By Abel Prieto Jimenez, from Havana, Casa de las Américas, on September 25, 2025
Abel Prieto Jiménez, Views from the Web
At the Third World Meeting of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity that was held in Caracas, Bolivarian Venezuela, in December 2004. Commander Chávez welcomed more than 400 participants from 52 countries and encouraged them to go on the offensive to face “one of the greatest challenges in the world today.”
We must, he said, begin with ourselves, “fill ourselves with humanity, make flesh, nerve, muscle, soul, and body, humanity, the human.” He added that he hoped the event would not pass as just another event, as something ephemeral, but that it would give birth to a “global network or movement for the battle of ideas.”
“How wonderful it would be if this group of intellectuals and brothers and sisters of the world could form a committee with a network, which must also continue to grow, with each member committing to grow in ideas and discussion. (…) …to save humanity, let us organize a network of thinkers and thoughts that will form a critical, creative, transformative force, that will form lamps or torches.”
He insisted on the need to promote “a new humanism”: a concept that leads us directly to Fidel. At that time, the leader of the Cuban Revolution had founded schools for art instructors in all the provinces of Cuba, as a key part of what he called, precisely, the “battle of ideas.” Graduates were to work in educational centers and communities and become, in his words, “standard-bearers of culture and humanism.”
It is commonplace to repeat that the Renaissance displaced God from the center of everything and placed—supposedly—human beings there. That is why we speak of Renaissance “humanism.” Four centuries later, neoliberalism brutally installed the God of Money in that central place. Hence, both Fidel and Chávez rescued the term and used it, loaded with a radically different meaning, as a symbol of rebellion against neoliberal dogma and its consequences.
Chávez also spoke at that 2004 World Meeting about the significance of the alliance between the vanguard of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thought and the popular sectors, and referred to the imminent birth of “a network of social and political forces (…) capable of moving millions of men and women across the continent and, why not, beyond.”
I must say that on my recent trip to Caracas, I witnessed this organic link between writers, academics, historians, journalists, and neighborhood and community leaders, all patriots, all Bolivarians, at the event “210 years after the Letter from Jamaica and 5 years after the founding of the Simón Bolívar Institute.”
I was particularly impressed by the speech of a young Yukpa indigenous woman. Her people, she said, carry Chávez in their hearts and sent a message of love to President Nicolás Maduro. She added: “We will not give up an inch of Venezuelan land. The Yukpas will be on the front line. They shall not pass!”
It was difficult not to be moved when listening to that girl, who was there with her baby a few months old, repeating, in Caracas, in 2025, the slogan that Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, launched in Madrid in July 1936. Today, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela represents a barrier for our region and for the world against the onslaught of imperialism and fascism.
What is Venezuela’s formula for thwarting the repeated US plans to destroy the revolutionary process? a journalist from Al Jazeera asked Chávez (Chávez recounts this in the speech I am commenting on). And his answer was: “a conscious people, but also an organized people, a united people, a people full of courage, full of love.”
We have seen this invincible, “conscious,” “organized,” ‘united’ people in the streets of Caracas, throughout the country, “full of courage and love,” informed in detail of the dangers and threats, but without any fear, serene, and also joyful, responding to the call of their President, enlisting in the militias with pride, determination, and enthusiasm. As the young Yukpa woman said, as Nicolás himself has said, “Fascism in Venezuela will not pass!”
In Caracas, I was able to talk with Venezuelan comrades whom I love and admire greatly, starting with President Maduro, who invited me to his television program, and also with Luis Britto García, Ernesto Villegas, Blanca Eekhout, Pedro Calzadilla, Tarek William Saab, Tania Díaz, Jorge Arreaza, Christiane Valles, Ximena González Broquen, Carlos Sierra, Juan Eduardo Romero, and Luis Berrizbeitia, to name just a few.
And I found it particularly useful and stimulating to exchange views with my brother Miguel Ángel Pérez Pirela, in his role as General Coordinator of the Network in Defense of Humanity, about the relentless war being waged against us in the field of communication, against Venezuela, against Cuba, against all of us who refuse to obey Washington’s orders, and about the tremendous commitment involved in promoting a project founded by Chávez and Fidel and decisively encouraged by Presidents Maduro and Díaz-Canel.
Miguel Ángel showed me what he has been doing to expand the Network’s presence on all possible platforms. He has designed a dazzling website where everything can be found, from the most distant memories to what is happening right now, including communiqués, statements, videos, audiovisual clips of the participants in the workshop “Sovereignty, Imperialism, and Critical Thinking,” interviews, television programs, books, magazines, documentaries—in other words, Everything with a capital E. It is a cutting-edge space, from an aesthetic and informational point of view, allowing the “lamps or torches” that Chávez dreamed of to shine brightly. It is striking and attractive, but without making any concessions to contemporary frivolity.
I understood that this “critical, creative, transformative force” of critical thinking, which the machinery of the Empire and its allies try to censor every day and at all hours, could find new channels to reach far and wide thanks to Miguel Ángel’s talent and determination.
After these encounters with so many lucid and committed people, at La Iguana TV, Telesur, the Pueblos Institute, the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Simón Bolívar Institute, and the International University of Communications, I returned to Havana convinced that the enemies of Venezuela, who are the enemies of Cuba, the enemies of humanity, are doomed to defeat.
In the face of barbarism, hatred, lies, and the stupid arrogance of those who believe themselves to be “superior” and seek to dominate the world, the revolutionary humanism of Fidel and Chávez will always prevail.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English