Our First Day

Our First Day / 14ymedio
Posted on May 24, 2014
14ymedio is blocked in Cuba within a few minutes of its birth
14ymedio, Havana | May 22, 2014

At 8:20 in the morning on Wednesday, 21 May, this digital daily was
born. Like a miracle, everything worked as we had hoped. A greeting
signed by several personalities from the media and literature welcomed
us. Two Nobel Prize winners, Lech Walesa and Mario Vargas Llosa, headed
the list of signatories. The news of the appearance of a new medium
immediately popped up in the publications of several countries and
generated large displays of solidarity.

A few minutes later, when someone tried to enter from the Cuban
networks, instead of our homepage another web page appeared. The attack
consisted of redirecting our URL to another site where one could only
read texts dismissing and insulting Yoani Sánchez. Sadly, the
information on our site was supplanted on the Island by the tactics of
personal rejection used so often in the official discourse.

It doesn't take much imagination to discover the identity of the
aggressors but, as we have no proof, we can only conjecture that it is
someone with the technological resources, access permissions and prior
information, rather than animosity.

Throughout the day the telephone calls and text messages from friends
congratulating the newborn never ceased. When it had already been twelve
hours since someone somewhere in the world first clicked on to read us,
a group of collaborators and the entire 14ymedio team celebrated the
occasion watching on the screen as the pages opened through an anonymous
proxy. In this way, with the PDF version and the email bulletin, we will
be read in our own country. Censorship is not the most difficult
obstacle we have to overcome.

Blocking 14ymedio could become a failed strategy if the objective is to
silence us. Nothing is more attractive than the prohibited.

Source: Our First Day / 14ymedio | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/our-first-day-14ymedio/