BREAKING NEWS: A Nuestros Lectores...

The editorial board of the website CubaEncuentro.com will split off from the parent organization, the Association "Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana." The entire editorial board of the website, as well as a number of the directors of the magazine, Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, will leave Encuentro and start a new website Diario de Cuba, (http://www.ddcuba.com/), effective immediately.

In an editorial dated tomorrow morning, Friday, December 4, 2009, what is easily the best one-stop website for intelligent, professional, trustworthy, well-balanced, and up-to-the-minute news on Cuban politics, culture, and day-to-day life in general in Cuba will split, with the entire editorial board leaving to start a new venture Diario de Cuba.

An editorial, signed by Pablo Díaz Espí, Editorial Director of the portal Cubaencuentro.com, and Antonio José Ponte, Co-director of the magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, entitled, "A Nuestros Lectores," gives the following explanation (my translation follows):

THE COMPLETE TEAM OF THIS NEWS SOURCE AND PART OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE MAGAZINE ENCUENTRO DE LA CULTURA CUBANA BEGINS A NEW PROJECT, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION TO THE ASSOCIATION "ENCUENTRO DE LA CULTURA CUBANA."

Today, December 4, Cubaencuentro.com arrives at its ninth anniversary. Throughout the nine years it has been our goal to provide news of what is going on in Cuba and about Cuba throughout the world, so as to place at the disposition of our authors and readers a platform for a plurality of opinions.

Since October 7 of this past year, the editorial team of both the portal and the printed magazine were left without an employment connection to the Association "Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana." Since then, it has been only due to our journalistic labors carried out on a voluntary basis that have made the daily appearance of Cubaencuentro.com possible. Many of our collaborators have joined us in this effort, allowing us to publish their texts without payment.

We have come to believe that a project like this one can continue successfully only under a different management model. And, given that Cubaencuentro.com legally belongs to the Association "Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana," we made endless attempts to come to an agreement with the presidency of that entity in order to continue the project independent of the Association.

Those attempts have been unsuccessful despite our willingness to reach a legal agreement. Given this situation, we find ourselves obliged to definitively discontinue our work on the site. The entire editorial team of this website and part of the editorial board of the magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana will now begin to collaborate on a new project, unrelated to the Association "Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana."

This new digital publication, Diario de Cuba, will begin production thanks to the voluntary labor of our journalists, and will depend for now on the trust of our collaborators. It will appear at first on a provisional basis as we move toward a definitive layout and structure.

We know that when we abandon this portal, we will be renouncing the space we have won during these nine long years of labor and we fear that we could also be renouncing a community of readers that has exceeded 200,000 unique visitors per month. However, it is the responsibility we feel toward that very community, toward thousands of readers who were able to read us each day in Cuba via e-mail, toward those journalists in Cuba imprisoned for having published on our site, and toward Cuban culture and politics, that motivates us to move toward this new goal.

We hope we can expect the attention of those of you who have been our daily readers during these nine years. You can find us at http://www.ddcuba.com/ effective immediately.


Pablo Díaz Espí (Editorial Director, Cubaencuentro.com Portal)

Antonio José Ponte (Co-director of the magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana)