Obama backs Yoani Sanchez
At her blog Generation Y, the brave Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez has posted President Obama’s responses to seven questions she submitted to him.
Obama prefaced his answers as follows:
Thank you for this opportunity to exchange views with you and your readers in Cuba and around the world and congratulations on receiving the Maria Moore Cabot Prize award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for coverage of Latin America that furthers inter-American understanding. You richly deserve the award. I was disappointed you were denied the ability to travel to receive the award in person.
Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely, and I applaud your collective efforts to empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology. The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals.
The most positive result of this will be to raise Yoani’s profile and make it harder for the Cuban regime to silence her– harder, but unfortunately not impossible.
Yoani has also submitted six questions to Raúl Castro, president of Cuba. We eagerly await his response.
(Via The Lede and Lerterland.)
Comments
| 21 November 2009, 7:24 pm |
This more than makes up for him ignoring the Dalai Lama in China and failing to come up with a plan on Afghanistan. Well done BHO!
| 21 November 2009, 8:04 pm |
in before Zin and Exile say this proves that she’s in the pay of the Americans and should be jailed
| 21 November 2009, 8:27 pm |
“This more than makes up for him ignoring the Dalai Lama in China and failing to come up with a plan on Afghanistan.”
No it doesn’t. He is just too cowardly to take on the Chinese.
As for Afghanistan, British soldiers are dying whilst he works out which decision wont damage his approval ratings.
The man is a pathetic coward and many of us predicted this indecision.
| 21 November 2009, 9:50 pm |
Nope, the fact that I don’t believe a word of what the scabby wee slag says doesn’t mean that I think that she should be jailed for her words. I would just prefer it if she told the truth, that’s all.
| 21 November 2009, 9:54 pm |
What truth, Exile? That Cuba has been a paradise of freedom and democracy for the last 50 years? Or that you are in contact with shape-shifting lizards?
| 21 November 2009, 9:57 pm |
I see that according to his typically self-important blog, Exile considers himself an anti-Imperialist with the added bonus of healthy cynicism and the wedding tackle of a donkey.
On that evidence, I tend to the second of the two alternatives above – the shape-shifting lizards.
| 21 November 2009, 10:10 pm |
Cuba is the country to which I would move if I really did want a government that persecuted those who engaged in homosexual acts.
Now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade, which only attracts sympathy to this regime that does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain’s impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.
He has already shown his indifference towards the Israel Lobby that so damages American (and Israeli) interests. So he should have no problem against the anti-American activities of vastly less numerous Cuban pretend-exiles, who are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like, and who, far from being conservative, merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.
| 21 November 2009, 10:16 pm |
Have any pictures surfaced of her supposed beating a couple of weeks ago?
No?
*shock*
| 21 November 2009, 11:44 pm |
So he should have no problem against the anti-American activities of vastly less numerous Cuban pretend-exiles, who are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like, and who, far from being conservative, merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.
David Lindsey, I totally agree with you and Exile that it’s better that Cuba be a den and brothel for the middle class and lower middle class.
| 22 November 2009, 12:10 am |
Cuba’s been fine for the past half century. You do your bastard hours, you get your social wage in return and you don’t have some snot gobbling git with a National Front haircut and a cheap suit giving out his old buck.
| 22 November 2009, 1:04 am |
RE: Cuba’s been fine for the past half century.
I guess all those cubans who regularly risk their lives to flee are just too dumb to agree with you, eh?
| 22 November 2009, 1:32 am |
Cuba is the country to which I would move if I really did want a government that persecuted those who engaged in homosexual acts
Er, no. Homosexuality has been legal since 1979, gay marriage is about to put on the statute book, and the president’s daughter led a gay pride march in Havana earlier this year.
| 22 November 2009, 1:39 am |
Rather like the Mexicans who cross the Rio Bravo to earn a buttie, I suppose. No bugger pretends that Cuba isn’t poor and made a lot poorer by the American blockade.
Zin is correct, David. La Rampa, the street that runs up from the promenade past the hotel Nacional is crawling with inverts and the police do nothing.
None of this has anything to do with this woman by the way. I am really curious to know why so many HP Saucers really believe every word she says when I and others have pointed out her porkies.
| 22 November 2009, 3:22 am |
The US gets thousands of migrants willing to cross deserts and oceans and work their asses off to get a better life. Mexico gets Exile. There is no justice in this world… i just hope Zin stays put in London.
| 22 November 2009, 8:51 am |
He has already shown his indifference towards the Israel Lobby that so damages American (and Israeli) interests.
On Planet Lindsay, eternally surrounded by thick clouds of hallucinogenic substances, the Israeli lobby should cease its efforts to damage real Israeli interests – which consist in the annihilation of Israel, something Lindsay dreams about every day as he visits yet another neo-Nazi website.
| 22 November 2009, 1:25 pm |
I think someone said elsewhere that Exile is the vilest commenter on these boards. I concur. Closely followed by Zin.
| 22 November 2009, 2:06 pm |
Zin’s job is to come here and find something trivial to ague with (i.e. anything David Lindsay says) and then leave without addressing the actual substance of the debate.
Exile is just a porn obsessed misogynist.
| 22 November 2009, 4:22 pm |
Not at all, otherwise why would I be mixed up with Mothers for Justice in giving grief to social work vermin? I have never treated any working class woman with anything other than respect; never treated any middle class whore with anything other than the contempt that her class deserves.
OK, what evidence do you have that this little slag is telling the truth? I caught her out over her lie about not having regular internet access, so why do you think that she tells the truth about anything?
A simple question that you cannot answer so you fall back on the old ad-hom stuff. Fine, because the case goes to the leftist side by default.
| 22 November 2009, 4:36 pm |
The US gets thousands of migrants willing to cross deserts and oceans and work their asses off to get a better life. Mexico gets Exile. There is no justice in this world…
Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States and so inhabited by Exile Ken.
| 22 November 2009, 7:59 pm |
Exile, “crawling with inverts”: Whatever do you mean and do you think the police should do something about La Rampa?
| 22 November 2009, 11:22 pm |
Exile is just a porn obsessed misogynist.
True, but I prefer to focus on his flaws.
| 22 November 2009, 11:24 pm |
Crawling in the sense of being full of ‘em, Hugh. You can’t walk up the street without some disgusting little bandit swishing by.
As to what the Cubans should do, that is an internal matter for them.
Thankfully it is only the one street. . .


Good on him. This will make it much harder for Castro’s goons to rough her up again.