Translating Yoani

In 2013, the young philologist Yoani Sánchez was “possibly the most famous living Cuban not named Castro” and one of the world’s most famous bloggers. Although, at the time, very few people in Cuba had access to the internet, a legion of volunteers worldwide translated her Generation Y blog into eighteen languages, reaching millions of internauts globally every month. In many parts of the world, the press and political figures viewed Sánchez with awe, describing her as a “girl genius” and a “rock star.” This view was not unreasonable—a thirty-four-year-old woman who built her computer from scratch in a country ruled undemocratically by old military men—Sánchez’s writing constituted a daily defiance of the Cuban state. Yet, questions remained: What made Sánchez different? Why did so much attention flow to Sánchez rather than the numerous hunger strikers in and out of Cuban jails during this period? Why did global media pick Sánchez to speak for and translate Cuba to the world and with what effects? Here, Frances Negrón-Muntaner investigates how multiple forms of translation, of language but also of form, education, ideology, color, and gender, in a context of capitalist and technological change allowed Sánchez to play a pivotal and mediating role that changed her, Cuba, and beyond.