“Periodismo de Barrio” must try to be the kind of media outlet in which the vulnerable communities see their concerns reflected without any sensationalistic and irresponsible touch. It must try to be a means to assist local government bodies in their decision-making processes. It must become a benchmark of journalism from and for the community. Moreover, it must be a laboratory of journalistic experimentation where creative writing, the use of pictures and videos, and the introduction of roles such as fact-checking can find some room. “Periodismo de Barrio” will be “package-first”, anchored in the real situation of Cuban connectivity.

“Periodismo de Barrio” (Community Journalism) is the result of multiple lessons learned. In 2010, as I tried to understand how the local government structures really worked in Cuba, I decided that I wanted to join them, and I run for local governor. And I won. During my two-and-a-half years in office I lost many battles in my constituency, but there were two essential moments which showed me how powerful these structures could really be.

First, and as a result of the management of its delegates and their work together with the people, Campo Florido was not included in the province of Mayabeque after the last administrative and political division, something publicly acknowledged by Cuban President Raul Castro at a televised session of the National Assembly.

Second, after more than five years and thanks to all the information collected by neighbors, we could put an end to the presence of generators in the village of Guanabo which were considerably harmful to the health of the local residents. Neither of these two small victories would have been possible, however, without the presence of a space for individual communication on Internet that makes these efforts visible at national and international level.

As part of my work at the IPS bureau in Cuba I learned that the stories were in the civil society. Ever since it was established, IPS has promoted a journalism committed to the Global South and, in the case of Cuba, focused – since it came to Havana more than thirty years ago – on issues such as gender, population, local development and climate change, among others. This thoroughgoing dedication to public service has been especially useful to implement this project. Other Cuban state media also address topics related to local development and adaptation to climate change. In this regard, “Periodismo de Barrio” intends to continue these efforts led by other means.

Two hours before the rains in Havana on April 29, I had donated $25 to the fundraising campaign for Nepal. It is a symbolic figure, given that country’s multiple needs, but our spirit of solidarity makes it impossible for us to sit back and do nothing. Several videos posted on the Internet by citizens and many news items have reported the huge losses that Cuba suffered as a result of the heavy rains exactly the same day. It will take years for those who were affected to recover everything that the floods took away, and the media need to follow the news cycle. This event helped gave me a better idea of the concept of “damnificado”.

Who were damnificados? A socially-disadvantaged minority that is part of the Cuban reality of life. Being damnificado is not usually a permanent condition. In Cuba, the damnificados are so as a result of an often unavoidable natural disaster and a high-risk situation that does not arise at the time of the natural disaster. In a global context where climate change cannot be gainsaid, Cuba’s insular condition turns the country into a major risk zone.

In an attempt to keep up the personal tradition of a deeply humane and respectful journalism that is sensitive to other people’s misfortunes, “Periodismo de Barrio” will try to offer a complex perspective on this situation. Although getting access to sources in Cuba is extremely complicated, by being close to the people rather than to the institutions, as well as our access to the Municipal Assembly delegates, make it easier to develop this project.

I believe that a media outlet with such quality standards requires a working group with an excellent level of training, commitment, professional experience, skills and abilities. For that reason, our call is open to all those interested. I do not believe in a media built on loyalty among friends but on respect among colleagues. In this respect, even if the core team will be small, all its members will have equal rights in the decision-making process, setting of the agenda, funding strategies and any other thing related to the management of the media outlet.

“Periodismo de Barrio” is committed to a good, independent and fair kind of journalism capable of harmoniously becoming a part of Cuba’s current communication channels. It is also a huge recognition of the efforts that Cuba makes when faced with disaster situations.

On October, 11th, 2013, thirteen activists stopped two buses in Tucson, Arizona, carrying detained undocumented immigrants as a protest against the federal immigration enforcement program Operation Streamline. The trial began today in the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court. I made a Storify you can read here.

On March 8th, 2015, I went to Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachussets, with a poster that contained the following question: Does having parents of the same sex have a negative effect on children?

One month before, Cuban blogger and journalist, Francisco Rodriguez — better known as Paquito el de Cuba- had won a contest launched by Cibercuba with the most popular picture on Valentin’s day.

“Since I signed our picture up on February, 4th until today when they finally announced we were the winners with 439 votes, I thought about the opportunity that this initiative offered me to make visible other forms of love that never appear in the traditional media of the island during this celebration”, wrote Paquito.

The picture showed the first time his son Javier, Michelangelo, his partner, and Paquito shared some quality time together.

Keeping this experience in mind, I decided to make a shiny poster and go to a public place to ask people if they believed that gay parents could be as good as straight ones.

Most people were very hurry to catch the train and could not answer the question. Other people looked curiously the poster from afar but did not approach to answer. But, among the respondents, most people considered difficult to adress the question.

In the article “Promoting the Well-Being of Children Whose Parents Are Gay or Lesbian” published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2013, Perrin and Siegel write that “extensive data available from more than 30 years of research reveal that children raised by gay and lesbian parents have demonstrated resilience with regard to social, psychological, and sexual health despite economic and legal disparities and social stigma.”

“Children’s well-being is affected much more by their relationships with their parents, their parents’ sense of competence and security, and the presence of social and economic support for the family than by the gender or the sexual orientation of their parents”, say Perrin and Siegel.

However, a controversial study conducted by the sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin and published by the Social Science Research sustained that children raised by a lesbian mother were 10 times more likely to have been touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver while those raised by a homosexual father were 3 times more likely. As to the question of whether they have ever been physically forced to have sex against your will, affirmative answers came from 8% of children of married biological parents, 31% of children of lesbian mothers, and 25% of the children of homosexual fathers.

A couple of months later, The New York Times published a piece pointing out some methodological errors of the research. “He included in the same category the children of stable same-sex couples and children whose parents’ marriage dissolved after a gay affair”, said The New York Times. The newspaper also raised the question of the role of faith and religion in scholarhsip. “Dr. Regnerus has a long history as an outspoken Christian who once said his faith and his scholarship were intertwined,” added The New York Times.

In the research “Quality of Life of Adolescents Raised from Birth by Lesbian Mothers: The US National Longitudinal Family Study”, the authors concluded that “the reported Quality of Life for adolescent offspring in planned lesbian families is similar to that reported by the matched adolescents in heterosexual parent families. This finding supports earlier evidence that adolescents reared by lesbian mothers from birth do not manifest more adjustment difficulties (e.g., depression, anxiety, and disruptive behaviors) than those reared by heterosexual parents”.

Nevertheless, it is not easy to be raised in a lebian or gay family, especially when you are a teenager. Adolescents in American planned lesbian families experienced negative reactions from their social environment associated with their mothers’ sexual orientation. Half of the 78 participating 17-years-olds in a study conducted in 2011 had experienced homophobic stigmatization. “Such experiences usually took place within the school context and peers were most frequently mentioned as the source”, say the authors.

At the end of our day at the T station, a man with two little girls appeared. The girls were running and they didn’t get to look at the poster, but the father did. He walked to the mechanical stairs right in time to reach the girls. I though he was gone. But he came back with his two small girls.

“Read this poster”, he said. “Does having parents of the same sex have a negative effect on children?”, repeated the girls. I couldn’t record the scene. My phone was running out of space. But we have time to ask the man what he think about it. “Having two parents together is what counts”, he wrote.

Meet Pau Pernghwa Kung

It is hard to interview a self-defined “not very active user of social media”. But as I see it, that’s a good quality. It does mean that you’re not going to fill my Facebook wall with videos of cute kittens, which is a blessing in these times. Yep, I said exactly those words to Pau. And he laughed.

Pau Pernghwa Kung is a first year graduate student at Deb Roy’s Laboratory for Social Machines, as you can read here. He is working on “mixing machine learning, network analysis, and journalism in ways that make news sing.”

Machines learning, network analysis and journalism. Sounds interesting… and fancy. But, first of all, Pau, how do you explain what cognitive machines is to a journalist who doesn’t know anything about it?

“Just for clarification”, said Pau, “cognitive machines is actually the old term.” Ok, I screwed the interview up during the first question. Well done, Elaine”, I thought. When Pau left the Lippmann House, I googled “cognitive machine vs. social machine”. And guess what, the first result was this webpage at MIT with the following announcement:

This web site is no longer updated. For current research led by Deb Roy, see the Laboratory for Social Machines.

So, “RIP cognitive machines” – it’s not actually dead – and “Hello, social machine learning.”

According to Pau, social machine learning “consider how technology connects with society to deploy responsive systems across multi-scaled social organizations (e.g., schools, villages, cities, nations) where people and machines can collaborate on problems that can’t be solved manually or through automation alone.” They focus on three dimensions: governance, journalism, and education.

“All public offices and employees are required to have an official Twitter account, which is prominently displayed on everything from police cars and uniforms to garbage trucks”, says Twitter.

Right now they are investigating a Spanish town called Jun. 35,000 people lives there and they are using Twitter to make local government more accessible and more accountable to its citizens. “We are trying to find out which ones of the Twitter features actually work and how can we leverage on their current system to scale up this response to larger cities,” says Pau.

In the case of journalism, the main focus of Pau’s research, is “looking at signals in the social sphere (Facebook, Twitter, and other social media) that actually affect journalism and how the journalists react to the influence of this social sphere”.

“We are trying to build an analytic engine for news and for journalists by first ingesting the news sources (we are looking at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, etc.) and later collecting all the tweets from journalists”, he added.

With all this data Pau can answer some interesting questions such as who is generating more information? Who is the leader among the journalists? Who is more influential on social media? Are the media and the journalists being influenced by social media?

But Pua, I followed your link to your Twitter account and there is just an egg there. Not a single tweet. How come?, I asked.”I feel ashamed about it. I look to Twitter from other people’s accounts but not from mine.”

Last year, Twitter gave $10 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over the next five years to study patterns of public discourse on the Internet, and potentially to build technology that will make online civic action more effective.

Pau also cares a lot about his profile on LinkedIn, thank God. Following his digital fingerprint, I knew he worked as an intern at Epoch Foundation form 2009 to 2011, where he “performed various industry survey for member corporations; and supported biomedical industry business competition”, among other activities.

From 2010 to 2011 he was also part of OnionSky, “a start-up website service focusing on establishing a platform for streaming performing arts multimedia records”. And on July, 2012, he started working at the Digital Video Multimedia Lab at Columbia University.

Pua is also an expert on chess, and Chinese chess. Could you explain the Chinese chess?, I asked, pronouncing the word chess as cheese. I need to stop doing that. Pau seemed to be very confused. I rectified my pronunciation.

“It’s a strategy board game for two players,” he said.”We have the cannon which must jump to capture the king. The generals can not face each other directly and we have areas on the board called the river and palace, which restrict the movement of some pieces (but enhance that of others); and placement of the pieces on the intersections of the board lines, rather than within the squares.”

Easy peasy. If you want to start playing the Chinese chess you can find a first lesson here and order a magnetic table here.

He also used to play the violin and the saxophone. Where did you learn?, I asked. “When I was very young. I played for eight or nine years. I was with an instrument band.”

At the end, I tried to do something I saw at the Inside Actors Studio program with some very Cuban variations. Pau, can you tell me the first word that comes to your mind when I say the following words? “That’s fun,” he said.

“MIT”, I said.

“Media Lab”, he answered.

“Facebook”, I said.

“Twitter, I guess”, he said.

“Social Learning”, I said.

“Teaching?”, he answered

“Sprite”, I asked because he was drinking one.

“Coke”, he answered.

“Taiwan”, I said.

“Mainland”, he answered.

Others entered using airports with passports of a third country and applied for political asylum.

Between 2005 and 2014 more than 15,000 people arrived on rafts and managed to touch land. In the same period, 17,503 Cubans were intercepted in the Straits of Florida and repatriated to the island, says Cafe Fuerte.

Cuban Immigration in US (2005-2014)

The Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) is a law approved by the Congress on 1966 that allows Cuban immigrants to stay legally in the United States after physically being in the country for one year and one day. Immigrants from other countries need to have a sponsor which could be a family member or an employer to apply to come to the United States legally.

Statistics provided to the website Café Fuerte by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) show an alarming increase in the number of Cubans immigrants, specifically after the Cuban immigration reform approved in 2013 eliminated the “exit permit”. This was an expensive mechanism that that previously controlled the citizens’ right to travel out of the island.

After President Obama announced a change in the relationship with Cuba on December, 17th, 2014, many people on the island grew “worried that America’s long-standing immigration benefits for Cubans are now in jeopardy,” says the Washington Post.

When the border is the sea

Rafters (Photo courtesy of the Public Affairs Office, 7th Coast Guard District, Miami, Florida)

“Between 1959 and 1994, in defiance of the law, more than 63.000 citizens left Cuba by sea in small groups and reached the United States alive,” says the website Balseros, a digital archive to explore the experiences of Cubans who left the country in small boats, homemade rafts and other unusual crafts. At least 16.000 additional rafters did not survive the crossing.

“My name is Inés Brooks,” says someone who claims to be from Camagüey, Cuba, in the website Cuban Rafters. During the last years, this website has been publishing life stories from people who came to United States during the crisis of 1994.

We built the floor of the raft with wood and put large gas tanks and high rebar to protect ourselves. Although we move slow at sea, we did not have to paddle. We arrived to Guantánamo on September 3rd, 1994. I was there until January 31st, 1995. I didn’t work at the base, but I do know a lot of people who worked in the hospital, while others worked in warehouses or distributing food.

The number of people leaving Cuba in rafts declined since the last decade, specially compared to the crisis of 1994. Many of these rafters are intercepted at sea and returned to Cuba by the Coast Guard. However, in December, 2014, “the Coast Guard intercepted 481 Cubans in rickety boats and rafts, a 117 percent increase from December 2013,” said the Washington Post.

God bless Spain

In the fiscal year 2013, 9.700 Cubans arrived at Miami International Airport (MIA) with Spanish or other European nationality passports and qualified as refugees under the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), says Café Fuerte. More than 180.000 Cubans have become Spanish citizens under the Historic Memory Law (also known as the Grandchildren Law), which came into effect in December of 2007.

The Historical Memory Law recognizes the right to Spanish nationality to persons whose father or mother was originally Spanish and grandchildren of those who lost or had to renounce to their Spanish nationality as a result of exile.

“The number of Cubans holding a Spanish passport tripled between 2009 and 2011, when it hit 108,000. Many of those Cubans fly to Mexico or the US on their Spanish passports, then present their Cuban passports to US officials,” says The Guardian.

But some of them are living in the United States with Spanish passports, as it is the case of Daniel Hernandez, who never applied for the Cuban Adjustment Law.

Mexico: crossing the border

Osvaldo Perez is the director of the Score At The Top’s Wellington school. Conveniently located on Southshore Boulevard in the heart of Wellington, Florida. Perez has managed this learning center for years, which sole purpose is to serve students from Wellington and equestrians from across the world. The staff includes over twenty professional teachers and tutors that provide SAT/ACT test prep, college and school guidance, and private schooling.

Osvaldo Perez

People calls him just “Offi.” When someone dare to call him Osvaldo, he answers: “That’s my father”. This can be read in the school website, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. “I came to the US through Mexico,” says Perez. “I got a visa to participate in a religious event (…) then we flew to Ciudad Juárez where the immigration authorities detained us for two days and forced us to come back to Mexico City. At that point, they gave us three days to leave Mexico either back to Cuba or any other country.”

What did Osvaldo do? You can listen to his story here

From Canada to Mexico with Love

In recent years, many highly skilled Cuban professionals in Cuba have left the country. After the Cuban migratory reform was approved, some of them apply for fellowships. The main international destinations are Mexico, Canada, and Brazil, among others. The fellows receive good stipends compared with the average salary in Cuba. And, it is also a safer and more expedite way to come to United States.

Rolando Marin and Thais Pineda

“A month ago, my wife and I came to United States”, says young programmer Rolando Marin.

I applied for a fellowship in Mexico and she applied for another one in Canada (…) She spent like 50 minutes at the border of Canada. But my history was more difficult. I took a flight from Mexico City to Chihuahua City and after that I went to Ciudad Juarez. I spent almost six hours at the border point.

You can listen to the rest of the story here

Even in a context of political détente with the United States, the causes behind the Cuban migration have not disappeared. Low wages, lack of profesional opportunities for young people, difficulties with housing, public transportation, and food shortages are among the reasons mentioned by Cuban immigrants. On the other hand, the United States has been perceived historically as a prosperous country where you can get what you want if you work hard enough. This is, of course, another misrepresentation of a more complex reality.