One day, in the middle of 2014, my friend Carlos Manuel Álvarez asked me to join him on the newsroom’s balcony. Wind gusted in our eyes. Elbows on the railing, we stared at the sea as we talked. We were killing time because neither of us had a computer to work on. All of them were in use. At OnCuba, the magazine in Havana where we worked, only editors got their own computers. The rest of us had to share, which sometimes meant waiting an hour. Several of my university friends and I had lucked into contributing roles at OnCuba, and even though we weren’t on staff, we were always in the newsroom. It was a way to keep our group together.
Sometimes, over beers, we dreamed aloud about a newsroom coup. We wanted to topple Hugo Cancio, the publisher, and turn his resources – a giant office with multiple rooms and a balcony with sea views; computers and internet; money; connections – into the media outlet we wanted. Something with our imprint.
We agreed that our primary mandate would be investigative journalism. We’d give up breaking news. Instead, we’d dig, analyse, identify, reconstruct, reveal – and, above all, narrate. Storytelling would be our baseline and our distinctive trait, our flag and our seal. And it would be our kind of storytelling. We thought reporting without depth was pointless. Our country’s history is dying because nobody’s telling it, we’d say.
Our second mandate emerged from the first. We’d write features. We read, dissected and envied every single piece in the main Latin American magazines of the time: Malpensante, Gatopardo, Etiqueta Negra, SoHo, Anfibia. We were sure that rigorous longform journalism, work that mixed reportage, essay and criticism, could untangle the knots of contemporary Cuban life.
Every night, the dream ended when we got into bed and remembered the reality waiting for us in the morning. In order to carry out the social service required of us after graduation, Carla Colomé worked at the state theatre magazine, Tablas; Jorge Carrasco at the website of Radio Reloj, a station that broadcasts the time; Maykel González Vivero at Granma, the newspaper of the Communist party and Cuba’s main outlet, again online; Carlos Manuel Álvarez at the Ministry of Culture’s communications office; while I worked at the Ministry of the Interior.
OnCuba gave us a chance to express ourselves, but as it changed, we became obsolete. We criticised Cuban reality, which no longer suited the publisher, who wanted to maintain an office in Havana. We started to clash with our editors. I covered sport, and one day I was informed that if I wanted to continue to do so, I had to concentrate on teams and athletes in Cuba, not abroad.
“Why?” I said.
“We want to concentrate on the players who are still here,” I was told. “They’re the ones who matter.” The explanation stank of the government. I quit the magazine.
I left OnCuba only a few weeks after my conversation with Carlos Manuel on the balcony. He’d just returned from Colombia, where he’d attended a journalism workshop at the Fundación Gabo. He’d never left Cuba before. Along with another friend, who drove us in his father’s car, I’d accompanied him to the airport for his early morning flight.
Carlos Manuel came home with a virus. At the Fundación Gabo, he’d caught the idea that there’s no such thing as a good time and place to be a journalist. He got it by listening to writers from across Latin America describe working under conditions at least as adverse as ours, people drawn to the profession because they wanted to be the custodians of truth in their countries. The region’s turmoil was producing a new generation of independent media. New outlets such as Brazil’s Agência Pública, Venezuela’s Efecto Cocuyo, and Mexico’s Periodistas de a Pie were pioneering an untraditional way of reporting. They didn’t relay the news coolly, without getting their hands dirty. They judged the powerful, held them accountable, sank their teeth – stylishly, of course – into flesh. They abandoned tact and, with it, the fallacy that journalism must be objective. They were out to defend human rights, and if they could do it, so could we.
Without a free press, Cuba’s history and memory were at the mercy of power. Living there as a journalist was like being a zombie who knows he’s dead. I ruminated constantly on one idea: if, in the future, somebody tried to reconstruct early 21st-century Cuba from a press archive, what they would find would be the story of a country that didn’t exist. Our mission was to bring reality back.
The arrival of widespread internet made us try our luck. Without that event, which transformed the nation, we wouldn’t have had a chance. In 2015, the government installed wifi hotspots in 35 public places. In those places, an hour of internet cost $2. For the first time in their lives, Cubans could go outside and get online. The high price meant choosing between the internet and clothes or food; but before, you could only use it in hotels – which cost even more – or at job centres.
Cuba’s constitution declares that the Communist party, which is the only legal political organisation, has regulatory jurisdiction over all radio, TV and print media. It also prohibits journalism outside this sphere. Starting an independent magazine meant declaring war on the government.
We had no office, no money and no internet connection of our own. Our idea of what launching a publication really meant was hazy. But we had energy and determination, and that was what counted. If we couldn’t get an office, then the 35 public plazas with wifi would be our offices. If we couldn’t get money, we’d work for nothing until we could attract underwriters outside Cuba. We’re going to take on all this work, we told ourselves, because the stories matter and the stories are here. All we have to do is go out, get them and tell them well.
What stories would we tell, and how would we tell them? We decided that, as an inviolable rule, we would be neither pro- nor anti-Castro. Instead, we’d be militant about rigorous reporting and clean writing. We’d give voice to those who had been silenced for decades.
How often would we publish? Ideally, one feature a week. If we assumed that reporting and writing one would take each of us a month, we could set up a rotation. Beyond features, Carlos Manuel said he’d get two acquaintances of his to be columnists: Iván de la Nuez, an art critic who lived in Barcelona, and Juan Orlando Pérez, a journalism professor at the University of Roehampton, London, who’d been fired from Tribuna de La Habana because he wrote a piece criticising the government for raising taxes to print textbooks about José Martí, Cuba’s national poet and intellectual lodestar. I suggested a section we wound up calling “Las Píldoras”, in which we told ordinary Cubans’ life stories in short, first-person narratives that gave the magazine a burst of emotion. Last, we thought, we could have some photo-only stories. It would be nice if our features had a visual element, too.
What would we name our magazine? No one had a convincing pitch. Mine was El Escape, which was pretentious and seemed obvious, even though it had no real background. We decided to vote, but it was a tie: everyone picked their own idea. As we brainstormed, we heard a street vendor outside. We couldn’t see him, but his voice floated in from the hall, calling, “Come on out, everyone, come down and get my lemon and honey. It’ll keep you warm, help your cough, fight your colds, stop your sneeze.”