Yoani Sánchez won a major awardfor her blog, Generacion Y
Cuba’s communist authorities have banned a dissident blogger from travelling to the U.S. to receive a major journalism award.
Yoani Sánchez won the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for her blog, Generacion Y, which is critical of the one-party state and receives 14 million hits each month. Time Magazine has named her as one of the world’s most influential people, and listed Generacion Y as one of the top 25 blogs.
Last month, following the seemingly arbitrary arrest of two musicians in Havana, Sánchez described her country as:
“…a society admitted into intensive care with transplanted parts and a dialysis machine connected to the area where citizenship should be working. We live on an Island where they excise and amputate because a few diagnose that a member has gangrene when in reality it is, simply, different.”
The Obama administration has made overtures to Havana in an attempt to engage the regime, but critics believe that the communist state is unlikely to reciprocate with any gestures towards liberalization or improvements in human rights.
History suggests that “accommodations to undemocratic, brutal dictators contributed to the suffering of millions and to the lost of American lives,” writes Frank Calzon, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama challenges the administration to “recommit America’s leadership to the cause of human rights and freedom around the world,” he contends.
There is a compelling need for a new relationship between Cuba and the United States, NED president Carl Gershman said recently. But it “can only be built on the foundation of a new relationship between the Cuban government and the Cuban people, a relationship based on dialogue, trust, the rule of law, and democracy,” he said.
It is imperative to “help build the international pressure that is needed to re-enforce and accelerate the internal forces at work in Cuba that will lead to the erosion of the regime and the liberation of the people,” he said, presenting the Pedro Luis Boitel Freedom Award in absentia to Cuban dissident Iván Hernández Carrillo in Miami last month.
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