freedom Forum. Follow him on
Twitter and on Facebook.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thor-halvorssen/cubas-yoani-sanchez-will-_b_857294.html
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