Vice President Joe Biden Meets with Yoani Sanchez

Vice President Joe Biden Meets with Yoani Sanchez
Posted on April 4, 2014

The challenge for defenders of free expression on the island was the
subject of a meeting between the well-known blogger Yoani Sanchez and
the vice president of the United States Joe Biden.

Both communicated news of the meeting from the Twitter accounts (@VP for
the vice president and @yoanisanchez for the blogger), with an attached
photo.

On October 25, 2013 Joe Biden received Berta Soler, representative of
the Ladies in White, in a meeting in which they talked about human
rights in Cuba and civil society in general.

Days later, on 8 November, president of the United States Barack Obama,
on a visit to Miami to raise funds for the Democratic Party, met for the
first time with Cuban dissidents living on the island.

Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White, and Guillermo Fariñas, both
winners of the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize, met the president
at the home of Jorge Mas Santos, director of the Cuban American National
Foundation.

The Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, in Miami on Tuesday, said that she
hopes to launch her own media in the coming weeks, announced several
months ago, and which she described as "independent" and distanced from
"barricade journalism," according to EFE.

The blogger attended the Hispanicize Conference, where she received the
Latinovator award for having contributed to and encouraged the use of
new technologies on the Island.

The Hispanicize Conference started on Tuesday, with nearly two thousand
Hispanic professionals for three days of discussions of trends in
journalism, social media, advertising and new technologies

Asked about her journalistic project, Sanchez told Reuters she does not
want "to be used as a weapon to defeat another. We want to be a medium
that survives the current moment of Cuba, a medium for now and for later."

According to Sanchez, the bloggers movement in Cuba has become "a civic
voice in recent years" to express "discomfort and the desires for change."

"The fundamental objective is that ordinary Cuban who now cannot go to
the corner newsstand and buy any newspaper other than Granma " said
Sanchez, who admitted to having alternate plans in the event that the
Cuban authorities want to prevent the opening of the new medium.

"Do we fear reprisals? Yes, it's possible. That's the fear that everyone
has who expresses an opinion and opens his mouth in Cuba. But I hope
that international public opinion will protect us because what we want
to do is journalism, we are not founding a guerrilla movement," Sanchez
said.

She added that he would like to make a newspaper "to accompany the
democratic transition" in Cuba and consolidate it as a space for
interaction and participation in society.

Cubanet, 3 April 2014

Source: Vice President Joe Biden Meets with Yoani Sanchez | Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/vice-president-joe-biden-meets-with-yoani-sanchez/