Please Don't Call Yoani Sánchez A Hero If You Really Don't Want To Help Her
Please Don't Call Yoani Sánchez A Hero If You Really Don't Want To Help Her
AS/COA's chairman, president, and board members signed a letter alongside prominent U.S. business and political leaders petitioning President Barack Obama to support Cuba’s nascent entrepreneurial sector.
It’s hard to tell what’s most striking these days: Yoani Sánchez’s heroism or America’s hypocrisy.
Last week, when communist authorities tried to block Sánchez’s new digital newspaper, 14ymedio, Florida Senator Marco Rubio called her “one of Cuba’s most courageous” dissidents. And rightly so.
But he also called the internationally acclaimed blogger “an aspiring Cuban media entrepreneur.” And that’s where the inconsistency starts.
Even as Rubio exalts Sánchez as a dissident, he and every other Cuba hardliner are essentially thwarting her as an entrepreneur – and in today’s Cuba the latter might be more important than the former.
This month, 44 prominent U.S. business and political figures, including a number of Cuban-Americans, signed a letter urging President Obama to loosen the Cuba trade embargo.
The aim: Allow Americans to bring more support – investment capital, telecom hardware, expertise exchanges – to the island’s rising number of independent capitalists now that Cuban leader Raúl Castro has, albeit grudgingly and haltingly, opened the economic reform window.....
