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Who is Yoani Sánchez?

With the title Yoani Sánchez: Blogger or mercenary?, Brazilian journalist Altamiro Borges published a characterization of the awarded blogger which joins the information that Brazilian alternatives sites have been publishing about this mediatic person.
As complement to the work by Altamiro, who presides over the Center for Studies of the Alternative Barão de Itararé in the city of Sao Paulo and author of A ditadura da mídia, among others, and other Brazilian journalists, La pupila insomne, has elaborated this dossier.

• Employee of the US Interests Section in Havana

• Yoanis Sánchez (YS) meets frequently with and receives information from the US Interests Section (SINA) in Havana.

Besides the photographs and videos the Cuban media has documented, Wikileaks published some information listing, since 2008, meetings by Yoanis Sánchez with SINAS´s officials in Havana.
At least 11 uncensored cables, issued by Washington´s office in Havana, show references to meetings with the blogger and the exchange of information between YS and that mission´s diplomats[1].
- SINA worked together with YS and schemed a false interview to Barack Obama.
According to a cable issued by SINA on August 28, 2009, the answers to the “interview” were written by officers from the US Interests Section in Havana. Four months later, the text returned to the diplomatic mission from the White House , with a high percent of coincidence between the answers and the original version, including,  almost exactly, the same introduction  in which Obama would congratulate Sánchez for the University of Columbia´s María Moors Cabot Awards.
The August 28th cable also had the questions the “journalist” would send to the Cuban President Raúl Castro, which she hadn´t done by that time[2].
-US diplomacy promotes and manages blogger Yoani Sanchez as a credible alternative to the traditional dissidence.
Wikileaks revealed that the Chief of the US Interests Section, Jonathan Farrar, wrote to the Department of State, on April 9, 2009, “We believe it is the younger generation of "non-traditional dissidents, like Yoani Sánchez, that is likely to have a greater long term impact on post-Castro Cuba. In that same cable, Farrar advised the Department of State to concentrate efforts in this dissident and to give her more support. [3]  
- Yoani Sanchez´discourse is in concordance with Washington policy  to Cuba, and she has openly admitted this subordination:
“The United States wants a change of government in Cuba, but that’s also what I want.”. (Declarations to Salim Lamrani, published by Rebelion, April 15, 2010, in two parts).
-Yoani Sánchez image is continuously oversized by the State Department, institution that directs 20 million dollars annually to the subversion in Cuba and privileges the use of the new technologies and the creation of leaders of the social networks.
The Secretary of State has directly refered to Yoani Sánchez at least once in her speeches every year, since 2009 to 2011. On November 9, 2009, her office issued an statement following a false “assault” on Cuban bloggers; on day May 3, 2010, Clinton praised her during a recognition to the World Press Freedom  Day; and, in March, 2011, Clinton homaged her during the 2011 International Women of Courage Awards.
However, none of the journalists and bloggers  registered by the Barometer 2012 of Reporters without Borders (RSF) is Cuban.

PRESS FREEDOM BAROMETER 2012

The Barometer 2012 of Reporters without Borders relates the physical attacks, assasination, and imprisonment of journalists,  the attacks against press offices, censorship mechanisms and confiscation of newspapers”, according to the international organization headquartered in Paris, which hasn´t been  indulgent with Cuba historically.
RSF Press Freedom Barometer 2012, which is updated annually, identifies 306 journalists and cyber-dissidents killed and imprisoned, to whom the Department of State has not paid the least attention. In fact, there is no reference to this individuals in the State Department´s official web site, but whoever makes a search to the name “Yoani Sánchez”, will find a list of 11 reports and statements, since 2008 up to the present, issued by that institution[4] .
2. - False leader:
-According to a survey by SINA and revealed by Wikileaks, Yoani Sánchez is only known to 2% of those surveyed.  According to the survey, the best known opponent in the Island is Luis Posada Carriles. [5]
- Blog Generación Y, the blogger´s most important means of expression has no impact on the Cuban audience.
The Blog is not censored in Cuba and, nevertheless, the traffic from the Island is insignificant, according to specialized analytics web sites like Alexa.com. See the countries with more access to the blog (Rank means the place the blog has in each of the countries, according to local user´s traffic):

Countries with more Access to Generación Y, according to Alexa.com
-Her blog is not an international reference to consult issues related to Cuba, despite the huge technical resources,  the promotional machinery and the 21 languages versions this blog has.
See a traffic comparison, according to Alexa.com, between blog Generación Y, Cubadebate and Juventud Rebelde, the most visited daily journals in the Island. Generación Y is in blue.

Another comparison: according to Alexa, the blog has the 99,444 place in the world. Alexa is the most trusted system on the Internet to know the ranking of the web and it registers the traffic behavior of more than 5 million web sites indexed by Google. It assesses the primary dominium, in this case desdecuba.com.

To have an idea of the significance this number has: journal  O Povo ´s web site, from Fortaleza, has the 14 043 place. The gap between one and other is huge, no only in the position, but in the resources they receive. [6]
3.- False expert and False freedom fighter
-Her ignorance on Cuban history and reality is proverbial.
Her cyber-bestiary is extense. We reproduce some of the phrases from the interview granted to Salim Lamrani:

• (The United States Cuban Adjustment Act is not an interference because) there are strong relations. Baseball is played both in Cuba and in the United States.

• Privatize? No, I don’t like that term, because it has pejorative connotation, but put them in the hands of private people, yes.
• I would not say they (Miami-based fundamentalist lobby), are enemies of the homeland.
• I thought that with all I learned in Switzerland I could change things when I returned to Cuba.
• These persons who are in favor of the economic sanctions are not anti-Cuba people. Just think that they are defending Cuba according to their own criteria.
• (The Cuban five prisoners in the United States) it’s not an issue the population is interested in. It’s political propaganda.
• (The case of terrorist Luís Posada Carriles) it’s a political issue people are not interested in. It’s a smokescreen.
• (The Cuban five prisoners in the United States) the Cuban government says they were not carrying out activities of espionage but that they had infiltrated Cuban groups to prevent terrorist acts. But the Cuban government has always said those groups were linked to Washington
•  Lamrani says there was anUS  invasión against Cuba) When?
• The regimen (of Batista that killed 20 000 Cubans) was a dictatorship but there was a plural and open freedom of the press.
• Cuba is a sui generis island. We can create a sui generis capitalism.

In relation to these confessions by Yoani Sánchez to Lamrani, Ignacio Echeverría, one of the most important literary critics in Spain and the person behind Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, wrote in the daily journal Público:
(a journalist) outrageously inconsistent, not capable of resisting the brutal flood of rigorous questions and acussations, direct or not, by Lamrani. The document, in a whole, is surprising and unconfortably instructive, because it is definitively devastating  the mix of intellectual naivety and  indigence Yoani manifests, her ideological weakness, her own vulnerability.  
-Her scarce leadership has to do also with her contempt against the Cuban people.
In an interview to El Nuevo Día, from Puerto Rico, she expressed: “80% of (the Cuban people) moves into the direction the wind blows because opportunism has deepened in the country”. [7]
4.- Compulsive liar
-She lied when she denounced to the international media that she had been beaten by the police in Havana.
International mass media reported that on November 6, 2009, Yoani Sánchez had been arrested together with three friends by “three hefty men” during an “afternoon stormed with beating,cries and insults”. On November 8, she welcomed journalists at her house to show the marks of the supposed attack, which she didn´t refer to until 48 hours after.
According to those reporting the meeting in the blogger house, Yoani Sánchez said she was “beaten and  pulled”, “beaten on the knuckles”, with a “new stream of beats”, “knees on her chest”, beating on her “kidneys and […] head”, her “hair pulled”, the face “going red due to pressure and painful body”, “beats that went on” and “all those bruises”. However, BBC reporter in Havana, Fernando Ravsberg, said that Sánchez “has no bruises, marks or scars”. [8]
Spain´s La Republica daily journal, published a video with testimonies of the physicians that provide assistance to Yoani Sánchez a day after the supposed beating, when she attended to request a document to prove she has been victim of violence. The three especialists assiting her refered that Yoani Sánchez did not show the least trace of violence, despite the fact that it was only 24 after the suppoused beating and that she has a pale skin that will hardly hide any mark or bruise caused by a violent attack.
You can watch the video with the physicians´  testimonies in Youtube.

-Yoani Sánchez lied when she said she´d interviewed Barack Obama and, of course, she hide how she sent the questionnaire.   
-Yoani Sánchez lies continously when she says she doesn´t have access to Internet.
She wrote a book on the use of WordPress to create blogs, which is imposible to conceive off line, unless another person with access to the Internet writes it for her. The book  WordPress: Un blog para hablar al mundo, presents itself as a user´s guide to this powerful communication tool” on the Internet.
She is probably the most active twitter and blogger in Cuba, according to the posts and messages she sends every day. She openet her blog in February, 2007, and her account in Twitter by the end of 2008; both are active. In the microblogging network, her posts  almost doubled in 2011in comparisson to 2010, as statistics of her account @yoanisanchez.historic performance show.
According to TweetStats, Yoani sents an average of 9,3 tweets a day. In 2011, she had an average of 400 Tweets per month:
Historic use of Twitter by @yoanisanchez, according to Tweetstats.com:

She uses diverse platforms and applications to sent Twitter, and she frequently posts videos and photographs in the social networks and in her own blog. To do this, she needs Internet navigation or a telephone with international roaming service that includes navigation in the web. This graphic showing the applications used by Yoani Sánchez to acces Twitter, proves she uses diverse platforms, not only the telephone lines:

Platforms used by Yoani Sánchez to access Twitter, according to TweetStats.com.

The interface most used by Yoani Sánchez to send Twitter messages is ping.fm. This application publishes simultaneously a message in diverse social networks, should the user configures it to do so. It can be accessed from a cell phone but this  should have navigation service. [9]

-Yoani Sánchez lies when she protrays herself as a victim.

Her natural state is to lament. To above mentioned examples, it can be added up her continuous requests to recharge her cell phone or her descriptions of Cuba´s daily life, that, according to herself, she suffers too.  However, her public incomes say something differet. The awards and publications have generated incomes beyond the 200,000 dollars in the last three years, which allows her to pay for, with no difficulty,  those luxuries the 99% of the Cuban and Latin American people can´t afford and, also, the high expenses in text  messaging, phone calls and Internet service.

Only in SMS (messages by cell phone) to Twitter from Cuba, Yoani Sánchez pays around 400 CUCs (equivalent to the US dollar) each month. Each message costs 1 CUC.

-She lies about her blog´s statistics

In the interview to Salim Lamrani, she says: “My blog has 10 million visits monthly. It is a cyclone”.

This has been repeated by her in other interviews. The number is fake. Nielsen, the most prestigious audience statistics enterprise in the United States, registered the traffic of the most important US media on the Internet in March, 2009. Only USAToday, CBS News, Washington Post, and BBC had a traffic closed to 10 million users each month [10],   and all of them are positioned within the first 400 internationally, according to Alexa. As a result, it is impossible that Generación Y has a traffic of 10 million users every month, having the 99, 444 place.   

Statistics offered by Nielsen's online audience

An addtional detail. When she talked to Salim Lamrani in April, 2010, the Cuban digital journal Cubadebate published a graphic refuting the data provided by the blogger related to the traffic to Generación Y. At that moment, her blog was in place 73  236, right now it´s 99 444. The traffic has plummeted. Her lie is more evident now:

Graphic published by Cubadebate in April, 2010.

-Yoani Sánchez lies to her sources and manipulates them:
In February, 209, she used Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús Church in Santiago de Cuba province to make politic proselitism. At the end of the mass, she met in an office inside the priest´s house, with young parishioners and Polish “tourists” “to dialogue”  on the possible use of Internet in actions against the Cuban government. In this video, the Young parishioners that participated in the conversation, expressed their stubborness for this unusual political debate inside the church:

In October 2009, she interviewed a group of children in the town of Taguayabón, Camajuaní, Villa Clara province, and published a post in her blog where she presented them as example of the critical expression to the Cuban government, even in children and adolescents. The parents denounced the manipulation to the authorities. The  children themselves offered their testimonies on the real facts. You can watch the video in Daily Motion:
http://www.dailymotion.com/videoxawnfc
-Yoani Sánchez deliberatelly fakes the Cuban reality, portraying an apocalyptic  vision that  the international press never contrasts to other sources.
This is also another of the reasons why she is not credible to the Cuban audience,who lives surrounded by problems, but do not recognize this speech:
Cuba is “a inmense prison with ideological walls”, a “leaky boat on the verge of sinking”. A place were "beings from the shadows, like vampires, feed on our human happiness and inoculate us with fear by means of blows, threats, blackmail". (Posted in blog Generación Y, November 18, 2 and 12, 2009, respectively)
A Island with “people waiting, with a stick or a knife under the bed for a day they can use them. Entrenched hatred against those who betrayed them, denied them a better job, or made sure their youngest child couldn't study at the university. There are so many waiting for possible chaos to give them the time necessary for revenge, that one would wish not to have been born in this age, when one can only be a victim or victimizer, when so many yearn for the night of the long knives”. (Posted in Generación Y, April 25, 2009)
Notes
[1] See  http://cablesearch.org/

1. MEDIA REACTION: U.S., INDIA-PAKISTAN, SYRIA-IRAN, CUBA, EU, 26th Feb 2010 from Embassy Berlin · #10BERLIN223
2. CUBAN OPPOSITION SHOCKED AND ENERGIZED BY DEATH OF 26th Feb 2010 from US Interests Section Havana · #10HAVANA110
3. CUBA BUTTONED DOWN FOLLOWING DEATH OF 24th Feb 2010 from US Interests Section Havana · #10HAVANA107
4. STRIDENT GOC PROTEST OF USINT AND OTHER MISSIONS, OBSERVATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS DAY EVENTS 14th Dec 2009 from US Interests Section Havana · #09HAVANA739 · CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN OO
5. CUBA UNLEASHES MOB ON BLOGGERS 23rd Nov 2009 from US Interests Section Havana · #09HAVANA704 · CONFIDENTIAL PP
6. HUNGARY: COUNTRY REVIEW ON RELATIONS WITH CUBA 20th Nov 2009 from Embassy Budapest · #09BUDAPEST837 · CONFIDENTIAL RR ·
7. BLOGGER THRILLED WITH POTUS RESPONSE TO HER Q&AS 18th Nov 2009 from US Interests Section Havana · #09HAVANA695 · CONFIDENTIAL PP
8. CUBA DENOUNCES U.S. INTERFERNCE IN BLOGGER CASE 12th Nov 2009 from US Interests Section Havana · #09HAVANA689
9. BLOGGERS BEATEN BUT NOT DETERRED 10th Nov 2009 from US Interests Section Havana · #09HAVANA684 ·
10. A SPLENDID LITTLE VISIT, FOR CUBA 21st Oct 2009 from US Interests Section Havana · #09HAVANA639
11. QUESTIONS FROM YOANI SANCHEZ TO POTUS 28th Aug 2009 from US Interests Section Havana · #09HAVANA527 ·

[2] See:

• 09HAVANA527: Questions (and answers written by SINA from Yoani Sánchez to Obama (PDF,  98Kb)
• 09HAVANA695: Blogger gets emotional for Obama´s answers. 
• Las “respuestas de Obama”, en inglés (PDF, 582 Kb )

[3] Jonathan D. Farrar, «The U.S. and the Role of the Opposition in Cuba», United States Interests Section, 9 de abril de 2009, cable 09HAVANA221.http://213.251.145.96/cable/2009/04/09HAVANA221.html
[4] http://search.state.gov/search (Search for “yoani sánchez”)
[5] Cable issued on June 9, 2008 by SINA http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/07/08HAVANA542.html
[6] Watch these statistics at: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/desdecuba.com#
[7] Original interview in: http://www.elnuevodia.com/cubalasultimasimagenesdelnaufragio…-1069420.html
[8] See article in  http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/america_latina/2009/11/091109_2218_cuba_yoani_rb.shtml
[9] This data is public and available at http://tweetstats.com/status/yoanisanchez
[10] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/msnbc-and-cnn-top-global-news-sites-in-march/
(Cubaminrex)

 

 

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