Excuse me, Sir, may I post that you were arrested?

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

The title seems absurd, but I assure you with all my heart that is what many expect of me. I started this blog to write what I wanted, to relate the things that were happening around me, to share a space in cyberspace and to feel free, even if just within a text of five hundred words.  I don’t know why, at times, it feels that with the passage of time my reasons seem to be forgotten, however for me – the one who writes this – they remain the same.

As everything is so strained in this place where it was my destiny to be born, I am not – I repeat it like a parrot, lest anyone think I believe myself to be or claim degrees that I do not have – either a journalist or a writer.  I am a blogger, and it is not my fault that in my blog the real Cuba is more real than in the newspaper Granma International.  There are those who graduated in journalism, or those who are journalists – which is not the same thing – and who tear the pebbles from the wall of State censorship, certainly it is not my case.

To give a little coherence to this declaration of Octavo Cerco principles that I am making I will illustrate it with a small story – it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not because it is not news, it’s an example: imagine that you have a blog in which you write about the world around you, and one day a reader knocks on the door and says, “I came to tell you that perhaps today State Security will arrest me, but please, don’t publish it.”

Why? To see if I don’t have to have great self-control not to go crazy in this psychiatric Havana?  If you are not an inmate, or given the case but you don’t want it known, if you are not doing anything “confrontational” and are considered to be “integrated”… why did you come knocking at my door?  This is a small example, but I can assure you that I have more colorful ones.

So, I have decided to dot the i’s:

- I write this blog alone, I alone am responsible for it, which makes sense.

- It is a personal and subjective vision of the way I see and live in my country.

- The acts of injustice, the abuse of power and the restrictions on individual freedoms, I feel a duty – to myself – to publish and comment on them through my lens.

- There is no external reason that can make me hesitate to give an opinion, to criticize what I consider wrong, or to praise what I like.

- I owe nothing to anyone and the censorship against which I struggle every day is self-censorship (which is very dangerous).

- Information belongs to no one, everyone has a right to it and that is what and why I advocate.