Worldfocus

The Cuban government has denied Yoani Sanchez permission to travel to the United States. Sanchez is a blogger famous for openly criticizing the Cuban government’s communist system. She was supposed to travel to New York yesterday to receive the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University, the oldest international award in journalism.

Sanchez and her husband used the blog, Generation Y, to provide searing criticism of everyday life in Cuba. She started the blog in 2007, and it receives more than one million hits every month. Here is one of her entries:

“History Ignored,” from October 9th:

“History cannot be ignored, that is why it is so hard to understand that a process accused of betraying revolutionary ideals may be worthy of being on the list of the ones who “kept the banner of socialism aloft”.

“History cannot be ignored. What kind of merit does an army have, other than that of imitating Hitler, in marching at 115 goose steps per minute? How funny is it for a civilian population to conduct itself like a beehive, emulating, along its armed compatriots, the ability to achieve a high level of mass organization?”