Yoani Sánchez is an acclaimed Cuban blogger, journalist and founder of 14ymedio, Cuba’s first independent daily digital news outlet. She is currently the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.She will be speaking at GMU on Tuesday, march 17, 2015 from 4:30pm - 6:15pm. RSVP here.
A University of Havana graduate in Philology, she emigrated to Switzerland in 2002 to build a new life for herself and her family. Two years later, she returned to Havana, promising herself to live there as a free person. In 2007, she began Generation Y, her personal blog about daily life in Cuba. She has been arrested and detained by the Cuban government for starting her activities.
In 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama wrote that her blog “provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba” and applauded her efforts to “empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology.” TIME magazine listed her as one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People, stating that “under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot: freedom of speech.” Foreign Policy magazine has named her one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.
I will be there to listen to a true hero, who can teach some lessons here in the US to some wanna-be "victims."
I also plan to give her a gift of a watercolor that I did in 1977 while I was a student at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, Washington. This piece was the second in a series of works all focused around the island of Cuba as a prison. It has followed me all over the planet and lived in Seattle, San Diego (CA), Spain, Monterey (CA), Bowie (MD) twice, Scotland, Sonoma (CA), Dumfries (VA), Media (PA), and Potomac (MD) thrice.
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| "Isla Prisión" (Prison Island) Watercolor on Paper by F. Lennox Campello, c. 1977 2x4 inches |
Hopefully, she will accept it and it will then live with a real life hero.
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