Photo Credits: http://www.nacionred.comYoani Sanchez b. Havana 1975
"I left high school in the countryside feeling that nothing belonged to me, not even my body. Living in shelters creates the sensation that your whole life, your privacy, your personal possessions and even your nakedness has become public property. “Sharing” is the obligatory word and it comes to seem normal not to be able—ever—to be alone. After years of mobilizations, agricultural camps, and a sad school in AlquÃzar, I needed an overdose of privacy."
-Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y
1995 – While attending the Pedagogical Institute, she moved from studying Spanish Lit to a degree in Hispanic Philology* where she developed her thesis titled “Words Under Pressure: A Study of the Literature of the Dictatorship in Latin America”
*Traditionally: the study of language in written historical sources; more commonly known in the states as a variation of Literary Criticism with an emphasis on linguistics.
“On Finishing University I realized two things: first that the world of the intellectual and high culture is repugnant to me and, most painfully, that I no longer wanted to be a philologist.” ~
2005 – worked in “dark office” at Gente Nueva publishers and later quit to teach Spanish to German tourists because she couldn’t live off of the former’s pay.
“It was a time (which continues today) when engineers preferred to drive a taxi; teachers would do almost anything to get a job at the desk of a hotel, and at store counters you could find a neurosurgeon or nuclear physicist.” ~
2002 – emigrated to Switzerland and picked up computer science
“I discovered that binary code is more transparent than affected intellectualism, and that if I’d never really come to terms with Latin, at least I could work with the long chains of HTML language.” ~
2004 – returned to Cuba for “family reasons” and cofounded Consenso, a Cuban publication of “reflection and debate”.
2007 – worked as web-master, columnist and editor of Desde Cuba (“From Cuba”) where her blog Generation Y remains.
April 2007 – first participation in Generation Y, “an exercise of cowardice”, gaining her world-wide attention in a matter of months.
March 2008 – Cuban government blocks website on public domains and so Yoani has to resort to texting friends outside the Island to post for her.
October 2009 – awarded Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize, but denied permission to attend the event by Cuban government.
November 2009 – receives response from US President Barack Obama for 7 questions she had previously mailed him, in which he says that her blog “provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba.” and even commended her for he ability to “empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology.”
Yoani has won a slew of awards including a spot on Time Magazine’s 2008 list of 100 Most Influential People in the World as well as on the Spanish Newspaper El Pais’s 100 Most Notable Hispanic Americans of 2008; her blog has also been featured on Time Magazine/CNN’s list of 25 Best Blogs in the World
In 2010 Yoani was a part of Foreign Policy’s list of The World’s Top Dissidents, further securing her space in contemporary history of Cuban politics.
Yoani currently lives in Havana, Cuba with her husband Reinaldo Escobar and son Teo in a high-rise apartment overlooking Revolution Square.
“I live in Havana, I opted to stay and every day I am more computer scientist and less philologist.” ~
~ Yoani Sanchez, Translating Cuba
Yoani has her first book, Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth about Cuba Today, coming out on April 26th of this year.
Sources and other links:
A Message from Yoani to the people of Cuba, 2010
Yoani from the Oslo Freedom Forum, 2010
Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Cuba
