By José Ernesto Nováez Guerrero on February 5, 2024
The current attack against the Spanish based Cubainformacion news service is spreading widely in certain independent media circles but it is practically invisible in the big cartelized media. Cubainformación is an essential international news service that focuses on the defense of the political and social project of the Cuban Revolution, which, through its various news outlets, tries to show the other reality of the island, precisely the one that does not fit with the narrative unilaterally imposed by the powers that be.
In a recent interview with Octavio Fraga for the blog Cine Reverso, José Manzaneda, founder and director of the project, commented on the causes of this legal accusation. The so called Prisoners Defenders, an organization based in Madrid, particularly its president Javier Larrondo, are the ones who have initiated the criminal case against the media and the Euskadi-Cuba association for libel, slander and hate crimes.
The accusation is based on a sentence included in one of the investigations published in the media about the organization Prisoners Defenders, which was later withdrawn.
Manzaneda, Cubainformación and Euskadi-Cuba are currently facing a possible sentence of six years in prison and 50,000 euros in damages, if the legal process continues and a court finds them guilty.
Jose Manzaneda – photo: Bill Hackwell
About Prisoners Defenders, Manzaneda himself explains that, “(…) it is very specialized in legal issues, in the sense that it writes reports on alleged human rights violations, alleged political prisoners on the island and reports against Cuban medical cooperation (…) reports that are then used by the U.S. government in its policy of aggression, sanctions and blockade against Cuba.”
Prisoners Defenders is part of the network of organizations, individuals, “independent” media, etc., with which they try to fulfill a series of objectives of the policy against Cuba including:
1) construction of an ideologically determined narrative with the support of abundant “evidentiary” material elaborated by this network to symbolically erode the Cuban project and legitimize the hostile actions of the U.S. government.
2) drown out any voice or narrative that pretends to present the Cuban reality from another angle, as well as discourage any effort of solidarity with the island;
3) to punish and terrorize through symbolic, legal or any other kind of lynching anyone who dares to defend the Cuban Revolution;
4) to be amplifiers of a neoliberal and imperialist perspective, disguised in various ways, depending on the public to which it is intended to be sold.
The attack against Cubainformación is, lesson that no one who defends the Cuban Revolution or who is adverse to their narrative is going to be safe. It is the local variant, so to speak, of lawfare as a political tool of reaction, which has been widely used against leftist governments in Latin America.
In a context of important political changes at the global level, the ultra-right is reorganizing and undertaking a new offensive in the region, encouraged by the reactionary government of the United States, whether Democrat or Republican and currently emboldened by the triumph of Javier Milei in Argentina, in the wake of a five-year period in which figures like Donald Trump and Bolsonaro in Brazil opened important paths for the reactionary onslaught.
In their scenario, the Cuban Revolution must disappear. It must disappear as a fact that it still exists, despite the immense challenges that Cubans must overcome, including being a symbol that a different model is not only possible, but increasingly necessary.
To defend Cubainformación and its director is to defend the existence of voices that disagree with the mainstream corporate financed information that dare to look where others do not look. It is to defend the existence of projects such as the Cuban Revolution, imperfect like the women and men who have made it, but also immense in its achievements and its history. It’s mission is to not to allow the machines of liberal thought, its ideological, political and economic excesses to impose themselves through fear, harassment and force.
José Ernesto Nováez Guerrero is a researcher, journalist and the Coordinator of the Cuban chapter of the Network in Defense of Humanity.
Source: Cuba en Resumen