Yoani Sanchez, Could Help Bring Down the Castro Regime With Her Award-Winning Cuban Blog

Courageous Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez (pictured above, frequently featured on Carpe Diem), whose regular posts on her blog Generation Y "offer punchy accounts of the day-to-day environment" in Cuba, can add two new awards to the many she has previously received:

1. The International Press Institute's (IPI) 60th World Press Freedom Hero:

“Sanchez’s tremendously important work provides a glimpse into what is otherwise a closed world,” said IPI Interim Director Alison Bethel McKenzie. “It is perhaps fitting that our 60th and final World Press Freedom Hero represents a future where the power of the internet can be harnessed to promote free speech. We are proud to know Yoani and to award this prestigious prize to her.”

The other IPI prize winning press heroes ("Symbols of courage in global journalism") are listed here.

2. The Prince Claus Award for Yoani's courageous efforts to raise "global awareness of daily Cuban realities through her blog, for her inspiring and courageous example in giving a voice to the silenced, and for demonstrating the immense impact internet communications technologies can have as tools for social change and development."

See these related posts:

1. CD post: "How Cuba's "Blogostroika," the Internet, and Social Media Could Bring Down the Castro Regime."

2. Enterprise Blog post: "Revolutionary Blogger and Freedom Fighter: Yoani Sanchez," where I concluded that:

"When the history of Cuba’s freedom movement is written, it’s likely that Yoani Sanchez will be recognized as a national hero and freedom fighter, the equivalent of Lech Walesa in Poland or Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic. Yoani Sanchez demonstrates that we should never underestimate the power of one courageous individual with a computer, a blog, and intermittent access to the Internet (Sanchez says she has not actually been able to see her own blog since 2007), or the individual’s power to change the world in the Information Age, especially with a message of freedom and individual liberty. Intellectual figures like Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of Yoani and her powerful message of individual freedom in one of the only remaining regimes of totalitarianism left in the world."

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