October 18, 2009

Yoani Sánchez: Virtually Outspoken in Cuba

By LARRY ROHTER

Yoani Sánchez is a 34-year-old Cuban writer, editor and linguistics scholar who last week became the first blogger to win one of the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes given by Columbia University for journalism that advances inter-American understanding. Her two-year-old blog, filled with personal observations and sardonic social commentary from Havana, is called Generación Y; it now gets more than 14 million page views a month, routinely inspires thousands of comments and can be read in an English version. But it circulates far more freely outside Cuba than within, where the Castro dictatorship regards it as counter-revolutionary.

Internet access is tightly limited in Cuba, and Ms. Sánchez has often had to play cat-and-mouse with the authorities to make her writings available, either inside Cuba or outside of it. And when the Cabot awards were announced, she was denied an exit visa to travel to New York to receive hers, a process she chronicled on her blog.

But she made a video recording from a Havana park regretting the restrictions on her movements and managed to transmit them out of Cuba; they were posted on her site and played at the award ceremonies Wednesday night.

“We Cubans are like small children,” she explained in the message, “who need Father’s permission to leave the house.”

Here is an excerpt, translated by The New York Times, from one of Ms. Sanchez’s posts this month, titled “The Architecture of Urgency.” Like much of her work, which she describes as an “exorcism” or “therapy” for her frustration, its bleak poetry does not focus overtly on politics, but instead conveys the texture of daily life in a crumbling totalitarian system:

On an island where acquiring cement, cinderblocks or steel is comparable to obtaining a bit of lunar dust, destroying in order to build has become a common practice. There are specialists in removing bricks of clay intact from the walls in which they have been embedded for 80 years; experts in disengaging blue ceramic tiles from demolished mansions; and skillful “deconstructors” who extract metal beams from heaps of rubble. They use what they have recovered to create their own living space, this in a country where no one can legally buy a house. The main “quarries” where they obtain their material are houses that have collapsed or workplaces that the state’s inactivity has left abandoned for many years. They fall upon these with an efficiency in their plunder that one would wish to see in the lethargic bricklayers working for a salary.

Some of these skillful recyclers have died when a roof collapses or when a wall too riddled with holes at its base falls. But sometimes luck smiles on them, and they find a toilet without cracks or an electrical outlet that the owners of the demolished house could not — in their haste — take with them. A kilometer from the looting site, a small house of tin and zinc slowly begins to change. They have added the tile pavement from a building that collapsed at the corner of Neptuno and Aguila, a piece of the exterior grating from an abandoned mansion on Linea Street and even a stained-glass window plucked from a convent in the old part of Havana. Within this home that is the fruit of looting, a family — equally ravaged by life — dreams of the next factory to be dismantled and carried away on their shoulders.

Accompanying the post is a video in which a 40-year-old Cuban poet and performance artist, Amaury Pacheco, recites one of his works, “Economic Plan,” as images of buildings being looted and demolished flash by on the screen. Mixing street slang, mordant humor and official jargon, he mimics the Castro brothers delivering one of their rambling speeches extolling the achievements of the revolution. Because much of the word usage is idiosyncratic, there could be differing translations; here is one:

Economy! We have fulfilled the annual plan:
1,100 street hustlers; 2,000 young prostitutes; 8,000 opportunists.
Plus, 300 non-mentally disabled and the syndrome of mediocrity.
Economy! In times of a Havana that is unrecognizable,
By sweeping the house, you cleanse the economy.
Strong legs for the rocky path,
Legs that are only for the percentages of economic shame.
Shameful economy! Economy of shame! Economy of shame!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview