El Estornudo: The Birth of an Independent Cuban Magazine

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 On Cuba, 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 On Cuba, 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.

On Cuba 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 On Cuba 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.”

Sneeze. That was it. Jumping, rebelling, expelling, reacting, acting. That street vendor, whose face we never saw, gave us a concept. We were going to be the country’s unavoidable physical reaction. El Estornudo: the Sneeze.

We raised the curtain on El Estornudo on 14 March 2016. Only that day did we realise that in New York, exactly 124 years earlier, José Martí had founded the newspaper Patria, with the goal of liberating Cuba from Spain.

The first text we published was a declaration of our principles. We started by saying: “Journalists are athletes and journalism is a marathon – and we’re getting arthritis from old media and its rules. We’ve decided to go back to the starting line. So here we are, independently founding an online magazine of longform reporting about Cuba. We’re going to rummage through the vices and virtues of our society, describe regular people’s regular lives, show you how our discoveries differ from what the powerful tell us. We hope these stories will eventually become small pieces in the puzzle of our time.”

We couldn’t have chosen a better moment to launch. Not just because Cubans could get online, but also because Cuba and the US had re-established diplomatic relations, ending decades of cold war, and the news attracted foreign media attention to the island. Cuba was trending, and all kinds of international outlets wanted us for local colour. The BBC, Al Jazeera, Vice, Univision, Internazionale, and others paid to republish our content. That sporadic income, which wasn’t enough for us to pay ourselves monthly salaries, was the only money we earned for two years, until we started to get funding from international organisations that support independent journalism.

El Estornudo changed my routine. I took up residence in a park near my house. It was a square plaza full of trees and metal benches, with a dry water fountain in the middle and a church on one side. If I wasn’t out reporting or writing at home, I was there. It was my office.

I’d sit in the shade of a leafy tree, on a bench or the ground or one of the enormous roots breaking through the soil. Sometimes, though, the tree dropped little brown fruits, inedible berries that stained everything and drove me into the glaring sun. If I had to, I’d work standing, sweating in shorts and sandals.

I was never alone in the park. The internet dealers kept me company. In order to get online, you bought cards at post offices and newsstands. Every park was swarming with young people who hoarded the cards, then split their connections using apps and Bluetooth. Renting their illegal services cost $1 per hour, half the price of state internet. Just like drug dealers, the internet dealers roamed the parks selling their product in whispers, avoiding police persecution. Without them, many Cubans couldn’t have afforded to talk to their relatives abroad, and as independent journalists, we certainly couldn’t have spent so many hours online.

When it rained, I’d huddle under the awning of a building that was close enough to a hotspot that I could work. When I had to upload a photo or video, I’d wait until after 11pm, and ideally much later, when the park was almost empty. The connection was faster then. At peak hours – mid-morning, or any time in the afternoon or evening – the park got so crowded that the network collapsed.

I loved to sit in the empty water fountain at night and watch the hundreds of people who crowded around me, eyes locked on their smartphones and laptops and tablets. A hum drifted through the park. It was people talking to the family members they hadn’t hugged in years, asking for clothes and food and soap, staring with eyes like footballs at the world beyond their island, speeding into modernity after so much time stuck in the past. Faces in the dusk, illuminated by screens. The park was dark, like the country, and the devices’ lights were little tunnels to the future.

The magazine began to concentrate on the new society emerging along with the internet in Cuba. Our detailed reporting agitated the government, which went from ignoring our existence to breathing down our necks. We discovered this change when they blocked our website on the island. From that moment on, people in Cuba have been unable to access El Estornudo except through technological tricks like VPNs that alter their geolocation. We lost a lot of readers that way, but we also got confirmation that our work was important. We went on reporting our stories.

I hadn’t written about sport since On Cuba, but that year, 2017, the Houston Astros and LA Dodgers were in the World Series, and each team had a Cuban: Yulieski Gurriel and Yasiel Puig. Both had played for Cuba, but, because they’d then gone to the US, the government had declared them traitors and erased them from history. And yet the whole country was thrilled that Gurriel and Puig were playing against each other for the biggest trophy in baseball, our national game. I wanted to talk about our shared exaltation, our refusal to forget our stars. It struck me as a great chance to get back to covering sports.

My idea was to watch the game surrounded by fans. I had two options: go to a hotel bar where everyone has to pay to enter, then meet the expensive obligation to eat and drink; or go to one of the many homes that had an illegal satellite, something the government forbade because they picked up international TV stations. I chose the second.

In Old Havana, I found a cluster of poor, crumbling buildings with an abundance of secret satellites. Fans were packed into poky rooms to watch the game, and I squeezed in with them. I didn’t get home until 2am. I’d promised to write a feature about my night, but I was exhausted and smelled like a nightclub. I took a bath to wash the cigarette smoke off me, then thought: if I start to write now, I’ll crap out halfway through. I should just get a couple of hours’ sleep.

I set my alarm for 5am and, when it woke me up, I started to write. I poured myself a cup of coffee and worked until 7am, when I realised the fan wasn’t turning. My power was out. Whenever my neighbourhood lost electricity early in the day, we didn’t get it back until 4pm or 5pm. I gathered my things and went to my mother’s house in central Havana to write.

I got in an empty 1957 Chevrolet shared taxi. On the way, an unknown number called me. “Hello, Abraham,” the caller said. “This is Maj Roberto Carlos.”

“I don’t know any Maj Roberto Carlos.”

“I need to see you.”

“I’m out. I can’t talk today. Tomorrow would work, but who are you?”

“I know you’re out. I knocked on your door and nobody answered. Tell me where you are.”

“I’m telling you I’m busy.”

“Abraham, you seem to be missing the point. This is a police summons. Tell me where you are and I’ll be there.”

“But why? What’s the issue?”

“Tell me where you are and I’ll explain.”

I arrived at my mother’s house. Ten minutes later, I saw a white Lada with the Ministry of the Interior’s crest park outside the building next door. I stuck my head out of the window and saw a man in hiking boots and greenish, corroded jeans that were worn at the thighs and patched at the crotch. Maj Roberto Carlos. Accompanying him was a young, toothy man, 25 at the most. A henchman. Over the next hours, he didn’t speak a word.

The only people at home were my grandparents. My mother was at work, my little sister was at the university and my older sister, who was very pregnant and on matern