A Prayer for Yoani Sanchez

Sailing to Havana

On the Texas coast, easterlies mean rain,  but southeast winds whisper tropical promises.  Building in like the trades, they rise after noon to blow every hint of land – burning fields, greening trees, fresh-plowed earth – back upon itself until dusk, when they quieten again.  Shaking off the lassitude of winter, sailors tack into the southerlies, working their way forward against their steady call. Along the coastal plain, gusty west winds fill with pelicans and spoonbills, and empty the bays before dying away as quickly as they came. 

But no matter the season, it is the north wind that delights.  With its restless, gypsy-like dance across the waters, it promises an irresistable bit of temperate pleasure in the midst of summer’s oppressive calms. When the wind blows freely from the north without a hint of easting, steady and unwavering as a well-trimmed craft, every sailor who has known the incomparable pleasures of long, offshore reaches begins to stand at windows or walk to doors.  Looking to the south, sniffing the air, letting the mind unwind its coils of responsibility, commitment and routine as casually as lines flipped from a cleat, they begin to dream.  With a well-found vessel and a few provisions, with fuel and water and the proper navigation tools, the course would be clear.  Passing down the Ship Channel, through the jetties and out toward blue water, leaving the tanker anchorage, the safety fairway, Heald Bank and the Flower Gardens behind, there would be only wind, water and a destination.  Set the course at 117 degrees true, make adjustments as you must, and in six days, or seven, you would be in Havana Harbor.  Seven hundred thirty-five nautical miles on the rhumb line, she’s only a long reach away on a steady norther.

In a perfect world, I would be gone: yielding to temptations I hardly can bear.  My open window faces north, scooping up the breezes.  My wind chimes, tenor in range, tuned to an Aeolian scale, ring only on winds from NW to NE. Tonight they are singing due North and my heart echoes their sound: restless, with a slightly minor stirring.  Given time and a boat, I could find my way to Havana. Laid up against the wall at Marina Hemingway, I would walk El Malecon, using my new, rudimentary Spanish to ask, “Can you help me find Yoani Sanchez?”

Finding Yoani Sanchez

 It is, of course, a fantasy.  There is much more than water that separates Galveston from Havana, and a few hundred miles of ocean are more easily overcome than the twin realities of geopolitical obstinance and dictatorial whim.  The thought of sailing away to Havana Harbor, tying up and walking over to visit Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez clearly falls into the realm of fantasy. Recognized as such, it stands as a powerful reminder that Yoani Sanchez herself is not a metaphor, a symbol, a blank screen upon which we can project our own fantasies about the oppressed Third World writer. 

Yoani Sanchez is real, as her people are real. At this very moment, she is in Havana, living her life as you peacefully sit at your computer and read these words.  Perhaps she is reading.  Perhaps she is wondering where to find a bicycle chain, or pondering the mysterious messages painted on the broken windows of the city.  Perhaps she is taking one of the unusual red and blue buses which sit at the side of the road outside her window or perhaps (one can only hope) she is pouring her son a scarce and luxurious glass of milk.  Soon, she will be writing again, using the power of human language to bring to a world’s notice the abuse of political power.

Despite the fact that I don’t know her culture, can’t speak her language and barely comprehend the nature of the government which constrains her life, I have come to know enough of Yoani Sanchez in past months that any thought of  focusing on other things leaves me with an irrational sense of betrayal, of abandoning a friend.   A friend or two of my own say, “You can’t be responsible for everyone.  Think how many unfortunate and oppressed people exist whom you don’t know: the refugees, the prisoners, the disappeared and violated.”

And that is true.  There are many I don’t know, millions of people whose circumstances nearly defy description and whose lives are lived out in hopelessness and fear.   There was a time when I knew nothing of Yoani Sanchez.   I knew little of her country and even less about her people.  But now, I know.   I’ve taken my bite of this particular apple, and so I find myself accountable for my response.  The difficult question, of course, is the nature of my response.

However distasteful we may find it, the truth is that we are embedded in history, and it takes time for things to work themselves out.  In difficult and complex circumstances, the longings of the human heart can meet the limits of life in a clash of suffocating force. When that happens, allowing time to pass, allowing the next step to reveal itself, is difficult.   It is tempting to become impatient, and even easier to experience helplessness, anxiety and frustration.  The urge to take control, to force a turning of events simply in order to resolve the tension – the urge to DO something – can be irresistible.  It’s a generally unhelpful response, particularly since, when no other obvious solution exists, the temptation to resolve tension simply by turning away can be strong.

Kryie Eleison

Restless in the wind and feeling the call of the water, still haunted by Yoani Sanchez and uncertain which next step to take, I found myself impelled to Galveston’s shore.  Walking the edge of the same water that laps against El Malecon so many worlds away, I remembered other days when there was nothing more to do: times when clear thought dissolved into a blur of confusion, and every action proved ineffectual. Seeing those days in memory, I saw my solution as well.  Turning my gaze from the south, from the expanse of water and the impossible journey it represented, I turned instead to the north, to the little seaside town and St. Mary, Star of the Sea.

I am not a Catholic, and whether Yoani Sanchez’ beliefs are Catholic, I have no way of knowing.  But in the cathedrals of the world it is faith that matters, not definitions, and Yoani Sanchez is a person of deep and abiding faith.  She also is a person of words, and surely understands the silence that is the necessary partner of words: the seedbed that allows them to take root and flourish, the frame that surrounds their images.

In a cathedral, it is the silence that comes first.  Sitting near Mary, Star of the Sea, or Anthony, or Patrick, with their banks of votives and calm, impassive gazes focused beyond the horizon of time, silence begins to permeate the soul.  As the silence grows complete, as mind and heart are stilled by the unutterable presence of eternity, I rise and take a taper, and light a candle for Yoani Sanchez.   There is no need for specific prayer, no need for words to fill the silence.  The silence itself is prayer, and comfort, enough.

As I watch the flame, a mysterious wind sends ripples of grief through my heart like a rising wind will ruffle the waters.  But the wind lays, and the heart calms, and the grief stands revealed for what it is: a profound experience of the truth that to be human is to be limited.  The promise and the pain of faith is understanding that those limits will be overcome, but  only in due time, and by a power other than our own. 

I stand a moment longer, watching the flame, hearing the silence, feeling the grief ebb away.  As I turn toward the sunlight streaming in through the open door at the end of the nave, as I begin my long walk through the flickering shadows toward re-engagement and life, there is no need to look back.

Yoani Sanchez is safe.

 

 

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Imagining a Ban

 

In recent weeks, Cuban policies limiting citizens’ access to certain goods and services have been liberalized.  Farmers no longer are required to purchase materials from state-run stores, and it’s now possible for more individuals to rent cars. 

Restrictions on personal cell phone ownership have been eased, and bans lifted on the purchase of electronic or electrical consumer items of all sorts, including computers, video players, televisions, pressure cookers, rice cookers, electric bicycles, microwave ovens and car alarms.

Raul Castro’s reforms have been scrutinized closely for practical as well as political significance.  Apparently desirable, they are filled with irony.  In a nation where most individuals are not allowed to purchase a car, car alarms seem somewhat beside the point.  The scarcity of many basic food items and the prohibitive cost of others make the possibility of possessing an electric rice cooker or microwave seem amusing at best.

While the sudden availability of televisions, computers and cell phones has created a bit of a stir in the world outside the Island, Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez and others suggest Raul Castro’s easing of restrictions instituted by his brother Fidel is nothing more than bowing to the inevitable.  At this point, there is no stopping the influx of technology into the country, so it makes sense to get ahead of the curve and gain political advantage wherever possible.  Even more cynical observers suggest that easy availability of cell phones simply provides one more way for the government to keep track of its citizens.

In any event, the reforms have been noted with cautious approval and general agreement that, while the reforms are lovely, they probably are cost-prohibitive for most Cubans.  Writing in the April 1 Washington Post, Manuel Roig-Franzia notes that “Cuban state workers make an average of $19 a month… (while) car rentals in Cuba – also managed by the military – are among the most expensive in Latin America, with vehicles typically going for as much as $100 a day.”

The additional fact that such items and services must be purchased with Cuban convertible pesos, a stronger currency than the national pesos paid state workers makes things more difficult.  Cubans who receive tips from tourists or have money sent in from abroad have access to convertible pesos, but the existence of a de facto dual monetary system does little to increase purchasing power across the board.

The same issues arise when it comes to a less-publicized but symbolically important March 31 move by the Cuban government to lift restrictions on Cubans’ freedom to enjoy resort beaches, stay at luxury hotels or purchase services provided by the hotels.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and consequent economic difficulties for the Castro regime, the practice of keeping Cubans and tourists apart became so rigid it was known as “tourist apartheid”.  Some of the most beautiful places in the country were off-limits to Cubans: Varadero Beach, Cayo Santa Maria, the Vinales Valley in Pinar del Rio Province.

For most Cubans , being allowed to move beyond that “apartheid” and indulge themselves in the luxury of a hotel stay will be as symbolic as the right to purchase a computer or DVD; it simply is too expensive. A quick look at current rates published by TripAdvisor tells the tale: a night in Havana?  $201 to $369.  A little stroll along Varadero at sunset?  $169 to $305.  Guardalavaca? $255.  Guardala? Coming in high, at $455.  There was a listing at Guama for $3, with a description  that proclaims “twice the charms”.  If not a misprint, it’s either the world’s best bargain or the world’s worst decision: who knows?

In any event, it doesn’t take a genius to do the math.  Quoting Roig-Franzia again, “on (the salary of the typical Cuban), it would take nearly two years to earn enough for one night at the Saratoga.” 

Resort living and luxury hotels aren’t for everyone, of course.  Even as an American with a perfect right to head off to the Hilton, I prefer to make other choices.   I suspect there are Cubans who feel the same.  If I were Cuban, I’d be far more interested in regaining my right to travel to places like the Vinales Valley.

One of Cuban’s most remarkable natural attractions, it’s been declared a National Natural Monument and listed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 1999 as “a cultural landscape enriched by traditional farm and village architecture.”  Surrounded by mogotes with rounded tops and steep slopes, the valley is a luxurious mix of tobacco, taro and bananas, unusual plant life and exquisite vistas.   For decades Cubans showed off their treasure, until access was limited by the government.  In the words of Rafael Ferro Salas, “The old road was closed.  Now only the rented vehicles of foreign tourists travel the new route, and those carrying visitors invited to the spot by government officials.  For Cubans who live in the island nation, traveling is prohibited on the access road leading to the valley’s vantage point, the site where the view is loveliest and most unforgettable.”

In words of unutterable poignancy, he goes on to add, “Pinar del Rio is full of natural beauties.  The most beautiful sites are being left like a footprint in the fog of memory.  So far no one knows when the day will come when they can go back to traveling among them.“  (CubaNet, October 1, 2004)

Writing in Babalu, Val Prieto notes some uncertainty whether areas such as the Vinales Valley are now accessible to Cubans.  It may be the lifting of restrictions applies strictly to tourist beaches, hotels and services.  Whatever the final result, the changes certainly stimulate thought.  Whatever happens in the next months, whether Varadero, the Cays, the Vinales Valley and other prohibited sites become open to all Cubans, it remains a fact that for years Cubans have been barred from their own country, banned from visiting sights celebrated world-wide for their beauty and historical significance.

For a Cuban to be banned from Vinales is not unlike an American being banned from Yosemite, prevented from traveling to or enjoying its splendor because the government prefers to reserve it for those who will pay well for the experience.

What others experience can be hard to imagine.  But imagine, for a moment, being banned from the Everglades while tour boats filled with foreigners are granted special passes to enjoy the wonders of the River of Grass:

Imagine being banned from Anasazi ruins throughout the Four Corners area because a politician prefers to show off the sites to his cronies:

Imagine being banned from Cape Hatteras because the government intends to restrict contact between you and visitors from other countries:

Imagine being banned from Death Valley for the sole purpose of buttressing your government’s sense of entitlement and control over your life:

Imagine being banned from Niagara Falls simply because the government has the power to do so and decides it will do so for the simple delight of exercising power:

For some people in the world, such banishments are a bitter reality, limitations on freedom imposed by rulers intent on controlling other peoples’ lives.  It’s impossible to look at the world and not understand that such bans lead inexorably to other constraints.  The freedom to travel, to assemble, to speak without fear with whomever we choose, the freedom to participate fully in the life of a country or community – all those freedoms begin to erode when a valley, an historic site or an occasion is declared by the state to be “off limits”, made a punishable offense for the sole purpose of maintaining power over individuals.

As I read about the possibility of change in Cuba, and ponder the strange significance of open beaches and hotel stays for the cause of freedom, I can’t help remembering an expression I once heard someone use in quite a different context.   “I’m banned, and I’m proud,” he said. From my perspective, it was an odd statement.  I suspect a few Cubans would find it even more odd.

 

 

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Death by Fidel: A Family’s Story of Survival

 

There’s no question that life is filled with mystery.   From time to time, how things happen, or why, can be impossible to determine.  But when Mystery appears on your doorstep, demanding entry, only the foolish or insensitive would refuse to open that door.

Last Friday afternoon, Mystery came to call.  Many of you know that I varnish boats for a living.  I was down on the docks, working on a boat for a new customer and chatting with him as he went about his own projects.  One thing led to another, and I mentioned blogging.  Then, I mentioned my interest in the Cuban blogger, Yoani Sanchez, and the experience of finding the blog Babalu.  Glancing up, he said, “I know Babalu.”  I was startled, intrigued and curious.  As if to answer my unspoken question he added, “I was raised in Havana.”

Indeed he was.  Gary Anderson’s father, Howard Anderson, had moved his family to Cuba in the late 40s because, as Gary said, “Grandpa didn’t want to be alone”.  Together with his wife Dorothy and their children, Howard Anderson lived and worked in Cuba until 1960.  In the summer of that year, they moved their boat to Miami and rented a house.   Conditions in Cuba were simply bcoming too dangerous for a family.

After the New Year arrived, stories and rumors of expropriated business holdings were rampant.  Howard Anderson returned to Cuba to protect his assets, including a chain of filling stations and a Jeep dealership.  While he was not a CIA agent, he did carry messages for the Agency, as well as providing radios to the anti-Castro movement.  That was enough for him to be charged with conspiracy during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961, and sentenced to death April 18. 

Writing in the September 15, 2006 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Evan Perez recalls Mr. Anderson’s last letter to his wife from a jail cell in Cuba’s Pinar Del Rio province: “Mr. Anderson said his fate was sealed.  As his trial began, air-raid sirens could be heard outside the courtroom… ‘It is unfortunate that this invasion took place, as under normal circumstances I am sure that the tribunal would not have been ruled by passion but by their own revolutionary laws,’ Mr. Anderson wrote in neat, square letters. ‘I hope and pray that you and mother will forgive me for the troubles that I have caused, especially this present big one.’  He was executed four hours later.”

Gary Anderson’s sister, Bonnie, was five years old when her father was killed.  Today, she is an award-winning journalist with 27 years’ experience, including two decades with NBC News and CNN, and the author of NEWSFLASH, an exploration of the decline of independence and truth in media published in 2004.

She also is a daughter determined to preserve and honor her father’s memory and a Cuban-American who insists the world face the reality of Castro’s Cuba.  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, not to your own facts”, and it is the facts which Bonnie Anderson has on her mind.  On December 3, 2006, her feature column in the Miami Herald detailed some of her family’s experience, and her frustration with the current state of affairs.  The full text is easily found online; these portions should provide a sense of her passion and thought:

My father, Howard F. Anderson, was only one of 20,000 people tortured and executed by Fidel Castro.  Before my Dad’s execution by firing squad, he had most of his blood drained from his body to be used for transfusions for the revolutionary troops.   (Note: Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Circuit Court, April 13, 2003). “In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”)  Other political prisoners who watched the execution from their cells told me years later that my father refused a blindfold, and he whistled as the bullets tore into his body.  One of the few memories I have, since I was only five years old at that time, was that my Dad whistled when he was angry…”

“As a journalist, I refrain from generalities.  But I do believe there are few Cubans on the island and even fewer Cuban exiles who have not had a family member either executed or imprisoned by this megalomaniac.  What I fail to understand is why there seems to be so little national compassion for the pain that Cuban exiles have experienced.  Americans show compassion for cancer survivors, for DUI and rape victims, for people suffering from depression, physical and mental abuse.  We show compassion for famine victims in Africa…genocide in Ethiopia…  So why, I ask, are Cuban exiles not afforded the same support and compassion?”

Despite my Anglo name, I was born in Cuba.  My mother was born there.  Her parents are buried there.  My father was buried there until Castro was so ticked off by an article I wrote in 1978 as a Miami Herald reporter that he had my father’s remains dug up and thrown out.  I am most proud of being Cuban American, and I want the rest of the world to understand our pain.  It is part of our daily lives, no matter where we live.  It is the ache of losing a country, but it is more than that, too.  It is a loss we feel in our blood and in our bones…  Our pain is part of our spirit.  The most we can hope for is compassion…”

While Fidel is celebrating a birthday, my brothers, sister and I are mourning the death not only of our father but also of our mother, Dorothy Stauber Anderson McCarthy, who died less than two months ago.  She was 39 years old when Fidel made her a widow.  She struggled to raise us and give us a new life, and she was most successful.  But her greatest triumph was to instill a sense of right and honor in us, to teach us strength and morality.

A month after her death, a New York judge ruled that we should receive millions of dollars of the frozen Cuban assets held in this country because of Fidel Castro’s murder of my father.  It is a very welcome decision, but very bittersweet.  Fidel Castro is alive and he knows he has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to pay for his heinous act.  But the fact that my mother isn’t alive to see this final measure of justice is a soul-deep wound that I wll live with for the rest of my life.

I weep for her.  I weep for us, and I weep for all who have been the victims of Fidel Castro.”

The entire Anderson family – mother and children - testified during the trial.   In our conversation, Gary said, “It was just as traumatic as I thought it would be.”  I can only imagine. Bonnie herself testified that when she went to Cuba in 1978, on assignment from The Miami Herald, she met Castro during a press conference, and he “knew who I was.” 

An AP story printed in the March 13, 2003 South Florida Sun-Sentinal reported that “she was able to travel to western Cuba and found her father’s untended grave at the rear of a municipal cemetery.  Twenty years later Anderson, then on assignment for CNN, again traveled to the cemetery, where the same caretaker led her to the grave site.  But this time, a teary-eyed Anderson testified, “There was just a hole in the ground. The caretaker said that someone had ordered that the remains be dug up, and they were either burned and thrown out or just thrown out.”

 Today, May 21, is Cuba Solidarity Day.  When I first thought of posting an entry to mark the occasion, I imagined I would speak of Yoani Sanchez, or the history of Cuba, or the people of the island.  To the extent that I know anything at all of Cuba, that is what I have known.

Instead, I find myself thinking of Howard Anderson, who whistled in front of his firing squad because, as his daughter says, he “whistled when he was angry”.  I think of his wife Dorothy, who learned of his death not by a compassionate knock on the door, but by a radio broadcast out of Cuba.  I think of Gary, his brothers and sisters, who told a judge they wanted to testify at trial, in order to make clear the larger significance of what had happened to their father.  I think of Bonnie, using her skills as journalist and writer to send words around the world that continue to resonate today, strong and vibrant as the day they were published. And, on this Cuba Solidarity Day, I will go down once more to Cuban Gold:  to work, and ponder the mystery of how a boat purchased with funds taken from a murderous regime has fallen into my care. 

Call it romanticism, call it too much time in the hot sun, call it crazy if you will, but I like to talk to my boats.  I do it all the time.   The constancy of the wind and repetitive nature of the waves seems to affect them.   They’re a bit like children – they love to hear their stories, retold a thousand times.  They love hearing how they came to be, and the meaning of their names.  LIke any of us, they love to dream, wondering where the path will lead once they’ve been freed from moorings and slip.

And so today, as the heat and humidity rise, and the feel of tropical summer permeates the air, as the pelicans dive and the wind begins again to blow steady from the southeast, from the Island whose day it is, I’ll talk to Cuban Gold.  I’ll tell her the story of her naming.  I’ll tell her what I know of the beauty of the Island for which she is named, and the endurance of the people who live there.  I’ll tell her of other boats that have crossed the Straits and of that great river of flowing water called the Gulfstream.  I’ll imagine with her the satisfaction of one day riding a great wave of joy into Havana Harbor, mooring beside the wall and resting there to be admired by the walkers along El Malecon: beautiful, proud - and free at last.

 

 

 

© Text copyright Linda Leinen 2008

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Cuba Solidarity Day – A Larger Context

 

 On October 23, 1956, I celebrated my tenth birthday.  Surely there was cake and ice cream, a gift or two, and a party with balloons and games, but I really can’t say.  My most vivid memory of the day (or perhaps the day after, given the  relative slowness of the news wires in 1956) is running down the stairs from my bedroom, only to discover the Hungarian Revolution had begun. 

I was a child, growing up in Iowa.  I certainly never had met a Hungarian, and I had little if any idea what a revolution might be.   But I could read, and I liked to look at photographs.  As I headed toward the kitchen, The Des Moines Register  was lying on the dining room table.   There was a huge photograph above the fold, and the words REVOLUTION IN HUNGARY were splashed across the top.   I stopped to see what required such large print, and such big pictures.  Looking at the photograph, my mind was wiped clean of thought like one of my grade-school blackboards.  I was gaining my first, visceral understanding that the world was larger than my town, and not everyone in that world lived with cake, ice cream and gifts.

I was lucky enough to be raised in a time and place where teachers were left free to teach children, and my teachers threw away their lesson plans in the days that followed in order to talk with us about what was happening.  As amazing as it may seem today, the 1848 Hungarian National Poem had been found without the aid of Google, and it  was made into a poster:

    Stand up, Hungarians, your country calls.
    The time for now or never falls.
    Are we to live as slaves or free?
    Choose one. This is our destiny!
    By the God of all the Magyars, we swear.
    We swear never again the chains to bear. 

As a child, I was moved by the straightforwardness of the poetry, and its breathless assertion that chains could fall.   More recently, thinking over events of the time from an adult perspective, I found myself pondering this excerpt from Karoly Nagy’s “The Legacy of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution”:

Liberty, democracy, human rights are like health. Servitude, oppression, discrimination are like sickness. Totalitarian tyranny is death. A revolution that overthrows tyranny and achieves liberty is a resurrection. During the last week of October and the first few days of November, 1956, most of us in Hungary felt as if we were risen from the dead…
 
It was euphoria.  We sang our long-forbidden national anthem, embraced each other on the streets, laughed and cried with joy.  We felt redeemed. We were intoxicated by hearing and saying words of truth. We learned the truth and demonstrated it to the World, that what defines a country, what qualifies a society is not any ideology, but the presence or absence of freedom. 

Decades later, it was events in Poland which focused my attention.  The emergence of the Solidarity Movement under the leadership of Lech Walesa was profoundly significant, and its history has assumed almost mythical proportions.  Solidarity’s success didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t linked directly to specific events or grievances.  The rising of Solidarity as a political force in Poland was related to governmental policies and economic difficulties which had become increasingly onorous over the course of a decade.  Consumer goods were scarce.   People waited in endless lines for such basics as bread and toilet paper, and often left with no goods to show for their patient efforts.  In July of 1980, as the government raised the price of goods but curbed the growth of wages, strikes spread across the country.

The history of the strikes, the further development of Solidarity into a national labor union and the quite amazing international support which it received is well documented elsewhere, and beyond the scope of this post.  It is worth noting that Solidarity was outlawed after the imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981.  Most of its leaders were arrested, including Lech Walesa, who was imprisoned until November of 1982.  Less than a month after his release, 10,000 more activists were arrested, and restrictions on civil liberties continued despite the lifting of martial law on July 22, 1983.

When Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 5, 1983, the Polish government refused to allow him to leave the country in order to accept the award.   In order to avoid involuntary exile, he remained in Poland while his wife, Danuta, traveled to Oslo to accept the award on his behalf.  By December of 1990, Walesa had become the first popularly-elected President of Poland, and was free to travel as he pleased.

Former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski once said,  “The idea of Solidarity is the most important answer to the globalized world in the 21st century.”   Viktor Yushchenko,  who eventually triumphed in  Ukraine’s ”orange revolution”, agreed, saying,  “By storming freedom, Poland gives an example for the continuing path toward freedom. Each country does it in its own way. But Solidarity was a guidepost for all of us.”

Indeed.  In 2005, ex-Czechoslovakian President and longtime dissident Vaclav Havel noted that, “On the 25th anniversary of Solidarity, we should all be reminded of the countries where there are still dissidents fighting for human rights, and where people are not free. Solidarity does not only mean freedom, it requires responsibility.”  He added that people in “Belarus, Burma, Cuba and North Korea still need clear signs of support, still need freedom, still need Solidarity.”

Recent events in Myanmar (Burma) related to Cyclone Nargis have proven Havel’s point as far as that nation is concerned, and there is an unfortunate number of other examples of oppression, incompetence and disregard for human rights around the world.   Next week’s Cuba Solidarity Day (May 21) will focus attention on a struggle taking place not in Europe or Asia, but 90 miles off our shores, where parallels with earlier circumstances and events are crystal clear. 

In her Generacion Y  blog, Yoani Sanchez speaks of the same sort of food shortages that brought trouble in Poland.  The Cuban government’s refusal to allow Ms. Sanchez travel privileges to claim her Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism recalls restrictions placed on Lech Walesa when he won his own Nobel Peace Prize.  Many recent changes in Cuba, including those regarding consumer goods and internet access, are as painfully incremental and nearly irrelevant as those implemented in any nation where dictatorial leadership seeks to maintain power while assuaging the masses.

Like Walesa, Havel and Yushenko before her, Yoani Sanchez  has become a face of Cuban opposition to tyranny, political repression and overwhelming bureaucratic and governmental incompetence.  But there are other bloggers, such as those at Babalu, who also speak of Cuba, and an entire people standing behind her who deserve no less recognition and no less respect.  Solidarity is meant not simply for the Sanchezes, the Walesas and the Nagys of the world.  It is meant even more for the nameless ones, the ones whose voice is not yet heard:  those who need someone to speak on their behalf until they are able to speak for themselves.There is something infinitely inspiring about real people engaged in real struggles over real issues.  They deserve our respect, our attention, our support and, yes – a vibrant and committed solidarity. 

Over the years, there has been some confusion and misunderstanding about the very term “solidarity”.  Some have endowed it with an ethereal, almost mystical quality, while others seem to limit its use solely to grand gestures with a distinctly Aux barricades! flavor.  The notion of solidarity actually is quite simple.  It has very little to do with free-floating emotion, philosophical constructs,  high-flown speeches or vague intentions, and a good bit to do with simple, concrete actions.  As so often happens, a little story may prove more helpful than formal definition.

Once upon a time, there was a man who began to read a book.  He was reading in bed,  comfortable and warm, with a glass of wine at hand and a candle burning on the ledge.  A bit of Vivaldi played in the background, and a fire flickered shadows onto the walls, although the book he was reading spoke nothing of music or pleasure or warmth.   The man was reading  Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.  As he read, he discovered that ”Ivan Denisovich” portrays a world as bleak as any in literature.   In Ivan Denisovich’s world, there is cold,  hard work and misery, and not enough to eat.  Ivan Denisovich lives out his life in a Gulag, and the Gulag is not a comfortable place.

Eventually, the man reading Ivan Denisovich’s tale of misery  became distressed.  As he realized the comfort of his warm bed and all the delights of life which surrounded him, he stopped reading.   He rose and dressed, doused his fire, stopped the music and moved to a hard-backed chair, where he continued to read through the night.

Perhaps the time has come for us to rise and reclothe our spirits, douse the warmth and comfort of our lives, and accept an uncomfortable chair.  In Cuba, as in so many places in the world, it still is night.  There are voices to be heard, and words waiting to be read. 

 

 

 

  © Text copyright Linda Leinen 2008

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If Yoani Sanchez Read Your Blog

 

 Wednesday night in Havana, Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez read her speech accepting this year’s Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism to friends gathered in her apartment.  She was prevented from traveling to Spain to accept the prize in person by a regime which appears increasingly distressed by the attention shown the young blogger.  An interview aired on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition provides an update and a bit of context for those not familiar with her work.

I have been following the story of Yoani Sanchez for some time.  When I first wrote the following essay, one of my greatest concerns was the translation of her words.  I do not read or speak Spanish, and the response she posted in March, just after Cuban authorities began slowing access to her blog, appeared on the internet in a variety of forms.

Now, I have a translation which I feel comfortable posting.  Provided by Jose Ma Gonzalez, a native of Spain, and Jane Reinhart-Gonzalez, I am confident it gives a good sense of Ms. Sanchez’ style as well as an accurate reflection of her words.  Many thanks to Jose and Janie, who do translation work professionally in Galveston, Texas.

Some of you who stop by will have read this before.  Nevertheless, considering the latest developments in Ms. Sanchez’ life, it is worth another read, and certainly worth posting for those who do not know the story of this year’s winner of the Ortega y Gasset prize.

Yoani Sanchez haunts my life.  Slender, dark-haired, she walks Havana streets thinking of toasters and lemons, passing into and through the shadows of the Castros, fingers curled around the flash drive hidden in her pocket.  She is walking to a liason, a tryst, an encounter hidden from the eyes of the world.  Her desire is not for a man, but for a computer monitor: her longing and hunger, to send her words out into the world.

Yoani Sanchez is a young Cuban woman who blogs from Havana.  She blogs rather well, with a worldwide readership.  The circumstances of her life, combined with her words and her incisive intelligence, make her someone worth reading.  They also make her someone to fear, particularly if you are a Cuban official whose only longing and intention is to maintain order and preserve the status quo.  Dictatorships will smile benignly on philosophers and thinkers who fuss about grand issues like freedom, censorship and ineffective government using large, rectangular words.  But when pretty young bloggers begin to describe the realities of life in words everyone can understand – toasters and oxen and lemons and milk – dictatorships pay attention.

I first attended to Yoani Sanchez when I saw her name – and nothing more – posted on a website.  Curious, I began to search.  I found an article about her blog in the December 22, 2007 Wall Street Journal, and was moved by the simple description of what she does:

 ”On a recent morning, Yoani Sanchez took a deep breath and gathered her nerve for an undercover mission: posting an Internet chronicle about life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.”

“To get around Cuba’s restrictions on Web access, the waif-like 32-year-old posed as a tourist to slip into an Internet cafe in one of the city’s luxury hotels, which normally bar Cubans.  Dressed in gray surf shorts, T-shirt and lime-green espadrilles, she strode toward a guard at the hotel’s threshold and flashed a wide smile.  The guard, a towering man with a shaved head, stepped aside.  ‘I think I’m able to do this because I look so harmless,’ says Ms. Sanchez, who says she is sometimes mistaken for a teenager.  Once inside the cafe, she attached a flash memory drive to the hotel computer and, in quick, intense movements, uploaded her material.”

Equally skilled at balancing action with reflection, Ms. Sanchez’ own words about her extraordinary routine are modest.  “The sensation of losing fear, of risking, is a sensation that is normally irreversible.  After you cross certain lines, there is no way back.”  After a lifetime of internalizing the constraints of life in a dictatorship, she describes her blog as a way to escape her “internal policeman”, a way “to push the limits, to find the line where the internal limits end and the real limits begin.”  Sometimes, Sanchez suggests, even a child’s game of “let’s pretend” can be useful.  “You have to believe that you are free and try to act like it,” she says.  “Little by little, acting as though you are free can be contagious.”

Reading her words and tracing the contours of her life, I found them remarkable, if somewhat removed from my own.  The single point of intersection between us seemed to be our blogs.  Produced in quite different circumstances, for different audiences and to significantly different purposes, they are identical as expressions of a writer’s passion: to have words read, appreciated, and absorbed as agents of transformation and change.  However, the initial differences in format I found between Ms. Sanchez’ blogs and my own are instructive.

Like most Cuban bloggers, I had chosen to remain anonymous.  Whether grounded in caution, fear, or simple preference, anonymity can provide comfort, a sense of privacy and security.  It also makes issues of honesty and accountability less relevant.  Ms. Sanchez, who signs her name and posts her photo on her Web site, appears to have few problems with honesty and accountability; she is quite willing to express her opinions and defend them publicly from the very heart of a dictatorship.  Such forthrightness earns her a prerogative or two.  Yoani Sanchez, 32 years old and living 90 miles off our shores in a crumbling nation which would prefer not to be portrayed in such detail, has every right to turn to a 61-yuear-old, comfortable and completely un-oppressed woman and inquire, “And you.  Where is your picture?  what is your name?  Tell me your convictions.”

As I removed my avatar and replaced it with a photograph, as I began signing my name to my work and pondered the implications of doing so, it was the challenge of Yoani Sanchez’ words which resonated in my mind: “Once you experience the flavor of saying what you think, of publishing it and signing it with your name, well, there’s no turning back.  One of the first things we have to do, a great way to begin to change, is to be more honest about saying what you think.”

Ms. Sanchez has a history of saying what she thinks.  Admitted to the University of Havana for study of philology – the study of language and literature – she nurtured a love for Latin American writers.  But her thesis topic, Dictatorships in Latin American Literature, brought her academic career to an end.  “The thesis wasn’t overly critical,” Sanchez says, “but the mere act of defining what a dictatorship is in an academic paper made people really nervous, because the definition was a portrait of Cuba.”

Forced to move from academia to the public forums of the Internet, she unnerved the regime even more: not by overtly political criticisms or attacks on the Castro brothers themselvs, but by her vivid descriptions of daily life.  On March 24, 2008 Cuban authorities became nervous enough to take action, blocking or slowing access to Sanchez’ blog.  According to Sanchez, government censors placed filters that delayed viewing of her Web page on a server in Germany.  Her response, offered here in translation, has been described as classic Sanchez:

I recognize that I have been misbehaving.  I rebel against orders; I look for lemons that never appear; I demand excuses that never arrive; and – a great absurdity of mine – I put my opinions in a blog, with photo and name included.

As you can see, bcause of these thirty-two impertinent years, I am not being corrected.  As a result, the anonymous censors of our ravenous cyberspace have wanted to enclose me in the room, turn off the light and not let my friends enter inside.  That, translated to the language of the Internet, means to block my site, to filter my Web page; in short, to puncture the Blog so that my compatriots cannot read it.

Ever since a few days ago, “Generacio Y” is merely an error message on the screen of many Cuban computers – another site blocked for the “monitored” Internet users of the Island.  My words, my text, and that of other bloggers and digital journalists, have caused the presser foot of the inquisitors to do its ridiculous part.  We have received a slap on the face, the “severe wink” and an admonishment from these arrogant and rebellious adolescents.  Nevertheless, the reprimand is so useless and pointless that it is an embarrassment, and so easy to outmaneuver that it turns into an incentive.

“This breath of fresh air has disheveled the hair of bureaucrats and censors,” she said in a later telephone interview, vowing to continue her blog.  “Anyone with a bit of computer skills knows how to get around them.  The aim of government censors is to block readership in Cuba, where people have limited access to Internet.  They are admitting that no alternative way of thinking can exist in Cuba, but people will continue reading us somehow.  There is no censorship that can stop people who are determined to access the internet.”

Another bit of fresh air blew through Cuba and the worldwide blogging community on Friday, April 4.  On that day, Sanchez’ creativity and persistence was rewrded when her Generacion Y  blog received one of Spain’s top journalism awards, the Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism.  The Spanish newspaper El Pais, which awards the prize annually, said Sanchez won it for her “shrewdness” in overcoming hurdles to freedom of expression in Cuba, her “vivacious” style and her drive to join the “global space of citizen journalism”.

Speaking with the Reuters News Service by telephone from her home in Havana, Ms. Sanchez said, “This is great encouragement for Cuban bloggers, who are still at an embryonic stage.  It recognizes that Cuban blogs can be a parallel source of information, reflection and opinions independent from Cuba’s official media.”

 It does much more than that.  Winning a significant prize in a first-world country gets you dinner, a check, an NPR interview and a swing around the talk-show circuit.  In third world dictatorships, winning an international prize can help save your life, as the additional attention and scrutiny set up a useful barrier between the writer and those who would silence a voice.

In a recent blog, I touched briefly on the moral and ethical dimensions of art.  Regardless of the medium, decisions are made by artists at every turn.  Am I working for myself alone, or am I willing to consider the world in which I live?  Am I willing to accept responsiblity for my creation, or will I refuse to engage criticism or disagreement?  To the extent that my art touches other lives, what effect do I wish to have?

The same questions of morality and ethics arise in blogging.  It is easy for us to forget that decisions are being made on a daily basis because the process itself is so easy.  You make coffee, you turn on the computer, you begin to type.  It is even easier to abdicate personal responsibility.  Challenged or rebuffed, facing disagreement or simple misunderstanding, we can choose to turn off our computers and walk away, leaving a trail of words, photos, videos, cartoon and .gifs in our wake without consequence.  Alone in front of our monitors, we are free to consider only those who choose to make their presence known to us, or we can imagine with sympathy and attentive curiosity the faceless ones who also read our words.

The simple fact is that we need to stop, and think about what we are doing.  I do not mean to argue here for one kind of blogging over another; this is not a criticism of cartoons, videos or smiley faces.  It is not meant to be dismissive of casual or shallow posting and, above all, it certainly is not a rejection of hanging out and having fun on the Internet.  All those things have their place.  But, when I think of Yoani Sanchez, their place is quite beside the point.

The point is this.  Imagine Yoani Sanchez, leaving her house on a delicious May afternoon with lime-green espadrilles on her feet, a flash drive in her pocket and a map to the nearest internet connection in her head.  Imagine her languid smile as she slips past the guard, her studied casualness as she sits at a rented computer and draws her treasure from her pocket.  Imagine her relief as the latest set of entries uploads properly, fleeing to the safety of German servers.  Imagine, then, Yoani Sanchez with an additional ten minutes of allotted time, deciding to indulge herself in the luxury of a quick surf across the Net.  With a click of the keys, in a sudden, unbelievable instance of serendipity, she arrives at your page, and begins to read.

What would Yoani Sanchez think?

 

 

 © Text copyright Linda Leinen 2008

COMMENTS are welcome.  To read previous comments or post one of your own, please click on the tiny “Comments” link below.  Eventually, I’ll learn CSS and revise the template, but this note will have to do for the time being!