Castro in war of words as dissident blogger savours free speech

Castro in war of words as dissident blogger savours free speech

June 23, 2008
Caribbean Net News

HAVANA, Cuba (AFP): Time magazine named her one of the world's 100 most influential people and Yoani Sanchez won Spain's top online journalism award, all while living in communist Cuba where the state controls the media.

Now her husband has sprung to her defence online, after Cuban leader Fidel Castro dismissed her award as "just another prize" supported by his nemesis, the United States.

In Sanchez's blog, her husband and journalist Reinaldo Escobar boldly asks how Castro can reject his wife's prize after he dared for decades to bestow awards on "dictators" like Nicolae Ceausescu.

Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, speaks during a interview with AFP in Havana. AFP PHOTO

It is an Internet-age scenario the 81-year-old ailing Castro probably never foresaw, since most people in Cuba -- who earn an average of some 17 dollars a month -- have no access to the web.

But Sanchez's work has earned her a global audience, spotlighting the Internet's role as a key alternative venue when traditional media are off-limits to those not on the same page as the government.

Cuban authorities last month refused to give Sanchez permission to travel to Madrid to receive the prestigious Ortega y Gasset prize, awarded by the daily El Pais, for her blog "Generacion Y" chronicling everyday Cubans' daily woes.

And in a prologue Fidel Castro wrote June 4 to the book, "Fidel, Bolivia and Something More," Castro said the prize was "just another one of so many prizes the United States fosters to try to serve its purposes."

He further lamented "that there were young Cuban people who think" the way she does.

Sanchez, 33, says her blog "is an exercise in cowardice because it lets me say in this space what I am barred from expressing in civil society."

She said in a recent entry that she has always struggled with machismo in Cuban society.

But "since I feel myself attacked by someone whose power is infinitely greater than my own, more than twice my age, and as the girls in my neighborhood used to say, an ultra-Alpha male, I decided my husband, journalist Reinaldo Escobar, should be the one to respond to him," she wrote.

Escobar defended Sanchez's freedom of speech and directly challenged Castro to defend bestowing Cuba's highest honor on men he called "corrupt" and "dictators."

"The name of the philosopher Ortega y Gasset might be linked with some elitist and even reactionary ideas, but at least, unlike those on whom awards have been bestowed by (Castro), he never set tanks loose against fellow citizens who disagreed (...) or jailed anyone for thinking differently than he," Escobar wrote in the blog.

In more than 48 years in power, Fidel Castro, Escobar said, "placed (or ordered placed) the Order of Jose Marti on all the evil and unworthy collars he could: Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceausescu, Todor Zhivkov, Gustav Husak, Janos Kadar" and Erich Honecker, among others.

"I would love to read, in light of the times we are in now, a column (from Castro) justifying those inappropriate honors that sullied the name of our apostle" Marti, Cuba's independence icon and poet, Escobar added.

Castro, who writes editorials for the Communist Party daily as he recovers from major intestinal surgery, released a new column Thursday.

It was another classic wide-ranging reflection on topics from Marxism to Cuba's international medical assistance, eschewing any references to media or free speech and thought.

"Our country has demonstrated that it can resist all pressure," wrote Castro, who stepped down earlier this year and was replaced as president by his brother, Raul Castro.

Despite recent social and economic reforms enacted under Raul Castro, Cubans will so far have to wait for greater access to the Internet.

"Cuba is not concerned with the individual connection of its citizens to the Internet," deputy minister for Computer Science and Communications, Boris Moreno, said last month.

"We use the Internet to defend the Revolution and the principles we believe in and have defended all these years," he added, quoted by the official Prensa Latina news agency.

Top of Page