The Cuban revolution is still the stuff of romantic wet dreams for a certain kind of Western socialist. But if you've ever talked to a Cubano you will, sooner or later, discover the incredible frustration of life in a one party state where the combination of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and the fundation myth of universal liberty stifles and limits. Blog of the Month for December is Generación Y, which offers dispatches from a place where it is not a wise idea to speak your mind.
Yoani Sánchez, a 34-year-old Havana webmaster, columnist and editor of website Desde Cuba, launched Generación Y in 2007. The blog is "inspired by people like me, with names that start with or contain a "Y". Born in Cuba in the '70s and '80s, marked by schools in the countryside, Russian cartoons, illegal emigration and frustration. It has since won many awards. Yoani calls her blog "an exercise in cowardice," as she is able to talk about things online that would get her into trouble were she to voice them offline and in public. Cowardice is clearly not the right word. Yoani is extraordinarily brave. In a November 8th post she described how she was abducted by state security agents:
"Near 23rd Street, just at the Avenida de los Presidentes roundabout, we saw a black car, made in China, pull up with three heavily built strangers. 'Yoani, get in the car,' one told me while grabbing me forcefully by the wrist. The other two surrounded Claudia Cadelo, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a friend who was accompanying us to the march against violence. The ironies of life, it was an evening filled with punches, shouts and obscenities on what should have passed as a day of peace and harmony. The same "aggressors" called for a patrol car which took my other two companions, Orlando and I were condemned to the car with yellow plates, the terrifying world of lawlessness and the impunity of Armageddon."
Since March 2008, the Cuban government has blocked this blog in Cuba. With the help of friends in other countries, Yoani Sánchez posts her updates. Volunteers also her to translate it. Generación Y is currently available in fifteen languages.
Generación Y offers extraordinary insight into the end-of-days time of a regime that took control of Cuba in 1959. Yoani Sánchez documents the dissidence of a generation that refuses to accept the state of things. Engaged, eloquent and culturally rich, this is a voice of independence coming from a country which relies upon the illusions of egalitarian harmony and might to sustain itself.
Garan Holcombe
30 November 09
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