Thursday, and Friday, Birthdays

It is no coincidence that January 28 Voces Cubanas celebrated its first year of life on the Internet, it’s an historic date and not just because of a group of indomitable bloggers – or cyberchancleteros (cybergossipers), one of my favorite words – have been set loose upon the web. I still remember when Yoani Sanchez, during the blogger journey meetings, talked to us about Voces Cubanas and the intention to create a plural portal where independent voices join the multifaceted Cuban society.

From a small flotilla of five blogs announced in 2009, today we are twenty-six, all linked to the portal. Since that first meeting of bloggers, which was of such interest to State Security, today in the “Generation Y House” there is an academy where a priest, a punk musician, a lawyer, a student, a renegade from the political police, an artisan and a professor discover that if they can harmoniously share the one hundred square foot space of the classroom, they might also be able to share the whole island of Cubans with all their contrasts.

The challenge has been great: teach blogging without the Internet, Twittering without a mobile phone, how to install plug-ins and administer an interface that supposedly exists only on-line, and it is supposedly because every Tuesday and Thursday we verify that nothing exists, save the human will.

Note: Today, Friday, January 29, is also the birthday of Claudio Fuentes Madan, who spent the morning in “conversation” – a new term that the DSE (Department of State Security) uses for their arrests and interrogations – with two officials from the Ministry of the Interior plus another who was “unidentified.”