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Yoani Sánchez: a few cards short of a full deck November 11, 2009 By Machetera Untreated mental illness is never a lovely thing to gaze upon, so in the case of Yoani Sánchez, the self-proclaimed “blocked” Cuban blogger, it’s hard to fathom the cruelty of a U.S. State Department which in lieu of quietly suggesting psychological help for its client blogger, amplifies and repeats her ravings for the simple reason that they are so very helpful to the propaganda war against Cuba going on fifty years now. On Monday, November 9, the same State Department which remained stoically silent in the face of so many criminal assaults and murders carried out by its client putschists in Honduras over the past four months, moved itself to issue a statement in which it “strongly deplore the assault on bloggers Yoani Sanchez, Orlando Luis Pardo, and Claudia Cadelo.” Taking the Cuban government over its knee once again, it delivered a lecture about repression and violence, freedom and reconciliation. There are multiple problems with the State Department’s touching level of concern, though.
First, there’s no independent confirmation of the claims of the three itinerant bloggers that they were forced into a black Chinese car driven by state security and then beaten in order to not attend a seriously strange demonstration (Against violence? In Cuba? Come on…). And considering Yoani’s predilection for gobbling up Cuba’s scarce bandwidth in order to upload pictures and videos of herself, the lack of photographic evidence for the claimed beating is remarkable. The exhibitionist blogger who doesn’t flinch at dressing up as a clownish parody of a German(?) tourist in order to create a spectacle at an otherwise serious gathering of journalists and academics, is suddenly reticent, shy and withdrawn, privately nursing her self-reported wounds with the assistance of her local medical clinic. (Whose services, she naturally does not mention, were provided free of charge.)
When doubts are raised about the oddly dramatic nature of Yoani’s tale, she posts again – still no pictures – accusing the doubting Thomases in her case of engaging in a game of blame-the-victim. It’s a curious pathology. Whether Sánchez is a paranoid bipolar personality, or a bipolar personality with paranoid tendencies is something for Cuban mental health professionals to decide, but the evidence is becoming quite clear – the pronounced and repeated delusions of grandeur coupled with tall tales about persecution which are clearly designed for foreign consumption indicate a troubled young woman whose skewed perception of reality is being stoked, rather than calmed.
Her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, a washed-up ex-journalist with a trail of burned bridges within the Cuban dissident community, bears much of the blame, in my opinion. According to Yoani, she and Reinaldo returned to Cuba from a rather uncomfortable existence in Switzerland where due to his advanced age and inability to master a foreign language, his employment prospects were precisely the same as for any other immigrant in a similar situation – hard, menial, poorly paid. It was not exactly the kind of lifestyle either of them had in mind, and indeed it compares rather unfavorably with swanning around the Melia Cohiba hotel in Havana, carting brand new laptops and making hidden camera videos of themselves harassing the hired help while their assistant, Ernesto Hernández Busto, rattles the begging cup on their behalf in Barcelona. (Hernández Busto, a Cuban surviving in that costly city with no visible means of income has his own blog, Penúltimos Días, where he reprints Yoani’s posts, and collects “donations” in support of her efforts.)
For ages now, Yoani has been longing to be arrested, but her greatest sorrow is that she cannot and never will be arrested in Cuba for the reason she most desires – that of making a fool of herself. She knows very well that she can, however, be arrested for taking money from foreign interests in order to attack Cuba and this is where Hernández Busto’s help is invaluable; putting an extra level of distance between Yoani and her sponsors.
I’ve never considered it particularly productive to wonder about anyone’s possible CIA affiliation, because whether someone is or is not an agent is not the important question – what needs to be asked is whether the person’s activities are or are not useful to the Company. In Yoani’s and Reinaldo’s case, the answer is an indisputable yes. After Yoani’s performance at the Internet discussion sponsored by Temas magazine at Fresa y Chocolate in Havana last week, while Reinaldo was holding an impromptu press conference for the foreign press on the street, she immediately went forth to grant a loony interview to nothing less than the CIA-sponsored Radio Martí.
Claiming that she was forced to wear a ridiculous platinum blonde wig in order to evade the police security around her building (not, it must be noted, to gain entrance to the event at Fresa y Chocolate – that was never her claim) the lies continued to tumble forth, including one about Cuban journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde accusing her of being a CIA agent – something which never crossed Elizalde’s lips. Rosa Miriam’s contribution to the discussion was calm, eloquent, never personal; she pointed out that in regard to the Internet, Cuba is enduring something practically schizophrenic. While the island struggles with the very real technological obstacles imposed upon it by the U.S.-led blockade, outside Cuba, there is an overabundance of criticism unleashed upon it for the censorship claimed by Yoani. “One of the things you have to ask yourself is how such visibility is obtained?…It’s a political manipulation; you have to look at it in context,” said Rosa Miriam.
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http://machetera.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/yoani-sanchez-a-few-cards-short-of-a-full-deck/ |
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