CUBAN dissidents have found a brave new figurehead in Yoani Sanchez, a blogger whose observations about life in one of the world’s last communist bastions have angered the state and made her a global celebrity.

Sanchez, a 33-year-old philologist, has attracted a loyal fan base with her gentle mockery of the regime in Havana, which seems to be at a loss over how to rein in “cyber-space rebels”.

“They regard me as an enemy of the state,” said Sanchez last week in a telephone interview. “That is because the blogging phenomenon has opened up a crack in government control which is almost impossible to repair.”

Although it is read all over the world, Sanchez’s blog, Generation Y, is blocked in Cuba. However, like Soviet-era homemade samizdat copies of censored books, it circulates on computer memory sticks and CDs as well as on paper.

“I know that I am being read because people recognise me in the street,” said Sanchez, who sometimes has had to pose as a Swiss tourist so as to be able to post her blog on the internet from a Havana hotel. “People come up to me all the time to wish me luck.”

The government of Raul Castro, 77-year-old brother of the retired Fidel, accuses her of being part of a “counter-revolutionary” conspiracy. Elsewhere she is regarded as a hero: Time magazine recently named her among the 100 most influential people in the world.

Last year Spain awarded her one of its most prestigious journalism prizes.

She was not allowed out of the country to collect it - nor to attend the party held yesterday in Italy for the publication of Cuba Libre, a collection of her blogs - but her prominent international profile protects her in a country where dissidents routinely end up in jail.

Besides being denied an exit visa, she has found her freedom to travel inside Cuba restricted. “We’re treated like schoolchildren: we need permission to go anywhere,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been misbehaving so I’m not allowed.”

She believes that the election of President Barack Obama in the United States will put pressure on the government to allow more political openings. In the end, though, change will be imposed by the Cubans themselves, she predicted.

“People are waking up from a long cycle of silence,” she said, adding that technology such as digital video and the internet was making it much more difficult for the government to maintain its control.

“My philosophy,” said Sanchez, who is under constant surveillance by the state security apparatus, “is that if they watch me, I’ll watch them. I make videos of things all the time, which I put on the internet.”

Her blog last week featured a visit to one of Havana’s hotels by Sanchez and her husband. Sanchez filmed while he asked a receptionist if he could buy an hour’s internet access. The woman explained to him that new rules forbid Cubans from logging onto the internet from hotels.

Sanchez said this would not affect her blog, however. “We’re slippery people,” she laughed. “If they want to restrict us, we’ll always find other ways.”

Necessity has prompted extraordinary creativity among Cubans, she says, adding that homemade computers built from black-market parts have proliferated in recent years.

In a posting on Friday, she highlighted the case of an “alternative technician” friend who had bartered his watch for a microprocessor to make his computer.

He dreams of leaving the country and marrying a foreigner who would give hima new computer on his wedding day “to which he would not have to add any bolts”.

Other recent postings include film of Sanchez speaking out against censorship at an arts performance in Havana. She has also encouraged people to bang their pots and pans at night in protest. Film of these cacerolazos, as they are known, has appeared on the internet.

The government has branded her antics “a provocation against the Cuban revolution” but Sanchez puts a brave face on harassment by the state.

“They’re trying to make mea radioactive person,” she said. “But I don’t like the role of victim. I try to respond with a smile.”

As for the Castro “dynasty”, she believes that it has run out of steam. “The Cuban system is like one of those gravity-defying houses in Old Havana,” she said. “How does it stay up? Maybe one day they pull a small nail from the door and the house comes tumbling down. In today’s Cuba, that small nail could be anything.”

Perhaps it will be her.

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