Yoani Sánchez Goes on the Attack

The story of the attack on three Cuban bloggers a week ago is still developing. Not only did more international organizations denounce the incident – most notably Human Rights Watch and the Interamerican Press Association, the latter with a statement affirming that Cuba holds 27 reporters in jail – but Yoani Sánchez used her blog and Twitter account to move from prey to vigilante.

On Wednesday night, Sánchez announced through Twitter — to her over 13 thousand followers — that she had identified one of her attackers as “Agent Rodney,” linking to a picture of the man on the blog Penúltimos Días. (A later post on this blog identified the agent’s last name and the address of his father.)

On Thursday, she published a post on Generation Y describing the constant surveillance she is subjected to, including pictures of those who, she says, “watch and harass” her – the “beings of the shadows.”

Some of them were running away; a woman covered her face, “perhaps afraid of the future,” Sánchez wrote.

After all, as she tweeted later that day from her cellphone, “If Twitter cannot be used as a loudspeaker for those condemned to silence, what is its real purpose?”

All this echoes something she said to us when we spoke to her on Sunday: “They still haven’t understood the potential of the web.”

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