A diary of life inside Havana by one of Cuba's few bloggers--a worldwide sensation.

Yoani Sanchez is an unusual dissident- no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime in Cuba- the difficulty of shopping and chronic hunger; the art of repairing ancient appliances; the struggle for real news and the burdens of reading the party newspaper; the fear of admission to hospitals that lack the supplies for basic sterilization; and a life structured by a propaganda machine that pushes deep into the media, the public square, and the schools. Each sensitive dispatch is a brutal and honest depiction of Cuban life today.For these simple acts of truth telling--which are published online at Generation Y, and collected here in English for the first time--Sanchez is treated as a domestic radical- she is summoned by the police; her friends are threatened; she was recently kidnapped and beaten. The state newspaper has gone so far to call her "a spy in the pay of capitalism."