In this environment where disagreement abounds, stretches and shrinks, where there is the competition to arrive first and so many other pretenses that create division, confrontation and suspicion, it comes as a balm that a group of Cubans – a team from Pinar del Río – chooses to live together, to shelter and strengthen the scattered Cuban Nation.
I have learned that this morning another digital space has emerged, created here on the island, led by Dagoberto Valdes. A magazine that from the “alligator’s tail”* addresses issues common to all Cubans. A new site to confirm that the internet is one of so many cracks that are opening in the wall.
I feel close to the entire team of Coexistence. Not only for sharing the adventure of trying to access the Internet inside Cuba, but for the premise that small steps are perhaps the most solid. With Dago, Toledo, Olga, Karina y Daguito I learned that, “We have one hour: Fifteen minutes to complain and forty-five to find solutions.” I am still in the process of applying this but I believe I am, at least, in the first stage of expressing “what I don’t like.”
To have lived side-by-side with the team of this new magazine, in the long days required to publish the html code of a Cuban publication, has raised my hopes, not for the future, but for today. I hope that the combination of talent, tolerance and modesty that they exhibit is contagious and spreads to others.
Website: http://www.convivenciacuba.com