Yoani María Sánchez Cordero

Cuban philologist and journalist, resident in Havana, who has achieved worldwide notoriety for her blog Generación Y, from which she makes a critical description of the reality of her country. Generación Y is the Cuban blog with the most followers: translated into 17 languages by a team of volunteers, and has reached more than 14 million accesses per month and inspires thousands of comments.

She and her personal page have been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions: the Spanish newspaper El País granted her in 2008 the Ortega y Gasset Prize for journalism with 15,000 euros, in the digital journalism category; Time magazine selected her in 2008 among the 100 most influential people in the world; Generación Y was chosen by Time and the American network CNN among the 25 best blogs in the world; likewise, Generación Y received the jury prize for best blog in The BOBs competition of Deutsche Welle; furthermore, she was the first blogger to win one of the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot journalism awards, in 2009.

Yoani argues that Cuba needs certain political and economic changes so that its citizens can have greater material well-being and achieve personal fulfillment. She also stands out for her activity in promoting the alternative Cuban blogosphere.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said about her blog:
Your blog offers the world a particular window into the realities of everyday life in Cuba. It is revealing that the Internet has offered you and other brave Cuban bloggers such a free means of expression, and I applaud these collective efforts to encourage your compatriots to express themselves through technology.

Yoani was born in the municipality of Centro Habana in the city of Havana, being one of two daughters of William Sánchez and María Eumelia Cordero. She recounts in her blog that her father worked in the state railroads, as her grandfather had done previously, first as a worker and later as an engineer; when Cuba's railroad system entered into crisis after the collapse of communism in Europe, William Sánchez found himself without work like many of his colleagues and devoted himself to repairing bicycles.

She attended school and completed her high school education in Centro Habana. She completed two courses in the specialty "Spanish-Literature" at the Pedagogical Institute. It was in the early 1990s when she met Reinaldo Escobar, a journalist 28 years her senior and with whom she would go on to share her life. In 1995 they had their first son, Teo.

After motherhood she enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and Letters where she studied the specialty of Hispanic Philology, specializing in contemporary Latin American literature.

In 2000 she graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in Philology, after presenting a controversial thesis titled Words Under Pressure. A Study of the Literature of Dictatorship in Latin America. In September 2000 she obtained a job at Editorial Gente Nueva, dedicated to children's literature. These were difficult years for the Cuban economy, coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of subsidies to Cuba, which had accounted for approximately 80% of Cuba's international trade for almost three decades. After a short period of time at the publishing house, she requested leave and devoted herself to teaching Spanish to German tourists.

In 2002 she decided to leave Cuba for economic reasons, and emigrated to Switzerland, where she discovered computing as a profession and means of livelihood. In an entry on her page titled "I Came and Stayed," she explains that she returned to the island citing family reasons in the summer of 2004; but she had lost her right to return for having been outside the country for more than eleven months without special permission. To avoid being forced to board a plane back to Switzerland, she destroyed her passport, which allowed her to resettle in Havana. That same year she founded, together with other colleagues, the magazine Consenso and three years later she worked as a webmaster, writer and editorialist for the portal Desde Cuba. In April 2007 she began there with her own blog, Generación Y.

In addition to maintaining her personal page, Yoani collaborates with The Huffington Post, an online newspaper and blog aggregator classified by Technorati as the most linked blog on the Internet.

Between February 23 and 24, 2008, Havana received a large number of journalists from around the world to report on the election of a new Cuban president. Many of these journalists took the opportunity to interview Yoani Sánchez, resulting in reports about her in major media outlets, such as The New York Times, Die Zeit, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and Reporters Without Borders, as well as German and Spanish television.

After this, access to the blog from Cuba was blocked. From then on she defined herself as a "blind blogger," being no longer able to view her own blog. The maintenance of her page was possible, according to her account, thanks to the collaboration of people located outside Cuba to whom she sent her posts, using email or dictating them by phone.

Fidel Castro described Yoani in the prologue of the book Fidel, Bolivia and More as "a young Cuban woman who carries out subversive work and neocolonial press activities of the old Spanish metropolis that rewards her."

Fidel Castro signed on June 4, 2008 the prologue of the book Fidel, Bolivia and More, which he received as a gift from Evo Morales, President of Bolivia. In that prologue, Castro quoted several phrases used by Yoani in an interview with the Mexican news agency Notimex. He referred to her as "a young Cuban woman" without using her name, accusing her of "carrying out subversive work and neocolonial press activities of the old Spanish metropolis that rewards her," alluding to the Ortega y Gasset Prize for digital journalism that had been granted to her by the newspaper El País.

In 2009 Yoani sent to U.S. President Barack Obama a list of seven questions aimed at facilitating the overcoming of the conflict between Cuba and the United States. Among them was included the question of whether Obama would be willing to visit Cuba. In November of that same year, she received a response from Obama. Obama's complete response was published in Generación Y.

The interview was reflected on the official page of the U.S. State Department, where there was the unique case that they placed links to Generación Y, to refer to her questions and Obama's answers.

In November 2010, through the leaking of U.S. diplomatic documents carried out by the WikiLeaks organization, it was revealed that a U.S. diplomatic cable originating in Havana and dated April 2009 indicated that "it is the young generation of 'nontraditional dissidents,' such as Yoanny Sanchez (sic), who will most likely have the greatest impact in the long term on post-Castro Cuba." Later, two other confidential diplomatic cables with the same origin were revealed. The first, dated September 2009, reports a visit by State Department official Bisa Williams to Yoani's home, where she advocates for the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, and the second, from January 2010, discusses her relevance in a section dedicated to bloggers.

The Government of Cuba and its media outlets have frequently accused Yoani of being a mercenary paid by the United States regime or by media groups such as the PRISA Group, of Spain.

Strongly hostile opinions against her can be found in Cuban blogs and news media, and she has been accused in them, among other things, of: inciting violence; being a mercenary, denigrating the Cuban revolution and encouraging internal subversion; insulting Cuba and sending messages designed under the principles of the Pentagon's cyber warfare; and it has also been said that her server also hosts ultra-right wing and neo-Nazi websites.

The newspaper Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban government, has accused her of being a "media instrument" of the PRISA Group, in addition to questioning the awards that have been granted to her abroad.

Her page is written from Cuba but, according to the Western press, its access on the island is blocked. Several government-supported blogs have also emerged, expressing varied perspectives on life in Cuba; as a tacit acknowledgment of the importance of this new medium, this phenomenon has grown since Raúl Castro took power. From the government's perspective, Yoani's work shows both the risks and the rewards of allowing broader access to the Internet; on the one hand, the availability of access for the population to the new medium can facilitate the emergence of a greater number of bloggers critical of the government; on the other hand, it is less likely that a greater number of critical voices will reach the degree of international attention and personal scrutiny that her case has generated.

Awards and Mentions
2008 Spain El País Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism,[108] (€15,000)
2008 Spain El País 100 Most Important Spanish Americans in 2008[109]
2008 United States Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People in the World 2008[110]
2008 United States Foreign Policy 10 Most Influential Intellectuals of Latin America in 2008[111]
2008 Mexico Gatopardo The 10 Most Important Figures of 2008[112]
2008 Germany Deutsche Welle The BOBs[113]
2009 United States Time Magazine / CNN 25 Best Blogs of 2009[6]
2009 Switzerland World Economic Forum Global Young Leaders Award[114] [115]
2009 United States Columbia University Maria Moors Cabot Prize[116]
2009 United States Panamerican Foundation for Development Heroes of the Hemisphere Prize 2009[117]
2009 Argentina International Foundation of Young Leaders Young Leaders Prize 2009[118]
2010 Argentina Editorial Perfil International Freedom of Expression Prize[119]
2010 Denmark CEPOS (Danish Centre for Independent Research) CEPOS Freedom Prize,[120] (300,000 Danish crowns, approximately €40,000)
2010 Netherlands Prince Claus Foundation for Culture and Development Prince Claus Prize for Journalism,[121] [122] (€25,000)
2010 Spain Public University of Navarre, Jaime Brunet Foundation International Jaime Brunet Prize,[123] (€36,000)

Books Written by Yoani
Yoani Sánchez is the author of the book Cuba Libre. Living and Writing in Havana which has been published in Argentina by Marea editorial and translated into English, French, German, Italian and Polish. It is a selection of texts from her blog. The Brazilian publisher Contexto has published in Portuguese a different selection of texts with the title De Cuba com carinho.

Books About Yoani
* Yoani Sánchez by Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, and Susan F. Marseken.
* Per conoscere Yoani Sánchez by Gordiano Lupi.