The Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez will share a colloquium with participants of IAMCR MADRID 2019.
During the second plenary session of the Madrid conference, we will have the opportunity to listen live to the journalist and philologist Yoani Sánchez Cordero (Cuba, 1975) recounting her experiences regarding freedom, since the freedom she has enjoyed over the last few years has been possible thanks to technology-
The Cuban journalist has achieved international recognition through her blog The Y Generation, in which she gives a critical description of her country based on her daily experiences. With this blog she has won numerous international awards and distinctions: among others, in 2008, she won the El País Ortega y Gasset Prize for Journalism and Time Magazine included her in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her case has been studied in our Schools of Communication since 2012, at a time when she had to twitter “blind” because her lines of communication had been cut off. We are therefore honored that she will be able to interact with professors and students who will take part in the IAMCR 2019 conference.
In a sneak peek on her intervention, we have “conversed” with Yoani Sánchez via You Tube and she has left us with these messages to open the debate on “Communication, Technology and Dignity”: The advent of new technologies has changed the scenario in my country, Cuba, a good deal. It hasn’t changed it entirely but it has given the citizens who live in such regimes new tools which we can use to tell people what’s going on, to express criticism and demands, to publish a lot of things happening at local community level which used to go unnoticed and which the government could often turn a blind eye to and pretend to be “unaware of”. It has also helped to distribute information of repressive actions.
In 2014, Yoani Sánchez, along with journalist Reinaldo Escobar, founded a digital daily paper, 14ymedio, produced in Cuba, in Spanish and English. The paper publishes national and international current events, together with news on the economy, culture, society, science and technology, and sports. It also publishes special reports, interviews, opinion columns, readers’ letters and debates.
According to Web Global Influence, Yoani Sánchez was 168th in the world ranking in 2018, and 30th in 2016 in the Spanish speaking ranking.
Yoani Sánchez has also published a number of books, which include: Wordpress 4.0 La tela de araña (2014, with Fernando Tellado); Wordpress: Un blog para hablar al mundo (2011); Cuba Libre: Vivir y escribir en La Habana (2010).