HAVANA: Dissident blogger Yoanni Sanchez launched a new digital newspaper yesterday, with hopes of making it Cuba’s first independent news outlet in 50 years, but it was blocked in the communist-ruled island almost immediately.
Curious Cubans trying to link to Sanchez’s “14ymedio” site were redirected to another page, Yoanislandia.com, filled with attacks on the prize-winning writer and pieces by pro-government bloggers. “This is a site of people sick of Yoani Sanchez presenting herself as the Mother Teresa of the Cuban dissidents,” the replacement site said in its “about us” tab.
Sanchez launched her new site at 8:05am (1205 GMT), promising to offer Cubans “a complete spectrum of news, opinion pieces and information” about life on the island. But by 11am (1500 GMT) it had been blocked inside Cuba, where the state has controlled all media since the early days of the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
Noted figures from around the world, including Nobel prize-winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa and Polish Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa, urged the government to “respect the right” of the newspaper to exist, in a letter posted on the site.
Sanchez assembled a newsroom of 11 journalists, including herself, in Havana to produce the news site. Her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, is editor-in-chief.
14ymedio was seen as a potential game changer in the media landscape here, since Cubans for decades have had just one official source of news — the Havana government.
AFP
