First There Was Email

I feel deep gratitude for being able to contribute, from the press, to the construction of a democratic and free society as the first step towards inevitable political change.

By Yoani Sánchez (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – At first it was email. At dawn on the 21st of May 2014, when the first cover of 14ymedio was published, most of the content that could be read on this digital site had traveled through email. Now, accustomed to having a web browsing service on our mobile phones, and despite the poor quality of the connection, it is difficult to remember how a newspaper was made without being able to connect directly to the Internet. But that is how it all started.

During the months and years following that birth, the alarm clock in our house was always set for three in the morning. At that time, through Nauta’s mailbox, we received the first articles published each day in the official press, the technical and editorial support of our team in Madrid and the headlines from numerous sites that, through RSS [Really Simple Syndication], gave us a vision of which topics and news was going to mark the beginning of the editorial day.

Even for those of us who had created blogs practically offline and posted blindly on Twitter, updating and nurturing this journal was an extremely complicated and exhausting challenge. We had, of course, the compensation of the words of encouragement from the readers, the gradual growth of the audience, the mentions and links to our work in the pages of other media, the enthusiasm of the reporters on the street and the usual insults from Cuban oficialdom, which blocked our website from the first moment.

Continuing to publish during those extreme moments would not have been possible without the support of colleagues who, outside the Island, especially in Spain, were our eyes and our hands to keep the newspaper alive. That symbiosis between the inside and the outside gave shape, personality and style to the medium that turns a decade old this Tuesday. Like our nation, which long ago stopped being contained on an Island, this newspaper spans sides of the borders, it is a child of the globalization of the Cuban issue.

After those initial days came the hardest part: working steadily, raising the quality of our articles and gaining the trust of Internet users. To avoid becoming a ‘rag’, to avoid the attempts of groups or movements to make us spokespersons for their initiatives, to evade police sieges and operations around our Editorial Office in Havana and to not lose our sanity in the exercise of independent journalism under a regime allergic to freedom of the press has also been part of the challenges of this decade.

In December 2018, with the arrival of the internet access service on mobile phones, it seemed that, at least from a technological point of view, our informative task would become more bearable. But the frequent service cuts, intermittent or massive, that seek to censor or penalize clients of the state telecommunications monopoly, have kept access to the global web like a possibility surrounded by uncertainty and obstacles.

In two decades, most of those journalists who joined in the effort to move this medium forward emigrated. Those who remained on the ground had to, in numerous cases, assume pseudonyms to protect themselves and redouble precautions to avoid reprisals from the political police. From an ecosystem of independent publications based on the Island, we have compiled a short list with fewer exponents than there are fingers on a hand.

Now, the clock that marks the beginning of the day rings in our home at five in the morning. Email has long ceased to be our main way to find out what is happening inside and outside Cuba, the country that seemed asleep from social protests has experienced the historic popular demonstrations of 11 July 2021 and several important aftershocks. 14ymedio continues to be censored on national servers and it is a rare month in which we do not suffer the suspension of our mobile phone service on designated dates or due to some opposition call.

Ten years later, the reporter colleagues who search out, confirm and amplify on the streets the information we publish about this Island, the editors who are the main pillar of each content that comes out, together with this servant, we remain committed and enthusiastic about maintaining this open window to deep Cuba. Personally, I must add that I feel deep gratitude for being able to contribute, from the press, to the construction of a democratic and free society as the first step towards the inevitable political change.

Over the course of the next 10 years, I hope that the country will have achieved that objective and that 14ymedio will finally be accessible to all Cubans, without interference by the State in the citizens’ right to information.

Translated by Translating Cuba.

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