Enhorabuena, Compañera Sanchez. Venceremos. Freedom Will Come.

The Cuban writer and dissenter Yoani Sanchez, whose brave work I have long admired, has won the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for her web log Generacion Y. The prize is the oldest international award in journalism. It is given by Columbia University.

Yoani has been prohibited from traveling to New York to collect her honour. Unbowed, today Yoani writes from Havana: "I am already thousands of kilometers from here, in this virtual world that they cannot understand nor fence in."

In Egypt, there is Wael Abbas. He has won several international press and human rights awards, which have given him notoriety sufficient to deter authorities from taking the worst measures against him, but he has still been detained, searched, and harassed.

In Iran, there was Omidreza Mirsayafi, but on March 18, the 29-year-old blogger died in Tehran’s Evin prison. There are thousands of Omidrezas in Iran. There are thousands more in Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and all over this virtual world that they cannot understand nor fence in.

"In practice, I’m a civic ghost, a non-being, someone unable to show the sharp eye of the doorkeeper even the slightest proof of being in the official mechanisms." - Yoani Sanchez.