Yoani Maria Sanchez Cordero (born September 4, 1975) is a Cuban blogger who has achieved international fame and multiple international awards for her critical portrayal of life in Cuba under its current government. Sanchez attended primary school during the affluent time when the Soviet Union was providing considerable aid to Cuba. However, her high school and university education coincided with the loss of financial aid to Cuba following the Soviet Union's collapse, creating a highly public educational system and style of living that subsequently left Sanchez with a strong need for personal privacy. Sanchez's university education left her with two understandings; first, that she had acquired a disgust for "high culture", and second that she no longer had an interest in philology, her chosen field of university study.
Generation Y blocked
On March 26, 2008, Sanchez announced to her readers that the recent problems accessing her blog appeared to be a deliberate action on the part of government censors to block access to her blog and the other blogs on the desdecuba.com website. While debate swirled back and forth on the web about whether the site was actually blocked, Sanchez stated that Generation Y could not be accessed in Cuba for the past several years. The debate about whether this was a year-long plus "fluke" or some "glitch" in the software, seemed to be resolved about a year after the site became unavailable. Comments made by a Cuban State Security agent in an interview published on March 19, 2009, in the digital magazine Kaos en la Red, where "Agent Miguel" stated, "I know State Security officials who literally prophesied that blocking the blog Generation Y within the country would, in a short time, cause the launching of Madame Sanchez into the stardom of the manipulative media campaign against Cuba. Regardless of these prophesies, they did it and now they're paying the price."  Sanchez was well known by this time and the attempt to censor her by the sudden government shutdown of her blog attracted more international attention than ever. On April 2, 2008, the Washington Post devoted a long column to her, just one of hundreds of articles and blog posts appearing around the world. On June 23, 2008, Cuba's daily newspaper, Granma, published a lengthy prologue, written by Fidel Castro, to the book Fidel, Bolivia y algo mas, which had been re-issued fifteen years after its initial publication. In a prologue to this new edition of a book commemorating his visit to Bolivia in 1993, Fidel Castro took the opportunity to quote a long excerpt from Sanchez's blog and, although he did not mention her name, expressed his disappointment that there are young persons in Cuba today who think as she does. Castro describes Sanchez's statements as a generalization used as a slogan.  Sanchez responded to Castro's comments by saying in her blog that she would allow her husband, journalist Reinaldo Escobar, to respond to Castro's statements because she felt it best to leave the fighting at the "macho-man-male" level, and instead continue with her "womanly" labor of weaving together the "frayed tapestry" of their society. Sanchez's husband responded with:  The ex-president disapproves of the fact that Yoani accepted this year's Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism, arguing that the prize is something that imperialism favours to blow its own horn. I recognize the right of this gentleman to make this comment, but I allow myself to observe that the responsibility implied in receiving a prize is never comparable to that of bestowing one, and Yoani, at least, has never awarded a medal to a corrupt person, a traitor, a dictator or a murderer.  Escobar went on to enumerate a list of names he says are "terrible and undeserving" recipients who were awarded the Order of Jose Marti by Castro, including names such as Leonid Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceausescu, Gustav Husak, and Robert Mugabe, among others.

Q: When was Generation Y blocked?
A: March 26, 2008,

Q: For how long was it blocked?
A: The debate about whether this was a year-long plus "fluke" or some "glitch" in the software, seemed to be resolved about a year after the site became unavailable.

Q: Who had blocked it?
A: Cuban State Security

Q: Did they ever give a reason for blocking it?
A: attempt to censor her
How did she know it was cuban state security that blocked her?
unknown
unknown