Iroel Sánchez
The Third Festival of EcuRed contributors will be held on May 28 and 29. Right after the second Festival a year ago, I wrote the following:
Today
marks the beginning of the Second Festival of contributors to the Cuban
online encyclopedia EcuRed, and I have a feeling that it’s doomed to
not make headlines.
Months
ago, a Click Festival, poorly attended by without a master, splashed
across the front pages of the mainstream media, but it has fallen into
oblivion since. When it comes to Cuba, everything is possible. If a
handful of people meet to lie or bark –cats indeed bark, especially if
they’re just a few– the international news agencies rush to cover the
event. However, if more than one hundred people from all over the
country discuss how to improve and enhance Cuba’s most visited website
(most of them on a volunteer basis), hardly anyone will know about them.
“Talk nonsense and travel with the
CIA”, I heard someone say recently. Welcome to this upside-down world
where what you say outranks what you know and more fame comes from what
you collect than from what you share. “To serve in silence and from the
bottom”, as Rubén Martínez Villena advocated, is old-fashioned. But a
hundred thousand visitors per day, including many foreign correspondents
based in Cuba, do more and better than a few phrases with no grip on
reality and which the wind and time will surely polish off eventually.
Nowadays EcuRed boasts an average of more
than 200,000 daily hits, and over 80 Cubans from all provinces will
come to the meeting of its contributors. And yet, the media is too busy
fabricating the legend of a newspaper read by just a few which everybody knows who’s paying for except the same media in charge of turning it into a news item.
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