Cuban Blocked Wins Blog Award Anyway

'Cuba: Blocked Blogger Yoani Sánchez Receives Prestigious Award'

by Elia Varela Serra

Yoani Sánchez is probably the most famous blogger in Cuba, a country where internet access is very limited and controlled. Her blog Generación Y [es] is extremely popular for anyone interested about Cuba, and has been often featured as an example of cyber-dissidence in Western media such as The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Público [es] or BBC Mundo. Since Fidel Castro's retirement from the Cuban Presidency in Februray and with the world's eyes turned on Cuba, Generación Y's popularity has increased even more, reaching 4 million visitors in March and 1,600 comments in her latest post. Probably for that popularity, Yoani's blog was recently blocked by the Cuban authorities, outraging Cuban bloggers in the diaspora and blog readers in general.

Now Yoani Sánchez has received another type of recognition last Friday, when she was awarded the Ortega and Gasset Award in Journalism by Spanish newspaper El País, the most prestigious in Spanish language (equivalent to the Pulitzer in English language) named after philosopher and journalist José Ortega y Gasset. As Penúltimos Días [es] reported, she received the award in the category of Digital Journalism for the following reason :

... for the perceptive way in which her work has dodged the limitations of freedom of expression that exist in Cuba, her sharp information style and the impulse with which she has joined the global space of citizen journalism.

Yoani wrote a post titled "I can't believe it!" after hearing about the award:

That portion of a philologist that I have left - that knows about people of letters, philosophers and academic names- is jumping for joy over the Ortega y Gasset Prize in Journalism that I've been awarded. The blogger, on the other hand, feels that for so many obstacles to access the internet, so many flash drives that I have carried around, have all been worth it.

I can only manage to remember that it was in April - Eliot had already noticed the cruelty of spring- that I decided to exorcise my demons in a Blog. I started by expelling the most paralizing of them all, that one that makes us resort to a mask, the disguise and the silence. The second one in the line of the abandoned, was the apathy of that who knows that not much can be done. In mid August, the crowd made of the frustration, the disillusion and the doubts were already draining away with each post. What seemed like a personal therapy, to shake off those ailments, became a space for many who, funny coincidence, also had their own demons.

Readers, I'm only the face on this site's sidebar. You, polemical, incendiary, censoring and boycotting readers, are, at the end of the day, the ones that make the blog.