“Convivencia” is a digital Socio Cultural publication, plural, participatory and respectful for differences. It promotes a healthful diversity where each person will find a space to share and improve life.
We aspire living together to be an open house shared by Cubans in the Island and in the Diaspora. A sign and an advance of the common Home we should rebuild and reconcile all of us together. The dimension of the contribution is not what matters. We believe in the power of littleness.
We intend to be a transparent space for public debate and proposals. A space useful to link personal freedom and cohabitation in an inclusive and autonomous civil society.
We will try to promote the pacific solution to the conflicts which arise from living together. We seek and share with the others, the truth which is not an exclusive patrimony of anyone. We do not promote confrontation or discredit of persons, groups or institutions. We neither promote the fake confrontation between the civil society and the State or the confrontation between the personal needs and the indispensable institutions of participation.
We think that graduality and moderation in dialogue are the best ways to the changes that Cuba needs.
We wish to be an informal workshop where we can learn how to accomplish a fruitful coexistence of the things we write and the things we do; personal liberation and social framework; responsible participation and power, as a service; governability and governance; identity and change; culture and creation; history and future; sciences, letters and arts; reason and heart; certainty and search; good decisions and mistakes. Living together just the way we are. Creating a better daily existence.
We are a non-denominational site inspired in the values of Christian humanism. We also wish to encourage the dialogue and the coexistence of religions and philosophies, of believers, agnostics and atheistics. We intend to be a nursery for diverse cultural expresions. We are not afraid of diversity. We don’t believe that diversity brings about confusion or relativism. We believe that cultural opening strengthens identity. We think that the exchange among different things or beings and the pluralist cohabitation enriches the human beings and helps the souls of peoples to grow. Unity can be built from diversity.
We are not or belong to any institution, organization or party. The members of our Editorial Board live in Cuba. “Convivencia” is addressed to everybody with no frontiers, however we wish our first addressees were the Cubans inside the Island, though it is the most difficult task, no matter how absurd it might seem. We expect the cooperation of everyone to be able to fulfill this task.
Our modest scheme of social communication looks to the future more than to the past and intends to share the present historical circumstances in Cuba, with their changes and hesitations, their fears, their hope and challenges. The name of the magazine:
Invites to elaborate and revive the framework of civil society in Cuba as a school of coexistence. We believe that civil society is the new expression of democracy.
Summons to find a minimum of common perspectives inside the most wide pluralism in order to create (all persons who want to join us), a new cultural-historic background for Cuba which takes into account the essence of the Cuban foundations and inserts the new conditions that give meaning, safety and hope to the new protagonists of a serene and fulfilled national community with pacific relations towards the international community.
Shares experiences of persons and groups that have managed to trespass the threshold of fear and mistrust and have opened their thoughts and acts, making viable projects of greater civic maturity, a creative empowerment of citizens and a minimum of trust in order to towards the new and the better.
Announces the celebration, in advance, of a national home “where there is room for all”. (1)
All in all, “Convivencia” offers a small threshold for the future of Cuba in which Cubans learn to live their personal freedom without fear and share, without isolation or miseries, the supportive responsibility of coordinating spaces of citizenship and civil society in which we are able to be the real “protagonists of our personal and national history”. (2)
Pinar del Río, Cuba. 28th January 2008
(1) Martí, José. Speech, 10th October 1881
(2) John Paul II in Cuba, 21st January 1998