BLOGSHOT: Yoani

photo from Generación Y



Generación Y is a blogsite run by Yoani Sanchez that won Best Weblog in 2008. Yoani is a Cuban dissenter and she wants out and not dumped, in her own words, “in the corridors of those condemned to stay”. Yoani’s blog is read all over the world, by all those who care about Cuba, I included.

Generacion Y also perhaps stands for the Young Generation of Cubans, those born in the “post-revolution” 1970s and 1980s, with names starting in Y, or with Y wedged in between, such as Yanisleidi, Yoandri, Yusimí, Yuniesky and so on, and whose education is “marked by schools in the countryside, Russian cartoons, illegal emigration and frustration”.

Yoani is admired by many, but also censured, berated, not least of all in her own country. I have the impression that for speaking against her own country, or at least, the country as run by those in power, Yoani has been rewarded by the “free world”.

Amazing, is it not?

But come. Cuba probably doesn’t belong to Yoani or young people like Yoani. They may not want any of it, as things are, the way every one, young and old, with a green card or a Schengen visa would not want to have anything more to do with the Philippines. Maybe Yoani herself doesn’t think of Cuba as her country, perhaps the way I sometimes feel that the Philippines is a lost country to me, my compatriots in government and in the liberation movement an army of locusts, which makes me, I am aware, the lost cause. Right?

Maybe Yoani’s country is the Blogosphere, or West Germany (sorry, I’m stuck), the imperialist havens allied to the US, or all those corners and places who take well to her rebellion. Or maybe her country is just that little corner in the heart, in the vicinity of Carlos Bulosan’s America, and all things taken, Yoani is good as far as she could go, and like you and I, she is just questing for freedom, however that quest shows itself to her and wherever it will take her.

I grew up admiring Cuba, that small nation who had gumption enough to boot the most powerful nation in the world out of its shores, in the belief that it belongs only to itself and can take care of itself, and my, didn’t it withstand decades of economic embargo, cyclones, desertions. The free education and free medicines, which means a lot to me and those of my relatives here in the Philippines, for instance, who had to dig wild yams to survive dry spells and die from poisoning without seeing a doctor or a school flag, it seems to me, count for nothing now for young Cubans like Yoani. Which makes me cuss for the injustice of it, because… because what, because I would give up my fucking gadgets like oh this hand-me-down mobile phone and your Northface backpacks and sneakers and this discard laptop I am typing on and pints of ice cream and layers of chocolate cakes just to cut canes and hammer houses into place for the Cuban revolution?

I would have, years back, if my next to nil political resources allowed me to travel to Cuba. But it didn’t, so now, I join Yoani in the belief that talent and labors like mine have no room to thrive in islands lorded over by sterile cows and revolutionary stayovers. Or who knows what I did, if and when, I made it to Cuba years back and found out as Yoani did how indefensible things have become there, how worse off "communist cadres" are there compared to here, no wonder those who wanted to save their revolutionary asses chose to leave and make a life elsewhere?

I’m not saying I don’t want Yoani hanged. I think of her privileged enough to have been born in “post-revolutionary” Cuba, in the same way maybe that I think fucking privileged and look down on the young in my own country who think armed struggle does not go with ipods and Louis Vuitton bags and stiletto heels and precision-design toenails and regard me as stone-age feminist who cannot see that gender is fluid or that post-conflict transformation is as real an event as the 2010 presidential elections ergo worth involving in.

For sure, one didn’t have to go to Cuba to know about how “communists” and Party-ordained revolutionists don’t take to writers with their own minds. If revolutions out-of- power can have arrogance enough to reject smart alecs who think they know better than those actually doing the dirty job of running a revolution, how much more those in power like the one in Cuba, although if Yoani wants my opinion, I don’t think the Cuban communists are in power. I think they really are fucked up and at their knees, just as Filipino communists are as fucked up and at their knees these days or they would have not handed over some of their best cadres to the circus at the zoo called electoral politics.

This is no best of time, these are the glory days of commerce, or I would have not lived to see my pals up there globe-totting hacking it up with the biggies and signing their names up to the aid agencies leaving me to swallow my own vitriol. This is the march of capital the world over and wouldn’t we know it if what we said or did served the retail sites, offline or online.

Wouldn’t we know it if what we are doing were part of the problem, or part of the solution.

I hurt for Cuba, and can’t help but feel let down, betrayed maybe, by its failure to keep Yoani and the Y Generation to itself.

Would that Yoani trade places with me.