Voices Magazine / Miguel Iturria Savón

Since August 6, a bunch of copies of Voices Magazine have been circulating in Havana, presented by Yoani Sánchez at the headquarters of Cuba Bloggers Academy, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to disseminating the technologies that are revolutionizing communications and encouraging citizen journalism on the island, which broke the information monopoly of the military government.

Located On the web at: www.vocescubanas.com/voces and vocesvocesvoces@gmail.com, the magazine represents a literary effort from the “grammar” of the bloggers, understood as a “grammar” of the lyrics, images, hypertext, according to Jose Ferrer, author of the decalogue Writing a Cuban Blog, which figures in it along with some twenty artists who exude freshness, wit and diversity in 62 pages taken from the same number of blogs.

Maybe it’s premature to talk about a handful of pages grouped in cyberspace, where every day projects that call on the constancy and incisive view of millions of readers, hungry for links, commentaries and novelty, come and go. Better to rely on the tenacity of Yoani, Reinaldo Escobar, Claudia Cadelo, Orlando Luis, Miriam Celaya and other voices who post almost daily without avoiding or being devoured by the minefield of politics, which breathes life into this assembly of tones and notes which is the symphony offered to Cubans from diverse angles and styles.

The index of Voices doesn’t include any sections or complex formats, the composition is simple and the design fresh. There is a list of authors, titles and pages. Among the names and articles, the reader will choose from are: Report of the Horde, by Orlando Luis Pardo, to Near But Far Away: The Universe Next Door, by Yoss, who comments on the grotesque parody novel of Eduardo del Llano.

In addition to the above-mentioned, the first issue of Voices includes poems, stories, literature, dissections on cyberspace, cultural issues, assessment of controversial figures, suggestive texts, personal dilemmas and replies to recently published material, including Reinaldo Escobar’s The Reach of the Cyber-Dissidence, and Open Letter to the BBC by Miriam Celaya regarding the irritating Fernando Ravsberg.

Voices also brings us Claudia Cadelo, with Leaders of an Alternative Revolution; Eduardo Laporte with the suggestive I Don’t Know What The Dogs Have; Emilio Ichikawa meditates on Paper and Screen; Wendy Guerra satirizes the rhetoric of the streets in Between Perseverance and Freedom: Ivan de la Nuez reveals the western fascination with The Near East; while Jose A. Ponte, (A Childhood Without Comics …), Juan Abreu (A Sexual Education), Mirta Suquet (Prosperity and Kindness …), Miguel Iturria (Martí: Spirituality and Political Manipulation), and Dimas Castellanos (The Limits of Immobility), complete the scriptural polyphony, flavored by the poems of Maykel Iglesias, Jesús Díaz and Luis Marimon, along with the cathartic Hurricane by Ena Lucia Portela, and the sharp and satirical That One Will Not Return, by Yoani Sánchez, about the phantasmagorical Fidel Castro.

Presented in this way, with names, articles and the bloggers at the end, it is more inclusive and interesting than the Cuban Voices platform, the embryo of that Blogger Journey continued in the Island Blogosphere Alternative Academy, which now adds, multiples and interacts with interested readers on this island in a dialog with time.

September 18, 2010