CUBAN AUTHORITIES have decided it is too embarrassing to allow one of its citizens to leave the country to pick up a top journalism award.

Yoani Sanchez, whose bog, 'Generacion Y' catalogues Cuban woes, was supposed to fly to Madrid to pick up the the prestigious Ortega y Gasset prize given out by the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Sanchez suddenly found, however, that, despite some liberalism in the country, the authorities were not that happy about letting her out of the country.

She told AFP that the freeze on her comings and goings was a way of reminding Cubans that they were "still children who need to get our parents' permission to leave the house".

El Pais said that, while the Cuban Government had not exactly said 'no', they had been "complicating" Sanchez's exit.

What new president Raul Castro did not really understand was that this whole thing was a set up by the evil capitalist media to see if his government was really serious about opening things up a bit. Clearly he failed.

Sanchez's bog is hosted in Germany gets 1.2 million hits a months. µ

L'Inq
AP