By Stella Calloni on August 26, 2023
Fidel with Stella Calloni
In reality the Cultural Battle began with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959. There is nothing similar in history: an island in the Caribbean surrounded by dictatorships defeats a dictator imposed by the United States and achieves the surrender of the army and the police, subdued by the empire, while the economic power, the partners and mafias of that power fled to Miami.
“You cannot be committed to the Revolution if you are not committed to the people” responded Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel during an interview conducted in Havana last March by journalist and political scientist Ghassan Ben Jeddou, president of the Board of Directors of Al Mayadeen.
He also congratulated the Cubans “because in such a difficult moment, they have a president like this, while elsewhere they seem to have come out of museums” when comparing him with the rulers of his own region “for the lack of ideas, and creativity to resist” said Ben Jeddou to the renowned journalist Arleen Rodriguez of Cubadebate. He was surprised by Cuba’s capacity for resistance in the face of U.S. aggressions, describing the Caribbean island “as a beacon of dignity”.
Undoubtedly in Díaz Canel’s answers we find intact the legacy of Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz and the persistence in these times of the authentic revolutionary principles.
That legacy is essential in the face of the United States’ attempts to return to the years of 1823, based on the colonial Monroe Doctrine par excellence in the 19th century, which translated as “America (South) for the Americans (North)”, disputing the European colonizers’ control of our territories and their immense wealth.
An almost impossible dream became a reality for the whole region and the people understood that if the Cuban revolutionaries recovered their homeland from the bloody hands of the empire, whose headquarters were only 90 miles away, they would rescue the region from immobility and resignation. It was undoubtedly an unimaginable cultural event. In his defense plea when he was arrested for leading the attempt to take the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba and Manuel de Céspedes in Bayano, on July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro, reviving the Cuban hero José Martí, already spoke of education and the fulfillment of the Moncada program, anti-colonial and liberating in all its concepts.
The need for an organized population leaving behind ignorance could not be postponed. Incorporating the exploited and humiliated majorities was a step towards their redemption and their conscious inclusion in the revolutionary project. The issue of education was on the table of priority measures and the great cultural battle would be expressed in the literacy process that began in January 1961, and which had begun to be elaborated in 1959, as well as the Agrarian Reform. There was practically no public school, and of course the majority of the people had no access to education.
“The concrete tasks are focused on achieving universal access to education for all Cuban children and youth, on the dignification of the work of teachers, the incorporation of unemployed teachers and the training of hundreds of new educators, on the adequacy and requalification of the Ministry of Education (MINED) and the other institutional structures” wrote professor Felipe de Jesus Perez Cruz, historian of Cuban literacy.
He added that “Those teachers, together with the land title, is the first thing that symbolizes -and concretizes- the triumphant Revolution in the conscience of the man of the countryside”.
On April 28, 1959, Casa de las Americas was born, the largest center of cultural irradiation, not only in the region but in the world, which has survived the most difficult times with an incomparable solidarity. Through this cultural institution we learned and valued the past and present of the cultural roots of our peoples, especially of the forgotten Caribbean, but also of Africa, Europe, Asia, which meant a wave of admiration and respect from intellectuals around the world.
The revolutionaries of the Sierra Maestra also understood the need for their own press and created their own media. It is impossible to imagine that clandestine press, which in one way or another reached the most advanced sectors of the region.
For this reason, after the triumph, they saw the need to break the isolation and transmit the revolutionary thought and the truth about the struggle of a heroic people that went out from the Sierra Maestra like the David of the Bible, to fight the giant Goliath until they defeated him.
Since before the revolutionary triumph that achieved the overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, imposed by the United States in 1952, the owners of giant media corporations were already acting to turn the revolutionaries into bandits, as they said of all the heroes of Our America who fought for liberation.
Knowing the enemy they faced, shortly after the triumph of the revolution, the commanders Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara met, accompanied by the Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti, who arrived to interview the fighters in the Sierra Maestra, and joined the revolutionary process. At that meeting they decided how to confront the media war, which was trying to destroy the roots of the nascent Revolution and isolate it.
“At first, almost 400 journalists from the continent were invited to travel to Havana to verify the campaign of slander and lies about the Cuban reality. During that meeting, the historic leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, pointed out the imperative for the peoples of Latin America to have a news agency to disseminate their reality, manipulated, silenced and slandered by the big information transnationals”, wrote Ernesto Vera Mellado, Cuban journalist and revolutionary, at the time. Among those invited were Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos María Gutiérrez, Rodolfo Walsh and Aroldo Wall, among other extraordinary journalists and writers, who took up the commitment to accompany the creation of a Latin American news agency and to write.
On June 16, 1959, Prensa Latina was founded under the direction of Masetti, also accompanied by renowned Cuban journalists. To this day Prensa Latina continues to fulfill its revolutionary objective in the midst of infinite difficulties due to the blockade imposed on Cuba by the United States, as do the radio stations that gave continuity to its task in the Sierra Maestra. And then would come Cuban Television, the cinema, everything that has managed to sustain the revolution. In addition, to demonstrate the achievements such as education, free health care or the scientific progress that continues to surprise the world, among many others.
Spreading the truth, but also the culture of the people, the diversities and complexities of our history was and is to confront the hegemonic power. The existence of Prensa Latina (PL) is a long and heroic battle to maintain correspondents around the world, increasingly resisting the suffocating siege of war against the island, which has become a true crime against humanity, due to the serious consequences it has on the population.
In June 1961, between the 26th and 30th of that month, the creation of the National Council of Culture was debated during meetings of Cuban intellectuals. At the end of the meeting, the first meeting between Commander Fidel Castro and Cuban writers and artists took place at the National Library.
At the beginning of his speech, the Cuban leader analyzed what the role of intellectuals and their commitment to the people meant for the revolutionary process, among other concepts. He began by maintaining that “no one has ever assumed that all men or all writers or all artists have to be revolutionaries, just as no one can assume that all men or all revolutionaries have to be artists, nor that every honest man, by the fact of being honest, has to be a revolutionary.
“Revolutionary is also an attitude before life, revolutionary is also an attitude before the existing reality. And there are men and women who resign themselves to that reality, there are men and womenwho adapt themselves to that reality; and there are men and women who cannot resign themselves nor adapt themselves to that reality and try to change it: that is why they are revolutionaries” (…) Of course, whoever has that attitude towards life, whether or not he is a revolutionary, whether or not he is an artist, has his aims, has his objectives. And all of us can ask ourselves about those aims and those objectives that are directed towards the change of that reality, are directed towards the redemption of man; it is precisely man, the fellow man, the redemption of his fellow man, that constitutes the objective of revolutionaries.” He remarked that “if we revolutionaries are asked what matters most to us, we will say: the people. And we will always say: the people in its real sense, that is to say, that majority that has had to live in exploitation and in the cruelest oblivion. Our fundamental concern will always be the great majorities of the people, that is, the oppressed and exploited classes”.
Furthermore, he pointed out that “the people is the main goal. We must think of the people before we think of ourselves. And that is the only attitude that can be defined as a truly revolutionary attitude”.
It was the moment in which the bases of the Cultural Revolution would be established and also this happened within the framework of the attacks of the United States, including the attempted invasion against Cuba (April 17-19 – 1961 Playa Girón) which was defeated, considered the first victory against the empire in Our America. Meanwhile, the media and psychological warfare was in full growth, trying to confuse some intellectuals on key issues.
It was happening in the middle of the “cold war” and the empire was very clear about the need to destroy the culture, identity and historical memory of the Cuban people, as it is doing in these new counterinsurgency wars of low intensity, to create zombie populations (something like the living dead) all over the world and in this century.
We are day by day under the intensity of a psychological war and imperial games resorting, among other maneuvers, to impose new names to confuse and colonize our language as well. An example is to call psychological warfare Lawfare, as if it were something new, when it has been applied since the early days of the “cold war”. Or the term Fake News, which means “false news” and a long list of words that
people repeat without understanding their meaning, which shows the progress of cultural recolonization, among other evidences.
Currently, they have managed to infiltrate the judicial structures in almost the entire region, and to concentrate most of the private mass media, in a task that has been going on since their owners, big businessmen, found in the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) their place in the world of disinformation.
The IAPA, presented at the beginning (1943) as an association that arose from the need to fight against Nazism, would soon show its true objectives. Slowly, permanent disinformation became an essential weapon in the different forms of warfare that the empire applies in all the countries of the world. Today we are subjected to a very rapid process of recolonization.
Cable television has allowed the United States to stage a veritable academy of violence on a daily basis, including increasingly savage methods of torture. Everything explodes, everything blows up. That is what young people see, among terrifying monsters.
At this moment more than 95 percent of the dis-information and manipulation circulating in the world is under the aegis of the State Department and the Pentagon of the United States and its main allies Great Britain and Israel, as well as the largest corporations in the world such as the Bildelberg Group and the colonized European Union, which decide the destiny of humanity.
The revolutionary leadership from the first days of the triumph had taken in its hands the cultural issue and the registration of a deep identity. The dialectic is based on this reality, understanding that intellectuals today, as never before, have to work together with the peoples, who remain in a state of constant rebellion and one day wake up and storm the streets, many times without leadership, as is happening in different countries of our region.
Unfortunately, since these leaders are missing and especially in the popular bases, there is a lack of organization, precisely when we are facing a new Geostrategic project of Recolonization of Our America based on documents created by the “thinking tanks” to act in the conflicts of the 2000’s (XXI century) and they are doing it. The new technologies under their control empower all their plans. In spite of this, the irreversible decadence of the empire is dragging its most dependent partners into the abyss and destruction.
The political leadership of Latin America must understand that as long as our countries do not achieve full sovereignty and independence, the dream of a real “democracy” with active participation of the people, with the rescue of historical and cultural memory, is impossible. Moreover, in the XXI century we have gone back to the times of the imperial expansion of the XIX century and a new process of national liberation is being proposed.
Source: Cuba en Resumen