Blogger creates freedom

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Raúl Castro lost the perfect opportunity to let the world know that his government is slightly less clumsy and repressive than his brother Fidel's.

Foreign ministries and the most important communications media had fixed their eyes on the ''new'' president. The reason was simple: Would he allow Yoani Sánchez, a young Cuban blogger, a professional philologist on whom the Spanish newspaper El País had bestowed the Ortega y Gasset Award for online commentary, to travel to Madrid and receive the prize?

Instead, exiled essayist Ernesto Hernández Busto had to accept it, reading a moving letter he directed to his friend, immobilized in Havana. Before the ceremony, Sánchez, whose very popular blog Generation Y gets millions of hits, had been selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people today.

Sánchez has lucidly explained the reasons for her success. She has created a small space of freedom in a society asphyxiated by unanimity. In her blog, www.desdecuba.com -- without bitterness but also without fear -- she frequently writes her observations about the Cuban reality. Literally thousands of people -- mostly abroad, because the Internet is barred to the great majority of Cubans -- read, refute, support or comment on what she has written on the Web.

Sánchez is demonstrating what should be obvious to all Cubans, Raúl Castro and his acolytes included: that every society is inevitably diverse, and that the multiplicity of opinions that emerge from that plural reality is what gradually improves the living conditions of the whole.

The freedom to gain information, to interpret reality and to dissent is not a luxury, but a tool to correct mistakes, denounce abuses and, sure, to replace those responsible for the noxious behavior.

The iconography of freedom, which is usually mistaken for a picture of the republic, shows a beautiful and fierce woman, sometimes bare-breasted and wearing a Phrygian cap. But that romantic image conceals a transcendental fact: The exercise of freedom is the essential feature of humankind.

Freedom is making individual decisions without any coercion other than one's sense of responsibility and the fair and impartial standards determined by society. The more free decisions are made by individuals, the greater the emotional felicity they will reach and the greater progress their societies will achieve.

The existence of total correspondence between collective prosperity and individual freedom is not casual. The world's 30 wealthiest countries are those whose people make decisions freely and define and seek their own objectives without major interference from the state.

In Cuba, people cannot decide where they wish to live, travel or work, how they want to spend their money, what they choose to read or what ideas seem to them brilliant or unwise. In Cuba, the government has decided what is the correct vision of reality -- from the war in Iraq to the poverty in Haiti to the production of ethanol -- and any discrepancy becomes ``deviationism.''

In Cuba, you cannot judge the past from a different perspective, because that's ''revisionism;'' and it is dangerous to dare foresee a future different from the one predicted by the mandarins of the sect. You walk into the minefield of ''ideological treason.'' In Cuba, entrepreneurial people cannot create a lucrative economic activity, lest they are charged with exploitation, and cannot even express their wish to emigrate, lest they are considered to be ``enemies of the motherland.''

In Cuba, the kidnapping of individual freedoms is such that the tenants of this poor island don't even have the right to make decisions about the intimate subject of affection. They are barred from openly loving people who are discontented with the regime; they may not have contact with them without suffering harm. And if they have the misfortune of falling in love with a foreigner (except for the children of the big bosses), an awful, bureaucratic Via Crucis begins.

When people say Cuba needs reforms, what they really mean is that Cubans need freedom. Freedom to own property, to communicate ideas, to move, to start businesses, to come together in accordance with their ideals and interests. Freedom, in sum, to make their own decisions and regain control over their own lives. From the pope to the last Cuban, half the world is waiting for those profound changes. Sánchez, who by herself already has made a small change, gave an opportunity to Raúl Castro to show that he is moving in the right direction. Foolishly, he chucked it away.

May 14, 2008

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