On the night Yoani Sánchez received a prestigious award from Columbia University, she celebrated with diluted Cuban rum -- she doesn't like the taste of it -- and crackers with mayonnaise, surrounded by family and friends in her apartment overlooking the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana.

They were celebrating the extraordinary fact that Sanchez, a 34-year-old Cuban blogger with no formal training in journalism, hardly any access to the Internet and no institutional support, was being recognized Wednesday with a Maria Moors Cabot citation for her blog, Generación Y, which chronicles in simple, elegant but visceral language daily life in Cuba.

She's happy even though the Cuban government's refusal to allow her to leave Cuba to receive her prize made her miss a larger party that same evening in another island, Manhattan. More than 1,300 miles from Havana, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger invested Sánchez, in absentia, with her prize ``for her courage, talent and great achievement in such a brief period of time.''

The room exploded in sustained ovation for two minutes.

The guests had just finished a dinner of filet mignon with a smattering of vegetables and a dollop of mashed potatoes. There was plenty of wine and a puffy, flaky dessert with strawberry ice cream, followed by coffee and chocolate truffles.

And then Sánchez joined us, virtually. Her face, devoid of makeup and framed by thick dark hair harnessed in a braid that rested on her white blouse, filled a large screen on the stage. The guests in the opulent rotunda of Columbia's Low Library fixed their eyes on the screen.

``Unfortunately, I'm unable to be with you all tonight at the Maria Moors Cabot Prize Ceremony,'' Sanchez said into the camera. She seemed to be sitting on a park bench.

``However, I've grown accustomed to the idea that I cannot leave my country,'' she said.

``We Cubans are like small children who must ask for Father's permission to leave the house. And, in the case of the little girl Yoani Sánchez, well, the personal and social price I've had to pay for posting my views of my reality on a web page has been, simply, to be condemned to immobility, to have become an immobile pilgrim on this island.''

Blog reaches millions

And yet her immobility is only physical because Sánchez, more than anybody else in recent Cuban history, reaches millions of people all over the world, thanks to the power of the Internet and to the ways in which journalism is evolving today, transforming citizens into journalists and journalists into crusaders.

Bollinger noted that Sánchez is the first blogger to be recognized by the Cabot program, the oldest international prize in journalism, conferred for the last 71 years to the best journalists in the Americas. He said that in the United States, ``where press freedom is well established, blogs and citizen journalists cannot be expected to take the place of the traditional press.''

And then, there is the rest of the hemisphere, where the press is not always as robust as it is in the United States.

According to a report by Cabot program director Josh Friedman, which Bollinger cited in his speech, ``news and opinion sites are making up for inadequate traditional media'' even in digitally undeveloped countries such as Haiti and El Salvador. In Peru, Mexico and Venezuela, bloggers have stepped in where traditional media have faltered.

``But Cuba,'' Bollinger said, ``is probably the most extreme case of blogging in the face of poor Internet access, narrow bandwidth and government control.''

I called Sánchez Thursday morning and told her about the event, the food, the applause. I forgot to mention there were flowers on the table: a beautiful fall display with large pink roses and tiny yellow buds. The round tables shimmered with the glasses, the lights, the sparkling silverware and the silky tablecloths.

Internet access costly

She told me about her worn shoes and how she hardly eats. She earns some money from columns she writes for publications in Italy and the United States, and from ``teaching the subjunctive to tourists.'' The bulk of her money, she said, goes to pay for access to the Internet in the hotels of Havana. An hour costs between $7 and $9, a fortune, she said.

But she doesn't mind. Her weakness is technology. Her priority: to communicate and to inform. We hung up quickly. She had work to do. She is now tweeting even as Cuba's ``geriatric leadership,'' as Bollinger called it, tries to find ways to stop her from doing what most young people can do anywhere else.

As she told an immigration worker when she was denied a travel visa to New York (view the video on her blog http://desdecuba.com/generaciony/): ``What do you fear? That this little person of 110 pounds could start a tsunami?''

She already has.