By Julio Meza Díaz
It is interesting and challenging how Cuban people create their own intranet. Besides the surveillance from the state, they make each weak a complicated task that I only tried for a few hours. This is a summary about my attempt to organize a little list for the Paquete Semanal.
My first step was to take a decision about who would be my demographic. I remembered that Cuba has an important literary tradition. For this reason, I assumed that there are currently many readers interested in literature. I decided then to create the Paquete Semanal for people that is interesting in recent news about literature from Latin America and the rest of the world.
The process to prepare the Paquete Semanal was easy in the beginning because I had a time limit; that is, I had to choose only among information from no more than two weeks ago. However, I established another rule for my work. This consisted in trying to choose a diverse content. That meant that I had to collect literary news about writers from different literary traditions.
I started collecting literary news from Argentina and Mexican newspapers. In those sources, I found a lot of current information about classic and contemporary writers from Latin American, United States and Europe. It was difficult to find out literary news from Asian, African or Arab writers. I concluded that to create a diverse Paquete Semanal would be challenging.
After that, I realized that I had only used sources in Spanish. As an automatic response, I began to access to the New Yorker, a mainstream literary web page. I was surprised for my own decision. I do not doubt quality of the New Yorker´s readings. However, I feel that this is not the only idea that pushed me to search its web but rather other reasons, like the marketing of its brand and its legitimacy into the literary field.
I leaved the New Yorker web page and paid attention to the CBC web. At that moment, I understood that it was necessary to include literary news from unknown web pages, because those non-hegemonic webs are important to build a diverse Paquete Semanal.
Preparing the Paquete semanal is a challenging task, especially if someone wants to prepare it with a real diverse information. In my case, my principal problem was to choose my sources of information. I think that it is important to know first which sources will be used before collecting the specific news. That is also important because a flash drive has a limited space and cannot host all news from each source.
