Cuban blogger protests travel ban

HAVANA - Internationally acclaimed blogger Yoani Sanchez has posted an entry protesting the Cuban government’s decision to bar her from travelling to the US to receive an award.

“Bypass machines that go out, baby’s cries that echo. Stamps that fall on pages to deny and to censor; kilobytes that carry my voice by Internet without my having to stir. Someone who watches me frowning as he speaks on control’s walkie-talkie,” says the post on Sanchez’s Generacion Y blog Wednesday.

“A bird called Twitter lifts me up between its talons. Offices with uniformed people who confirm ‘you cannot travel for the moment’, yet I am thousands of kilometres from here, in that virtual world that they cannot comprehend or fence in,” the blogger concludes.

The blog entry is accompanied by a photograph of Sanchez in the Cuban government office where she learned this week that her request to travel abroad had been turned down for the fourth time.

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism announced in July that Sanchez, 34, would receive a special citation as part of the 2009 Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean.

The blogger was invited to Wednesday’s awards ceremony at Columbia’s New York campus.

Sanchez’s husband, Reinaldo Escobar, told EFE Monday that an immigration official informed his wife that “at the moment, she doesn’t have permission to leave the country”.

The official did not respond when Sanchez asked why her application was turned down, Escobar said.

He said Sanchez showed the immigration official photocopies of her three previous requests for an exit visa - all denied - as well as the invitation from Columbia and another from the Brazilian Senate, which has asked the blogger to make a speech.

Sanchez has also been invited to events in Poland, Spain and Mexico, her husband said.

Since 2007, Sanchez’s Generacion Y blog has become a source of news about Cuba for readers outside the island, earning her Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for digital journalism.

But Cuban officials wouldn’t allow her to make the trip to Madrid to receive the prize.

Cuba is one of a handful of countries that require citizens to apply for authorization to travel abroad.

–EFE