Poet Francis Sanchez Reopens His Blog After Six Years Of Digital Silence / 14ymedio

Screenshot of the blog Man in the Clouds, by Francis Sánchez. (CC)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 7 March 2017 – The poet and essayist Francis Sanchez has returned to the blogosphere this week after six years of not updating his personal blog. The writer from Ciego de Avila announced he would continue to publish his ideas “without censorship” on his site Man in the Clouds, now with a new web address.

“I am not the same,” says Sanchez in the first text he posted on the web after his long digital silence, a pause that attributes to the social pressures he experienced following the opening of the site in October 2010.

“After five months I was forced to stop updating it,” recalls the author. “All the bloggers, in Cuba, we were accused of being cyber-mercenaries.” This situation that caused many acquaintances to close the doors or cross “the street in search of another sidewalk” when they saw them.

In those years the official press deployed an intense campaign against the alternative blogosphere. National television dedicated a chapter to it on their Cuba’s Reasons program, where it was suggested that it was a “new strategy in the United States war” against the island.

In those years the official press deployed an intense campaign against the alternative blogosphere

In March 2011 Sanchez published the post Closed for Demolition in which he said goodbye to his readers. Now he returns to the digital space with the intention of writing about “readings, art, society, reality and imagination, human rights, and everything unpredictable that beats inside a very long etcetera”.

The creator of the magazine Inverted Tree has published three texts in his new stage as a blogger, one of them dedicated to the poet Pedro Alberto Assef, born in Ciego de Avila in 1966 and recently deceased in a hospital in El Paso, Texas. In the text he calls him an authentic writer and possessor of an “exhaustive lyrical knowledge.”

Another post reproduces a fragment dedicated to the figures of Julián del Casal and José Martí in the book of essays Sacred Companies that Sánchez wrote “in four hands” with his wife, the essayist and poet Ileana Álvarez. The volume was presented at the most recent Havana Book Fair in February.

“I can not calm anyone nor calm myself announcing what’s going to happen or what I’m going to write tomorrow. I do not really know, I do not want to. I am only attentive,” Sanchez tells his readers.

For Francis Sanchez’s blog translated into English from May 2012 and before see here: Man in the Clouds. For later entries see here.