U. of Columbia Regrets Yoani Sanchez Veto
HAVANA TIMES, Oct. 14 – The U.S. University of Columbia regretted that the Cuban government did not grant an exit permit to blogger Yoani Sánchez, who should have received during a ceremony in New York a mention of the Maria Moors Cabot prizes from that centre of higher learning.
The dean of the School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann, said that the island’s authorities should consider the 34-year-old philologist’s blog as a sign that Cuban young people are ready to take Cuba toward a better future, reported IPS.
Sanchez is Cuba’s most well known blogger internationally. She gained considerable fame for her criticisms of the Cuban government through acrid portrails of daily life on the island. Her site, Generation Y, is blocked on the island, even for the small percentage of the population that has Internet.
The US university which invited Yoani Sanchez was not the “University of Columbia” but Columbia University, one of the most prestigious such institutions in the United States. My mother graduated from there, though its prestige doesn’t derive from my mother’s time there.
Washington decides which Cubans are permitted to enter the United State. Today the US being visited by the Cuban punk singer Gorki Aquila, who is spending his time telling people in the US everything he thinks is wrong with the island. If Cubans and people from the US could travel freely between the two countries,
this would be less of an issue.
Then there’s the Cuban Adjustment Act, under which any Cuban who touches US soil is permitted to remain in the United States. This is a further reason why the Cuban government believes it has the right to decide which of its citizens (and resident foreigners, too), may travel outside of the island.
Normal relations with the US would solve many problems.
This is just another cheap, anti-Cuba propaganda by Mr Lee Bollinger, President Columbia University, who in September 2007, invited Mahmoud Ahminadinejad, President of Iran, to a Town Hall meeting at this school of higher education, hoping to give him a “lesson” in democracy, in which every one in attendance was free to ask everything.
Much to their surprise the invitation was accepted by the Iranian President and as he was introducted and took his seat at the podium, Mr Bollinger irrumpted on the seen and instead of the protocolar welcoming accorded to anyone of his political stature, he burst into a revolting tirade of offenses and inuendos that shocked the world of academia. Never before had anyone been invited to give a conference treated in such a rude, disrespectful manner, by this born-again bastion of liberty of free speech for Yoani, a man-made, ugly, instrument of the US media.
I have little sympathy. The US denies visas to the wives of the Cuban Five, denying them visitation with their families. We’ve done this for more than 10 years. We denied a Cuban musician permission to appear at Pete Seeger’s Birthday Party this past summer. The NY Orchestra had to cancel their palnned trip – No visas for the people who put up the money for the trip.
And of course, it is our Government that forbids us the privilege of traveling to Cuba for any reason unless we have family there.
It is often difficult to tell which country is the most oppressed, but there are many more US citizens denied travel rights then there are Cubans. We outnumber them about 300 million to 11,000,000.