Poet. Director of La Gaceta de Cuba.
It is about the nature of the cultural magazines

Perhaps that is the way how the history of any literary or cultural magazine starts, because although many plans and editorial politics may be developed, only the life, the importance of the next issue, the battles and skirmishes of a determined time, whether it is on its foundation or change of time, will allow us to find the editorial outline, to define it and to get closer to the reasons which moved us to create it. Then our project (and I am talking about something so specific as a cultural magazine in the Latin-American scope) reaches that criolla definition of the grade of "sazón", in a multiple discovery, and allows that publishers, collaborators and readers find the necesary magnet. Then, as well as the designer of the Versalles gardens, it has to "take care of it as a rose". Before this feeling or certainty one can not avoid to ask himself: When will an editorial project which has already been developed not be "en sazón" any more? When will it need to renovate?

It is a great space, by nature paradoxical, the one which the cultural magazines conform. A functional and changing space; diverse and armonic; with more questions than answers; that looks for the balance and the specialization; the unique reader and all the readers. And at the time to convoke them, the question arise: For whom are made the magazines? Which are the interests of their potential readers? With which public wants to meet or meet once again?

Then we ask ourselfs about the role of the publications, because they exist on the basis of a higher contradiction: to live of an art and literature each day renovate, lasting in their qualities, and to reach themselves the miracle of going beyond, of being a message for the future as continent of what was new and vanguard and tomorrow will be the testimony of an epoc. It is the major paradox, the need that they be at the same time "for today" and "for tomorrow", ephemeral and everlasling.

The fruitful tradition of the cultural Latin American magazines (and I will just remind some of the cuban chapter and of this century, like Orto, Revista de Avance, the mentioned Orígenes, Ciclón, Casa) has settled a profession which has been loyal to the ideology of our countries. Its importance provides us the oportunity in places like Mexico or Colombia, Argentina or Cuba, of reading their culture, of substituing the fragmentary discourse of their differencies for a vocation that with the will of the flemish cartographers, leaves us the map of the being and of the world.

Among the magazines, between the canon and the choral, Cúspide can be an example, a publication lost in a cuban sugar central, which between the 37's and 39's wanted to be the "crucible where the hopes of part of the unkown intelectuals were fused together", and had among its collaborators a firm yet then continental such as Fernando Ortiz, or that of a teen-ager of less than fifteen years old called Fina García Marruz, (because wherever they are) the literay magazines usually have universal vocation.

In our experience, La Gaceta de Cuba, founded at the begining of the nostalgic sixties by Nicolás Gullén and some others cuban intelectuals, wanted to reach the universal through the claim of the difference which makes us different but equal, similar to our time, far from generational etiquettes.

There will always come accusations of "capilla", "mafia", or the so criolla "piña" ("ananás" for the culture, which is no more than "the group which the others form... and which does not include me"). Although to be honest, it should be placed on the newspaper office door with all the responsibility that which the master Pedro Rodríguez Ureña wrote: "Not any intelectual work is a product excusively individual, neither social: it is the work of a small group which lives in a high intelectual tension".
Perhaps this may be just nothing more that the theoric justification of the consolidated "capilla".

In each editorial design, even in the most inocent page, the society's beat is going to be, mixing the established culture with the emergent, the doubt and anguish which every spiritual work keeps inside, being preset those tendencies which the reader adopt or reject as the othet half, when he legitimizes proposals and doubts.

Luis Buñuel called the technology of communication "the fourth rider". Without being apocalyptic, in the threshold of the third milenium, the many "consumo" alternatives through the trinity of the merchant, means and and "globalización" take us to many other paradoxes: postmodern magazines in illiterate countries; civil society against the intolerance era; heresy against censorship; standardization in front of the indispensable sound out; unavoidable of the identity.

To make use of the word and the image with a civic function, where their meanings can not be watertight compartments of our reality, but to explore it in that undying imprint, which translated into meals, readings, forms, sounds, colours, we call it culture, although unfortunately in the world we live not even the great minorities with which Ramón Jímenez dreamt as addresses can be participants of that so necesary dialogue for the man.

That is why we aspire that the cultural magazines be more anxious than life. With projects that for their nature are imperfect, but bet on, in front of the despair and the uncertainty, on the old longing of crossing the mirror and survive the fleetingness.