A Conversation with Cuban Journalist Yoani Sánchez: Using Journalism to Open a Window
Last Wednesday, renowned Cuban blogger and journalist Yoani Sánchez visited Georgetown to discuss the transformation of daily life in Cuba and how she strives to transmit information through clandestine and alternative information structures. The event, co-hosted by Georgetown University’s Latin American Student Association, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Master of Science in Foreign Service program, began with Sánchez holding up a USB flash drive and asking, “What is this?”
“This [flash drive] is liberty,” she remarked in Spanish. “This has changed my country much more than the politicians or the growing relationship between Cuba and the United States.”
As technology arrives, she explained, Cuba has transformed from a closed society in which the state held an almost absolute monopoly over information to a society whose citizens have many more opportunities to know what is happening inside and outside Havana.
Sánchez, creator of the blog Generation Y, calls her website ‘an exercise in cowardice’ that allows her to say what is forbidden in public. Despite censorship in Cuba, she publishes by e-mailing and texting her blog entries and tweets to people outside the country who then post them online.
Continuing her speech, Yoani stressed how the presence of technology has brought about a ‘rain’ of kilobytes and challenged the authoritative machinery of vigilance and control of the Cuban government. By secretly transmitting information, she explained, she has “open[ed] a window to the world and into Cuba when the door is closed.”
She also compared Cuba’s closed doors to the presence of an all-seeing government known as Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984: “Cuba has Big Brother’s telescreens. Our telescreens are the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, a vigilance unit established in each block. Our telescreens are our friends, our relatives, our neighbors – anyone who can denounce us. It’s having to apply to jobs and bringing a file proving you’re a good revolutionary.”
When asked to comment on the growing relationship between Cuba and the United States, Sánchez expressed that it has become more difficult for Cuba’s government to blame its problems on the US. However, she added, the renewal of relations has not made Cuba freer.
“Liberty needs political will. It needs the government to decriminalize discrepancies. Liberty is that those who think differently are not persecuted,” she asserted.
“I am not satisfied,” she concluded. “I want the door to be open. I want there to be freedom of the press and for no one to have to go to the black market to acquire information. But right now, I have to work with what I have, so my job is to help make the window stay open while we push the door until it opens. And I do this through journalism.”