When we documented the July 11 caravan in Tampa I did not simply upload the photos. I handled the material as if someone were going to dispute it, because at some point someone will.
This is what I learned doing it, in case it helps anyone who goes out to document an event. You do not need to be technical. You need to be methodical.
A photo is not evidence. A properly handled file almost is
The difference between the two is not the camera. It is what you can answer when someone asks you when, where, and how you know it has not been tampered with.
The good news is that your phone already answers most of that on its own: every photo and video carries the date, the time and, if location is on, the exact coordinates. That is called metadata, and it is what turns “I was there” into something verifiable.
The six rules I followed
1. Never touch the originals
Originals go into a folder and are never opened for editing. Everything you do, cropping, compressing, publishing, happens on copies. The moment an image passes through an editor it loses metadata and gains the suspicion of having been retouched, even if all you did was rotate it.
2. Metadata is the evidence, so do not destroy it by accident
Almost every social network strips metadata when you upload a photo. That is good for your privacy and disastrous for your archive. If you send a photo over WhatsApp and then keep only that copy, you have lost the date and the place.
Always keep the copy that came off the camera, without passing through any messaging app.
3. The real date, always, even when it is inconvenient
This one is not negotiable: never change a file’s date or backdate a publication to make your record look longer. If you are documenting today something that happened three months ago, the publication date is today and the date of the event goes in the text.
A single false date, once discovered, contaminates everything else you have published, including what was true. No benefit is worth that risk.
4. Separate what the files show from what you remember
They are two different things and it should be said. “The caravan left Al Lopez Park at 16:56” comes from the file, with the time inside it. “The police helped us move off” comes from my memory: it is testimony, it counts, but it is a different category of claim.
In this blog’s record they sit in two visually distinct blocks on purpose. Mixing them would have weakened both.
5. Say what you do not know
About that day I cannot say which organization called the caravan, nor exactly how many people were there, nor who is speaking at each moment. I wrote it exactly like that in the entry itself.
It looks like it weakens the account. It strengthens it. A document that acknowledges its limits is more credible than one that asserts everything with the same confidence, because it shows judgment was applied. Anyone reading it closely will look for the weak points: better that you find them first.
6. Protect whoever did not choose to be there
In the caravan photo I published, the personalized license plate of the car ahead was legible. I pixelated it. It is not only out of respect for its owner: a file that needlessly exposes third parties is a file someone can use to accuse you of something.
The same goes for the faces of people who are not your family. At a public event there is less expectation of privacy, but that does not oblige you to publish everything. Originals are kept whole; what gets published is thought about.
The exception you have to understand properly
All of the above applies to someone documenting from outside Cuba. Inside the island, the rule inverts on one critical point.
Those same metadata that serve me as evidence place someone in Cuba at a location and a time. A photo of a protest with embedded coordinates is a signed confession if that phone ends up in police hands, and Decree-Law 370 expressly provides for confiscating it (Cubanet).
So, for material coming out of Cuba: metadata gets stripped before publishing, and the intact copy is sent out, to someone who can archive it without risk. Whoever is safe documents; whoever is in danger only hands over and deletes. It is the same logic I set out in the guide on publishing without it costing you your freedom.
And one last thing almost nobody does
Publish on a site of your own, at a stable address that does not change. A post on a social network depends on the platform not deleting it, on the account staying alive, and on privacy settings you do not entirely control.
When something sits on your own domain, with its date, and a copy also exists in an independent web archive, you no longer depend on anyone to prove it existed. That is what turns a memory into a record.
None of these six rules requires special equipment or technical knowledge. They require deciding, before you leave the house, that whatever you are about to record has to survive someone looking at it with suspicion. Which is exactly what is going to happen.