I feel deep gratitude for being able to contribute, from the press, to the construction of a democratic and free society as the first step towards inevitable political change.
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, 21 May 2024 — At first it was email. At dawn on the 21st of May 2014, when the first cover of 14ymedio was published, most of the content that could be read on this digital site had traveled through email. Now, accustomed to having a web browsing service on our mobile phones, and despite the poor quality of the connection, it is difficult to remember how a newspaper was made without being able to connect directly to the Internet. But that is how it all started.
During the months and years following that birth, the alarm clock in our house was always set for three in the morning. At that time, through Nauta’s mailbox, we received the first articles published each day in the official press, the technical and editorial support of our team in Madrid and the headlines from numerous sites that, through RSS [Really Simple Syndication], gave us a vision of which topics and news was going to mark the beginning of the editorial day.
Even for those of us who had created blogs practically offline and posted blindly on Twitter, updating and nurturing this journal was an extremely complicated and exhausting challenge. We had, of course, the compensation of the words of encouragement from the readers, the gradual growth of the audience, the mentions and links to our work in the pages of other media, the enthusiasm of the reporters on the street and the usual insults from Cuban oficialdom, which blocked our website from the first moment.
Like our nation, which long ago stopped being contained on an Island, this newspaper spans both sides of the borders, it is a child of the globalization of the Cuban issue
Continuing to publish during those extreme moments would not have been possible without the suppor
