Cuba's Yoani Sánchez Speaks Out - Full Interview | MetroFocus

[Mika]

5. Here ...

The Curious Case of Yoani Sanchez
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/20/the-curious-case-of-yoani-sanchez/

13. How can your blog accept Paypal, a payment system not available to any island resident because of economic sanctions that affect, among other things, e-commerce?

16. How are you able to register your domain through the U.S. company GoDaddy when this is formally forbidden under current economic sanctions?

17. Your blog is available in 18 languages including; English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Lithuanian, Czech, Bulgarian, Dutch, Finnish, Korean and Greek. No other Web site in the world, not even the sites of important international agencies, such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, OECD or the European Union offers this degree of linguistic support. Not even the U.S. State Department or the CIA offers this degree of access to non-English speakers. Who finances the translations?

18. How is it possible that the site that hosts your blog offers bandwidth 60 times greater than the Internet access service Cuba offers to its users?

24. In 2011, you published 400 messages per month. The price of sending one SMS message from Cuba is $1.25. So, you spent $7,000 in one year of Twitter use. Who pays for this?

When asked about this list during her visit to Columbia University’s School of Journalism she joked that when she was in Brazil the list had grown to fifty questions and that she had already answered all of them. These questions though are not just for Yoani to brush off but are rhetorical questions that thinking people ought to ask when looking at her website and the production methods of “Team Yoani”.
Indeed, the first stop on her 80-day Phineas Fogg-like trip produced plenty of questions and Yoani’s answers belied the fact that maybe she wasn’t exactly “ready for primetime.”

Upon her arrival in Brazil, Yoani was greeted by the stark reality that many global citizens do not agree with her narrative. She was challenged by Brazilian journalists, students, and other citizens about her description of Cuban reality and her answers to three questions in particular caused her to backtrack almost immediately.

When asked about the U.S. embargo against Cuba, Yoani stated unequivocally that it was an interventionist policy and was a justification for the failings of the Cuban government. Most importantly she emphasized that this policy of economic strangulation was a “relic of the Cold War” and needed to be abandoned as soon as possible (“Ya!”). She also called upon the closing of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Not the detention center that has brought so much infamy to the United States government and has challenged our notion of due process, but the actual base which is a violation of Cuban sovereignty. Lastly, she called for the release of the Cuban operatives known as the Cuban Five arguing that the Cuban government has spent an unnecessary portion of its budget to campaign for their release.

When confronted by Miami Cubans who were incensed by such commentary Yoani began to backpedal by saying that her comments about the Cuban Five were “ironic” and that she believes that they are not innocent. This rationalization poses a problem for the legitimacy of her position.

For example, now that she has arrived in the United States her position towards the embargo and Guantanamo has been mitigated to a milquetoast generalization that there should be a “dialogue” about these issues. Why is she advocating for dialogue now instead of demanding for the termination of unilateral sanctions as she did in Brazil? Why does she not also decry the interventionist nature of USAID programs that are specifically aimed at “regime change” in Cuba? Why are these questions not being asked in New York, or more pointedly, why aren’t the institutions and academics not letting them be asked? The “guardians” at NYU and Columbia have shown a tendency to “cherry-pick” the questions directed towards Yoani. Why, in what is supposedly the freest nation on earth, is this happening? There have been protests and outbursts in her meetings but no direct challenge has been allowed that would put her in a position of explaining her vacillating views on such important topics.

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