Yoani Sanchez
It is no surprise that the Castro dictatorship has denied permission for blogger Yoani Sanchez to travel to the United States to accept the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean.
The regime obviously has failed to silence Sanchez's commentaries on Cuban life and the criticisms of the dictatorship implicit, and explicit, in them. Sanchez has mastered the new technologies of communication faster than the secret police can repress them and those who use them to inform the world about the Cuban reality.
So the dictatorship resorts to its thuggish instincts and uses a power it reserves for itself, denying Sanchez an exit visa needed for her to leave the island. The United States had already granted Sanchez a visa, but this being Cuba, Sanchez also needed an OK from the slave masters in Havana.
The denial wasn't a surprise, because A) that's what the dictatorship has done every time an international group has awarded Sanchez with a top prize; and B) approval to travel to New York this week would have given Sanchez her biggest platform yet to speak about the hope and change that are so desperately missing in Cuba today. That's a risk a cowardly dictatorship like the brothers Castros cannot take.
So what to do?
It's easy: Read Sanchez's blog, Generation Y, in the original Spanish or as it has been translated into English and other languages. Each visit is a poke in the eye of dictatorship who has no idea what Sanchez and her blog truly represent, and each visit also offers a measure of protection from a tyranny that will do whatever it thinks it can get away with if it thinks the world is not paying attention.
The dictatorship may succeed in placing an embargo on Sanchez's right to travel freely, but it cannot silence her, and it cannot block those of us who have come to admire her work, her courage and her love of her country.
Read her blog, and tell others to do the same.
That is the highest tribute you can do for her.
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