What motivates a magazine? The confidence of a cultural commitment that wants to be shared. Every magazine is a child of its epoch because of its testimony, determined by the authors that make it. Images and texts, names and fundamentals create the inside and the outside of an endless publication.
When José Martí wrote about the importance of the Venezuelan magazine Revista Venezolana for Bolívar’s homeland, and even for the world, he said: "it comes to make room for all written works that relates in a visible, direct and healthy way with the Venezuelan history, poetry, art, customs, families, languages, traditions, crops, traffic and industry. And saying Venezuela, we say America: suffering the same evils, and eating the same fruits". The intentions and achievements of La Gaceta de Cuba have not been so far, since its foundation: cultural reporter of its time and, at the same time, historic bridge joining past and present.
Habitus cultural, as it was remembered by Luis Álvarez Álvarez, the magazine comes to connect humanity in the shareable knowledge between reading and happened, interviews with relevant personalities from all times; and those texts or topics that, while being rescued or treated for the first time, lose their succession in favor of an unexpected but thanked synchrony.
Documents well brought from the past give credit to cultural confrontations that are necessary for the national La Gaceta de Cuba reaches its number 3, corresponding to May-June, 2018.
Photography is back to its pages. I prefer it to images resolved in the outlines. The design is by Marla Cruz Hechavarría. Front and back covers with illustrations by Ángel Ramírez. Six sections ("Talking to the other", "Invitation to read", "Narratives of the nation"…) in the present number. Among the usual collaborators (Marilyn Garbey, Carlos Espinosa, Roberto Méndez, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, David Mateo, Frank Padrón…) and others rescued such as José Lezama Lima and Julio Le Riverend, there is a primacy of the interviews to Corina Mestre, Jorge Luis Prats and Graziella Pogolotti, Ángel Ramírez and Laura Ruiz Montes.
The interview is thanked because it is an appreciated genre due to the own and other people’s de Cuba and after that, the narrative proposals and the essays. Out of the last ones we can highlight "La paloma de Guillén vuela por el cielo del paladar", by Roberto Méndez Martínez, "Habana Ink. La poesía de Larry J. González", by Ángel Pérez and "Introducción al discreto humor de Jorge Mañach", by Laidi Fernández de Juan.
The section of "Critic" is very varied and I celebrate "Los aldabonazos de Ares", by Adelaida de Juan and "Un viaje por la lengua del Toar", by Domingo Carlos Lechuga.
It is unnecessary to analyze text by text to acknowledge the quality in topics and style of each of them. It is the diversity of ideas and the authors’ poetic what determines the magazine is so read. And besides the diversity in the exposition, the careful edition by Mabel Machado and the corrections by Vivian Lechuga and Jamila Medina Ríos cannot be forgotten. Norberto Codina, Arturo Arango and Nahela Hechavarría have a more than blessed choral support.
Initiating a magazine involves a daring reason and always a dose of hope until the day it comes out of the printing house. But, continuing it? It takes a resolved will of and for the culture. Every magazine, just like José Martí would acknowledge again, "does not make a profession of faith, but of love. It is not announced scandalously different way, it grew and still extends, the magazine of the cultural magazines in this country".
Writers, artists and readers from Cuba celebrate the publication of its most recent number.
Translation by Alberto Morales