This blog is now celebrating its fifth birthday. In reality, it was the end of December 2007 when the first posts if Sin EVAsion appeared. I remember one of them in particular, “Year-end Yearnings,” in which I mentioned the many friends of my early youth who had emigrated from the country and of whom I kept the fondest memories.
On the date it opened I wasn’t administering my own blog yet, and had only connected to the Internet on a few occasions, so my friend Yoani Sánchez, with her usual cyber-enthusiasm, which — not content with having gotten me all excited and having opened my blog in the blink of an eye which decided me on the adventure — posted the first texts I wrote for this space and urged me to write more.
In January 2008 I started posting, aided and supervised by Yoani, until I was able to fend for myself without causing a disaster. That’s why I mark the true birthday of Sin EVAsion from this moment. Because of this, and also because at some point the cyber-security-agents torpedoed the site , the first posts that came out on this blog were lost and haven’t been recovered.
In any event, due to the haste imposed on me by my scant connection time, there are still many times my fingers slip and I start to experiment with the goblins of the web and things get twisted…
My usual readers know that from time to time the little imps in the keyboard commit technical errors, but so far you have always forgiven me these lapses. Luckily, my good friend and teacher always throws me a lifeline and helps me to clean up the mess. It was also she who clothed the blog in a new image so I could be all dressed up for this new anniversary.
There has been a lot of water under the bridge in the last five years and neither the national scene, nor the Cuban reality nor I are the same. I have seen all around me that conditions have been changing, and quietly but inexorably social forces that were sleeping have begun to move.
This blog is inserted in a wide and varied Cuban phenomenon that one day historians might call “the transition from Castroism to humanism.” I feel privileged and happy to be a part of this. Personally, Sin EVAsion and you have made me a person more apt to debate, more respectful of the opinions of others, more inclusive and — undoubtedly — more useful that I was before.
This is not about a feeling of childish pride for something that doesn’t belong to me because I am no more than a speck in the midst of the yeast. What I really feel from the depths of my heart is gratitude: toward life, that it gave me this opportunity to be in the right place at the right time to discover the magic of expressing myself freely; to my friend Yoani, for initiating me in the rudiments of the fascinating rites of cyber-technology; and to all of you, for having accompanied and sustained me throughout this time, in good times and bad.
Thank you! We will continue together.
January 11 2013
