About

Who we are

Aroma de Cuba is an independent site about Cuba: its news, its history, its culture and its food. It has published in Spanish and English since February 2026.

It is not a newsroom. There is no staff, there are no correspondents, and nobody on the island is reporting for this site. It is edited and published by one person, with the help of an artificial intelligence agent called Zunzún that drafts articles from already-published sources.

Saying that in the first line, rather than burying it in a footnote, is the only honest way to introduce it. A site carrying 1,338 bylined articles suggests a far larger operation than the one behind it.

That person does not publish under their name. It is a deliberate choice and it has a cost: you cannot check their track record or hold them to it by name. What you can do is read exactly what is checked before publication, what has been corrected, and who pays — which is the information a byline would have given you.

What we cover

Four things, in this order of weight:

• Cuban migration — deportations, asylum, I-220A, routes, the diaspora.
• Cuba and the United States — politics, sanctions, negotiations.
• The crisis — blackouts, fuel, prices, shortages.
• Culture and food — music, film, history, recipes, products.

We do not cover sport, celebrity or crime. When a story falls outside that, we either do not publish it or we publish it explicitly citing whoever did.

What we do not do: we have no reporters in Cuba, we conduct no interviews of our own, and we publish no exclusives. Everything here comes from material already published by others, synthesised and given context.

Editorial standards

Five rules. They are implemented in the publishing system itself, not merely written down here:

1. No figure without a source. If a fact cannot be held up by a link to whoever published it, it does not go out.
2. No anonymous quotes. We do not publish speech attributed to “a neighbour in”, “an activist” or “sources close to”. Nobody at this site spoke to that person. The validator automatically rejects copy that tries.
3. Images are labelled for what they are. See Images and AI.
4. Internal links are checked at build time. A broken navigation link stops the deployment.
5. Corrections are recorded, not erased. See Corrections.

How we verify

Every draft Zunzún produces goes through a human review before publication — always the same person, always before rather than after. That review checks three things:

• that every figure appears in the cited source, with the same value;
• that no quote is attributed to an unnamed person;
• that the cover image matches what the text describes and is correctly attributed.

What this review is not: it is not independent verification. We do not call original sources or confirm facts ourselves. What we check is that the text faithfully represents what the source said. If the source was wrong, we repeat the error until someone points it out.

Sources

Articles published from August 2026 carry, at the foot, the list of sources they were written from, each linked directly. Where a source is an original document — a court ruling, an official bulletin, an agency statistic — it is marked as such, because it does not carry the same weight as a write-up of it.

Articles published before that date do not always carry one. Roughly 347 news posts were published with no structured sources. We have not backfilled them: inventing a citation so an archive looks complete is exactly the problem this page exists to prevent. They stay as they are — incomplete, and visibly so.

We link to sources with nofollow. We cite them; we do not vouch for them.

Images and artificial intelligence

The text. Drafts are written by an AI agent. It is declared in every byline, on the agent’s own page, and in the markup search engines read, where it is typed as software rather than as a person.

The images. This needs to be precise, because the state is not uniform:

• 844 covers are AI-generated illustrations and carry the credit “Illustration: Aroma de Cuba (AI)”. Before August 2026, 838 of them carried no label at all and could be read as photographs. They now do.
• 6 covers credited a news outlet for an illustration that outlet never took. The credit was removed, and each of those pages carries its correction.
• 238 covers remain unresolved. They are photographs from agencies and commercial outlets, hosted on our own server, credited to the outlet but with no documented licence. We cannot claim a right to use them. They are pending replacement with original or openly-licensed material.

We state it with the number, because the alternative — claiming “all images are correctly attributed” — would be false on 238 pages.

We never attribute a generated illustration to a news agency.

Corrections

When something is wrong, it is corrected on the page itself, with a note of what changed and when. We do not delete or silently rewrite.

To report an error, write to redaccion@aromadecuba.com with the link and what you believe is wrong. We reply to every report, including the ones where we conclude there is no error.

Ownership and funding

Aroma de Cuba is owned by a private individual, personally. There is no company, no investors, no editorial board, and no organisation behind it.

Funding: none. The site carries no advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate links, no subscriptions and no donations. Hosting costs are paid by the owner.

We receive no funding from any government, party, exile organisation, foundation or NGO — Cuban, American or otherwise. If that changes, it will be announced here before anything changes in the coverage.

Contact

redaccion@aromadecuba.com — corrections, factual errors, questions about how an article was produced, and image takedown requests from their authors.

Write there and the person who edits the site replies. It is the same inbox for everything: there are no departments.