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I launched Cuba's first independent magazine, and that's when my troubles began by Abraham Jimenez Enowa, read by Sebastian Capitan Viveros. A version of this essay was previously published in the dial under the, my friend Carlos Manuel Alvarez asked me to join him on the

newsroom's balcony. Wind gusted in our eyes, elbows on the railing, we stared at the sea as we talked.

We were killing time because neither of us had a computer to work on.

All of them were in use.

At On Cuba, the magazine in Havana where we worked, only editors got their own computers.

The rest of us had to share, which sometimes meant waiting an hour.

Several of my university friends and I had lucked into contributing roles at OnCuba,

and even though we weren't on staff, we were always in the newsroom.

It was a way to keep our group together.

Sometimes over beers, we dreamed aloud about a newsroom coup. We wanted to topple Hugo Cancio, the publisher, and turn his resources, a giant office with multiple rooms and a balcony with sea views,

computers and internet, money, connections, into the media outlet we

wanted, something with our imprint. We agreed that our primary mandate would be investigative

journalism. We'd give up breaking news. Instead, we'd dig, analyze, identify, reconstruct, reveal, and above all, narrate.

Storytelling would be our baseline and our distinctive trait, our flag and our seal.

And it would be our kind of storytelling.

We thought reporting without depth was pointless. Our country's history is dying

because nobody's telling it, we'd say. Our second mandate emerged from the first. We'd write

...