Yoani Sánchez, Cuban Dissident Blogger, Gets Passport

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/world/americas/cuban-blogger-yoani-sanchez-gets-passport.html

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MEXICO CITY — When Cuba eliminated the permit that had been used to keep Cubans from leaving the country for decades, skeptics asked: Would dissidents and critics previously denied be allowed to travel as well?

No one expressed more public skepticism than the well-known blogger Yoani Sánchez. She chronicled every detail of her struggle to get a passport, the last hurdle to travel under the new law that went into effect on Jan. 14. As recently as Wednesday afternoon, she was using her Twitter account, @yoanisanchez, to criticize the “lethargy of the bureaucracy in Cuba,” as yet another official told her “your passport still isn’t ready.”

Then suddenly, four hours later, it was. Thrilled and apparently surprised, she wrote: “They called me at home to say my passport was ready! They just delivered it.” She attached a photo of the document in another post, and wrote that after talking to her sister, whom she had not seen in six months, the passport made a reunion outside of Cuba suddenly possible.

The Cuban government’s decision seemed to suggest that officials are in fact determined to make sure that the new travel law is seen as more open and liberating than the system that preceded it. Experts have noted that encouraging Cubans to come and go could benefit the island’s sclerotic economy as more Cubans work abroad and send money home.

Ms. Sánchez is also well known worldwide, having won a number of awards for her efforts to create more room for public discourse in Cuba, so by approving her request to travel, Cuba has avoided stirring up a storm of criticism internationally.

At the same time, however, Cuba — wedded to its old ways even as it tries to change — signaled that it would open its doors only selectively. On the same day Ms. Sánchez received her passport, Angel Moya, one of 75 dissidents and writers imprisoned in 2003 for their political activities, reported that his passport application had been denied.

He told The Associated Press that a clerk had informed him it could not be processed “for reasons of public interest” — an apparent reference to a clause in the new law that lets the government restrict some citizens’ rights to travel, based on factors including past activities or threats to national security.

Mr. Moya noted that his release from prison was conditional — he is technically still serving a 20-year sentence on a charge of treason — and he said that was probably the official reason for rejecting his passport request.

Ms. Sánchez, whose passport was celebrated online by many of her 383,000 followers on Twitter, said that the combination of receiving her passport and discovering that Mr. Moya did not made her both happy and sad. “On one hand I have my document to travel,” she wrote, “but for many of my friends like @JAngelMoya, they will not allow it.”