Edited by Ed Newman on September 3, 2024
Alberto Prieto, photo: Bill Hackwell
The president of Casa de las Américas, Abel Prieto, former Minister of Culture of Cuba, reflected on the need to promote and develop an anti-fascist culture and thought in the face of the advance of fascism in Latin America, the Caribbean and the rest of the world.
“I believe that all this work of sowing ideas, sowing awareness around a great global anti-fascist front is important. It is very important that we work on the creation of this front on a world wide basis,” he declared during an interview in Resumen Latinoamericano and republished in the magazine República y Poder.
Abel Prieto declared that “many times the left has neglected the issues of communication; The right has not ignored them for a second.”
“The left has dealt relatively little with these issues, and yet they are vital, like cultural colonization itself,” said Abel Prieto, arguing that “the direction of voters towards far-right candidates through social networks is proven.”
Referring to the statements of the Spanish-French journalist Ignacio Ramonet, Abel Prieto declared that “he insists that we should not confuse this extreme right with that of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco; qualitatively, there are features that differentiate them.
And he explains —and other scholars of the matter agree— that after all these years of neoliberalism, this model that began to be applied with great rigor in the 1980s of the last century, had in the Chile of Augusto Pinochet a kind of terrible test case.”
Explaining that “along with Pinochet’s crimes, the experts, the economists of the Chicago School, came to impose this experiment in which the State is reduced to the minimum expression and it is the market that imposes its laws,” the Cuban intellectual said that in the face of the establishment of this neoliberal model there has been no lack of hesitation, caution, and mediocrity on the part of the left or the pseudo-left.
According to Abel Prieto, the left “has allowed itself to be captured by this doctrine and has not given alternative responses to the implacable market imposed in all areas and which has been creating an effect of despair.”
Among the lines highlighted by the Cuban intellectual, when analyzing Ramonet’s speech, he highlights the rejection of migration as one of the springs that feeds the ranks of the new fascism.
“The idea that immigrants are going to take away jobs, that they are going to receive help from governments, to cloud the white race, to bring mixed race, detestable, mediocre, savage, barbaric customs” supports, according to Prieto’s explanation, the famous fable of the impending invasion of barbarians who come to invade us.
In this sense, he stressed that “against this are the theories of white supremacy, of hatred of those who are different, of women, of feminist movements, up against those who have a truly rabid fury.”
When analyzing the figure of the writer Agustín Laje, Abel Prieto insists that the speech of the lecturer and political scientist who represents the current Argentine Government reveals that “there is doctrine behind a madman like Javier Milei.”
“This individual speaks of neo-Marxist lesbian feminism; imagine what kind of denomination he found to hate and give arguments against feminism” he stressed.
“Desperation, uncertainty, and lack of answers have nourished the ranks of the new fascism; traditional politics promises and promises and delivers nothing, and the number of young people who join neo-fascist movements and follow neo-fascist demagogues is tremendous,” says the Cuban intellectual.
He gave two examples: Argentina and Spain. Regarding the Latin American country, Prieto says that Milei’s voters are mostly young people, and that the Spanish far-right force, Vox, is being supported by teenagers.
“In Spain, Vox is being nourished by teenagers, boys who are taking their first steps into politics, hating women, immigrants, Blacks, Arabs, those who have a sexual orientation other than the orthodox, LGTBIQ+, gay communities. Fascism gives these bewildered, confused people the idea that they are part of a community,” he explained.
Abel Prieto told the story of the American Jewish journalist, Talia Levin, who infiltrated neo-Nazi groups in the United States, and declared “that what many people are looking for is to understand things in a simple way, that the Nazis say what is bad and what is good in a very simple way, without nuances, and they reach those people who are looking for simple, elementary, primitive answers to the crossroads they live every day.”
Source: Radio Havana Cuba