All official journalism that there is in Cuba stems from the State and is subject to censorship that filters all information given to the Cubans, providing them only with inadequate, incomplete facts interpreted beforehand. In addition to it, due to the almost total lack of internet access, Cubans cannot compare the information presented to them with the news brought by foreign press.
However, there is an ever-growing group of men and women working every single day on creating a different kind of journalism with the aim to spread the truth about the everyday reality surrounding them both within the island and abroad.
In our newsletter we have gathered stories of the lives of 10 of them, which have been written by their own colleagues. Some of these journalists, for example Yoani Sánchez, need no introduction. Others, however, are little known even to members of the community that each month eagerly awaits this modest newsletter. However, they all work towards a common goal, which is to break the silence and wake Cuba up from its information sleep, in which it has been submerged for too many years.
The difficulties they face when exercising their profession are numerous: Many of them lack proper education either because they had no access to it or because they were expelled from the university. Also, their old computers and cameras are regularly confiscated by State agents who hardly ever let them connect to the extremely slow internet or hide their printers under the bed. However, with their courage and imagination they have been able to do journalism on an ever-increasingly professional level.
Yet, as Dickens said, the worst of times can also be the best of times and perhaps these journalists, distanced from the government’s ideology and independent of any publishing house or editorial policy, are actually doing the freest journalism that they ever could and would. After all, their pens are not only informing us about what is happening in Cuba, they are also rewriting, word for word, the History of the Island.
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