Fabiola Santiago: In New York, as in Cuba, Yoani Sánchez speaks her mind,By Fabiola Santiago

Posted on Saturday, 03.16.13

Fabiola Santiago: In New York, as in Cuba, Yoani Sánchez speaks her mind
By Fabiola Santiago
fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

NEW YORK — I only knew Yoani Sánchez through her written words.

For six years, I followed her daring reports from inside Cuba, marveled
at her groundbreaking exploits on the Internet from the safe distance of
my home in Miami, wrote about her — once holding my breath while she sat
in a jail cell, hoping my own words would echo and help free her — and
now, here she was, sitting across from me at a late-night soiree at a
friend's apartment in Manhattan.

At the dining room table between us, a buffet spread of sandwiches,
antipasti and dips had been served. The conversation about family and
country in the company of a small group of Cuban Americans and Columbia
University faculty flowed like the wine with which we toasted her, mine
a Spanish albariño, hers a Chilean reserve red.

The moment was surreal, precious, as unique as this
blogger/activist/independent journalist/dissident who has managed to
focus — or force, one might say — the world's attention on the lack of
basic freedoms in Cuba. If her popular Generation Y blog, her frequent
and fertile tweets and her translated columns are powerful, she's just
as impressive in person, tackling questions from journalists, students
and the steady stream of pro-Cuban government characters that appear out
of nowhere and disrupt her talks.

"The true thing is that I am here — and I will return" to Cuba," she
said Friday at New York University. "Am I afraid? Yes, I am very afraid."

She said she's aware that she is risking her life and expects "a
flogging" when she returns to Cuba, but added she hopes the
international community will protect her.

Sánchez is here to participate through the weekend in the academic
conference The Revolution Recodified: Digital Culture and the Public
Sphere in Cuba, sponsored by NYU and The New School, an arts-oriented
university in Greenwich Village.

The event, one of the panelists told me, began as a conversation between
two academics and was going to be a modest roundtable until Sánchez's
profile — on the rise during the journeys to Brazil, Prague, Spain and
Mexico that preceded her U.S. tour — spiked the demand and the need for
high security.

Her three-city U.S. visit will bring her to Miami, where she has a
sister and a niece, to speak at the Freedom Tower and Florida
International University on April 1.

"I'm here to listen and to learn," she told me about her visit to the
Cuban exile capital.

At NYU, everyone, including journalists, had to walk through metal
detectors to get inside the room where she gave a press conference — and
Sánchez has a constant escort wherever she goes, including visits to
Bloomberg and Google headquarters.

Likewise at Columbia University, home to one of the country's premiere
journalism schools and where she made her first public appearance in the
United States, security was tight.

Yet pro-Cuban government activists took seats among the crowd of
students and faculty at the packed Lecture Hall, and heckled her,
unfurling a black and white banner that said: "You Are Not Free Press,
Just Cheap."

Sánchez, who is traveling after being denied permission to leave Cuba 20
times in five years, reacted to the hecklers with peaceful aplomb,
choosing to walk right by her detractors, and not away from them, as she
was escorted out of the hall to an interview room where she spoke to
reporters.

She told journalists not to give the Cuban government too much credit
for the reforms that allowed her travels because they came as a result
of pressures from the Cuban people and from the outside world, and not
from any conviction that there needs to be fundamental change and
"respect" for the rights of citizens.

She said that Cuban exiles and others outside the island could help
ordinary Cubans "by gifting them technology."

Flood Cuba with cellphones, hard drives, memory sticks — anything that
helps people connect to the Internet and the outside world, she said.

"Technology protects us," she added.

It was easy to see that she has more friends than foes in this so-called
capital of the world.

When he introduced her, Josh Friedman, director of the Columbia-based
Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, described her as a "very authentic,
down-to-earth person."

Sánchez was given a prestigious Cabot citation in 2009 for her blog
chronicles, but the Cuban government denied her permission to travel
here to accept the award.

She has postponed receiving it until October, when the university wants
her to return to collect the prize at the Cabot's 75th anniversary gala.

"From the podium here at Columbia University, I want to say: Yoani
Sánchez is a journalist. Yes, she's a troublemaker, but you are supposed
to be a troublemaker," Friedman said.

Despite what her critics say, her work — "words under pressure,"
Friedman called it — are "devoid of ideology."

The secret to her reports, he added, is that "she's a wonderful observer."

After traveling here from Mexico, speaking at Columbia and doing media
interviews, Sánchez was exhausted but agreed to the late-night dinner at
the home of Columbia journalism professor Mirta Ojito, a former
journalist at The New York Times and The Miami Herald, a Cuban American
who, like me, has followed Sánchez closely.

Sánchez only showed her exhaustion when, without missing a beat in the
conversation at the table, she took her famously long hair, stroked it
into neat strands, and before we knew it, without using a single
accessory, fashioned an artful hairdo.

Ojito and I looked at each other across the table and laughed with
heart-felt recognition of the Cuban ability to resolver, to make do, and
of the human qualities that make this woman — wife to a journalist who
works as an elevator maintenance man in their Havana apartment building,
mother to an 18-year-old with adolescence issues ("he slams doors," she
said), thorn in the side of the Cuban government and its supporters
around the world — extraordinary.

Welcome to America, our complicitous look said, we have so looked
forward to this moment.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/15/v-fullstory/3288702/fabiola-santiago-in-new-york-as.html