By Emilia Trabucco on September 5, 2026
Abel Prieto, foto: Bill Hackwell
Interview with the president of the Casa de las Américas, Abel Prieto Jimenez
A writer, essayist, and one of the leading figures in Cuban cultural policy in recent decades, Abel Prieto Jiménez served for many years as president of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), was Minister of Culture from 1997 to 2012 and from 2016 to 2018, and served as an advisor to the leadership of the Revolution. Since 2019, he has presided over Casa de las Américas. His intellectual and political career has been closely linked to Fidel Castro and the major debates surrounding culture, identity, hegemony, and decolonization.
On the centennial of Fidel Castro’s birth, NODAL speaks with Abel Prieto at a particularly complex moment for Cuba, Latin America, and the Caribbean: an intensification of the U.S. offensive against the island, an energy and economic crisis, internal transformations within Cuban society, the rise of the new right and neo-fascist movements, the concentration of media and technological power, and a profound reconfiguration of the global landscape.
What tools Fidel’s thought still offers for understanding this historic moment, and what political, cultural, and organizational conditions are necessary to build revolutionary projects capable of representing the vast majority—these are the central questions from which Prieto, within the framework of the celebrations marking Fidel’s centennial, shares his reflections, going beyond mere remembrance and tribute to the Latin American revolutionary leader.
Cuba is going through a particularly complex period, marked by an intensification of the imperialist offensive. What concrete facts and figures allow us to gauge its scope today? Is the term “blockade” still sufficient to describe what is happening?
What we are dealing with now is a large-scale suffocation campaign. The word “blockade” falls short. They have drastically curtailed the ability to import fuel; but also to import food, raw materials for manufacturing medicines, medical equipment—everything, absolutely everything. They have exerted enormous pressure to dismantle Cuban medical cooperation in Latin American and Caribbean countries and have managed to bring several governments to their knees. They have brought tourism to a standstill; foreign companies that had been working with us for years have pulled out, fearing retaliation from the U.S. government; they threaten anyone who wants to sell us oil or anything else.
Several shipping lines and airlines have suspended their ties with Cuba. Seven thousand containers of basic goods destined for our country have been stranded at various points throughout the Caribbean.
The U.S. government has imposed sanctions on Cuban companies with the aim of damaging essential sectors. It has also targeted organizations and even individuals, such as our Minister of Public Health. This is sickening and insane.
They have caused the infant mortality rate to double, left tens of thousands of Cubans waiting for months for surgery, and forced us to endure extremely difficult conditions. They hope that by punishing the Cuban people in this way—pushing them to the limit so cruelly—the expected “social upheaval” will occur; that is, that the people will rise up against the government, thereby providing a pretext for a “humanitarian intervention.”
On the contrary, I believe that the majority of our population has become more radicalized and is now more anti-imperialist than ever. There may be some confused people—those who think the Yankees need to come once and for all and “solve the problem”—but those who are confused or won over to “the Yankee solution” are a minority. The vast majority of the Cuban people know full well who is responsible for this ruthless blockade and are prepared to defend their Revolution at all costs. That people would never accept a return to the colonial status from which we freed ourselves in 1959.
It is the people who actively participate in preparing to defend the country. Now, in Cuba, every week, every Friday, a National Day of Defense is organized, based on a concept created by Fidel and Raúl during the Reagan era, when we were on the verge of being invaded by the Yankees: “the War of the Entire People,” as Fidel dubbed a defensive concept that involves the mass participation of the people in the response to a military invasion—from communities, from neighborhoods, from defense zones.
On August 25, Trump signed an extension of the embargo against Cuba through September 2027, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, and that very same day, scientists at the Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) announced the creation of a new drug for the treatment of cancer. And this very week, amid such a complex situation, the start of a new school year on September 1 in all the country’s schools and the continuation of the International Book Fair in the central provinces made headlines.
On the one hand, we are preparing to confront imperialism in its fiercest and most dangerous form and its absurd accusations that we represent “a threat to its national security.” On the other hand, we are constantly seeking creative ways to move forward in science, medicine, education, culture, and the economy, through the implementation of the reforms approved in July by the National Assembly.
This offensive also has a communications dimension. What should Latin America and the world know today about the reality in Cuba that psychological warfare and the communications blockade seek to hide?
They use lies all the time, without any shame—toward the entire world in general and, specifically, toward the Cuban people. They repeat over and over that Cuba is a “failed state,” that it is the government’s inefficiency and corruption that cause shortages, deprivations, and paralysis.
Díaz-Canel has said it many times: Why are they trying to suffocate us if we’re so inefficient? Why don’t they let us fail on our own? Wouldn’t it be more instructive for us to fail on our own to prove that socialism doesn’t work?
They constantly deny the achievements of the Revolution. They distort our history and paint a picture of Havana in the 1950s as a dazzling, “glamorous” (that little word) city, full of cars and neon lights, where Hollywood stars came to have fun on the weekends. Of course, the dark side of that Havana—the side of brutal repression, of misery, of racism, of the mafia, of children without schools or medical care, of unsanitary neighborhoods—does not appear in those fables crafted with artificial intelligence.
This kind of reinterpretation of history is taking place on a global scale. And neo-fascism has a strong interest in whitewashing the image of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, and—going much further back—the European conquerors and colonizers who committed genocide against indigenous peoples and perpetuated African slavery. Remember that Trump declared October 13 Columbus Day and stressed the need to rescue the figure of the “Discoverer” from the avalanche of insults from the “far left,” referring to the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement. Even Giorgia Meloni, when she was at the UN in 2023, went with her press team to lay a wreath at Columbus’s monument.
In Spain, the far right is obsessed with the issue of history. Ayuso traveled to Mexico to pay tribute to Hernán Cortés, who left such a terrible and bloody legacy in that country. And around October 12, 2024, the so-called “Catholic Association of Propagandists” launched a very high-profile campaign in more than fifty Spanish cities, with the slogan “1492: Neither Genocidal Nor Slave-Holders, But Heroes and Saints.”
The battle of ideas, as Fidel used to say, has to do with the present and the future, as well as with memory, the past, and history. That is why what we can do in the realm of communication—from Cuba and from all the centers of cultural resistance in Our America and around the world—is so important.
Here, the Union of Cuban Journalists—and in particular, a very brilliant journalist, Rosa Miriam Elizalde, along with communicators from various countries—has been organizing the meetings of the “Patria” International Colloquium, named after the newspaper founded by Martí in 1892, and an anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movement has been structured in this sphere, which is truly decisive. Patria is linked to the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity, which was created in 2003 with the support first of Fidel and then of Chávez.
It is essential that the Network strengthen its influence everywhere, particularly in the United States. Fidel told Ramonet (as recounted in the book One Hundred Hours with Fidel) that the American people are constantly being deceived; yet, when they learn the truth about a particular situation, they react in a noble and just manner. That is what Fidel said, and he cited the example of the poll conducted in the U.S. when the Cuban child Elián González was being held in Miami. Eighty percent of those surveyed said the boy should return to his homeland, and that is what allowed Elián to return. If the American people knew the truth about the U.S. government’s relentless harassment of Cuba, their reaction would, without a doubt, be “noble and just.”
We must bear in mind that this media campaign against us is taking place amid a widespread cultural crisis, a grave intellectual regression, and an offensive aimed at dumbing down millions of people.
Social media doesn’t encourage you to analyze, reason, or evaluate a problem—quite the opposite. It manipulates you emotionally and drags you into reacting with anger, with uncontrollable rage, and into joining the wave of hatred against “the other”—the communist, the immigrant, the feminist, the gay person, the Arab, the Black person, the Muslim, and so on. Fascism has benefited the most from this irrational climate.
One hundred years after Fidel’s birth, and having shared many years of work and conversations with him, can you tell us what he was like in your day-to-day interactions? What anecdote do you remember in particular?
In the late 1980s, I was a member of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), and Fidel never missed a single meeting of the National Council or any session of the Congresses. He followed the debates on all the topics discussed there with the utmost attention and participated in and delved deeply into each one: the persistence of racial prejudices in Cuba, the mistakes made in presenting tourists with a pseudo-folkloric version of our culture, the inadequate quality of education and television programming, the advance of cultural colonialism among us, and so on. Fidel was convinced that one of the main causes of the collapse of socialism in the USSR and in the other countries of the socialist camp had to do with the defeat they suffered in the cultural war, and he was very interested in hearing the opinions of our intellectual and artistic vanguard regarding any distortions we might be falling into. The image people have constructed of Fidel as a dictator who clings to his views without listening to anyone is an indefensible caricature. Fidel joined in those UNEAC analyses as one of us: he never wanted to cut off a discussion, simplify it, or impose his own judgment. Although he didn’t like being called that, he was a great intellectual, a lover of debate and the collective search for truth. As for sharing an anecdote, I’d like to recall one from 2003, in the midst of George W. Bush’s fascist offensive and the emergence of the Web, when Saramago abruptly broke with Cuba in an article titled “This Is as Far as I’ve Gone.” The mainstream press exploited that break to the hilt to demonstrate that the left itself had abandoned the Cuban Revolution. Pablo González Casanova responded to Saramago with the piece “With Saramago, this far. With Cuba, forever.” And there were other responses from friends. I remember that Fidel called me and asked me to try to stop people from continuing to respond to Saramago. “He’s not a professional enemy,” he told me. “He’s an honest man; he’ll come around,” he added. Shortly thereafter, the great Portuguese writer agreed to give an interview to Rosa Miriam Elizalde for Juventud Rebelde, in which he spoke of the profound significance that revolutionary Cuba held for him and his generation, and then he visited us, along with his wife, Pilar, and Fidel spoke with them throughout an unforgettable early morning. He was obviously not “a professional enemy.”
This anecdote holds a valuable lesson on how to work toward building an anti-fascist and anti-imperialist front in the style of the Network—how to knock on every door, how to reach out to every honest person, and how to avoid any temptation toward sectarianism. Let us not forget that, in 1961, in his Address to Intellectuals, Fidel told us: “We must renounce only those who are incorrigibly reactionary, incorrigibly counterrevolutionary.”
Given the global and regional situation, which aspects of Fidel’s thought do you consider fundamental to understanding the current moment?
Fidel was very concerned about the rise of “the poor on the right” around the world—that is, unhappy people who, bewildered by propaganda, manipulated, and resentful of the unfulfilled promises of traditional politicians, end up casting their vote for a loud, fascist demagogue. Today, alongside various forms of fraud that favor highly reactionary candidates, there are the votes of “the poor on the right.”
In this regard, there is a very significant speech from November 17, 2005. He spoke in the Aula Magna at the University of Havana and addressed many crucial issues, including the cancer of corruption and the damage it inflicts on Cuba, the setbacks revolutions can suffer, the role of young people, the aggressiveness of the decadent emperor George W. Bush, and the collapse of socialism in the USSR and the countries of the Soviet bloc.
But he addressed a topic that is incredibly relevant today: the instillation in people of “conditioned reflexes” that prevent them from thinking and force them to mechanically repeat the rhetoric of the reactionary forces.
“The Empire says, ‘Socialism is bad, communism is bad,’” Fidel noted, “and all the ignorant, all the poor, and all the exploited repeat: ‘Socialism is bad, communism is bad.’” He added: “A lie affects knowledge, but a conditioned reflex affects the ability to think.” Here, as in so many other areas, Fidel is ahead of the curve in the debate regarding what we mentioned earlier about social media and emotional manipulation.
That is why he insisted that the worst mistake a revolutionary can make is to fail to think. We must instill a critical instinct in our people, one that enables them to detect the traps and dismantle them. And when I say “our people,” I mean the decent people of this world, in Cuba and everywhere.
Furthermore, alongside the cultural crisis, we are experiencing a terrifying ethical crisis. Politics has become a shameful reality show. As Ivan Karamazov said, “Everything is permitted.”
Look at the Zionist-fascist genocide against the Palestinian people, and the world standing idly by. Look at what they’re doing to the Cuban people. Or the recent exposé by Irene Montero about Nazis from all over Spain, armed with clubs, heading to Ceuta to “hunt” migrants, without the police interfering. Or look elsewhere, in sports, and take a look at the World Cup and the litany of expulsions, incidents, and racist and fascist-like outrages that marred that spectacle. It would seem so, that “everything is permitted.”
In the face of all these atrocities, Fidel bequeathed us a commandment: “Never lie or violate ethical principles.”
Ramonet himself made a very astute observation to me: the left’s handicap in fighting the battle on social media is ethics. He has a point. Our enemies invent outlandish lies and outrageous fabrications to accuse the Cuban government and our leaders, yet we, on principle, do not fabricate accusations. That is how it is, and that is how it must be. It falls to us to defend Cuba with the truth, with facts, with arguments, inviting people who are victims of deception and manipulation to reason.
More than six decades after the revolutionary triumph, the continuity of the Revolution is being built by generations of young people who live in a world profoundly different from that of their parents and grandparents—a world shaped by new economic, cultural, and technological conditions. What challenges does this generational shift pose for the continuity and renewal of the revolutionary project? How can we work with the youth to build a Revolution capable of interpreting its own historical moment as well?
I believe that today the Union of Young Communists is doing excellent work in the territories through the Community Youth Network. This initiative promotes actions related to defense preparedness, support for food production and the use of renewable energy, social work, ideological training, cultural promotion, and communication.
They are promoting critical training and education to counter campaigns against Cuba. They express themselves through new codes, using technology in an emancipatory way. One of this Network’s most important missions is to move beyond the role of passive consumers of the pro-capitalist, pro-Yankee, hypnotic, and demobilizing messages on social media, and to become creators of anti-capitalist, “Our American,” patriotic, and solidarity-based messages—messages free from prevailing selfishness.
In this—in participation—has always lain the key to the integration of young people throughout the Revolution.
What would “an attack on the Moncada” look like today? Which current struggle could be an “Operation Carlota (Angola)”?
Alongside the economic battle—to produce more, to survive, to navigate the labyrinth of the Yankees’ stranglehold—lies the cultural war of the present. Today’s assault on the Moncada, today’s Operation Carlota, await our youth in the clash against the imperial laboratories of psychological and cognitive warfare, against that machinery that attacks us twenty-four hours a day.
We need credible, educated, charismatic influencers and YouTubers—followers of Martí, Fidel, Bolívar, and Guevara—who are capable of assuming authentic leadership among their generation and refuting the hegemonic agenda, which excludes nothing less than the imminent climate catastrophe and the horrors of capitalism, in order to establish another truly legitimate agenda.
Influencers and YouTubers who do not fall in love with themselves; who are not sickened by the drug of fame; who fall definitively in love with revolutionary ideals, solidarity, justice, and support for “the poor of the earth,” as Martí said.
We also need talented Booktubers who promote reading and quality books, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Borges’s The Aleph, including Che’s Diary in Bolivia, Fidel’s History Will Absolve Me, and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.
These influencers are obliged to devote great clarity, great effort, and great passion to historical topics: it’s not just about conveying information, dates, historical events, and names; it means something more. That powerful phrase by Che—“the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love; it is impossible to conceive of an authentic revolutionary without this quality”—must be placed at the center of this new assault on the Moncada.
Under no circumstances can we do the dirty work that the machinery serving the Empire carries out around the clock: manipulating people’s emotions. The Community Youth Network is striking a deep chord with young people as they engage with the history of our peoples and identify with it—with its heroes and heroines, with its genuine “superheroes,” and with their origins. This awakens legitimate, liberating, and emancipatory emotions, which are, by their very nature, free from any manipulation.
In the face of the advance of the right wing and new forms of domination, what is the main challenge today in building a revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and socialist project in Latin America and the Caribbean capable of representing and organizing the vast majority?
We must halt the ideological and cultural onslaught of imperialism and fascism—which are currently on the offensive—pool our forces, unite, organize, and work very hard to prepare our people so that we may be capable of “emancipating ourselves by our own efforts,” as Fidel put it. We must foster a critical, well-founded, and analytical way of thinking in the face of frivolity and irrationalism—a way of thinking that is expressed through that critical, every day, indispensable instinct—and launch a full-scale counteroffensive.
There is talk of more than 30,000 deaths in Europe due to the heat wave in 2026, and yet climate change is not taken seriously. Capitalism has been the planet’s most terrible predator, and that must be our cause—the cause of the left. In the “common sense” promoted by the right, there is no room to “philosophize” about something as abstract and distant as the end of the human species.
Remember that there are theorists of fascism who read Gramsci very carefully. And there are many others who have not read him and will not read him—yet who effectively apply “Gramscian” tools.
“Without culture, there can be no freedom,” Fidel used to say, paraphrasing Martí, and in the battle against fascist stupidity and arrogance, we must elevate the culture of our people. Culture is not a mere ornament.
“The trenches of ideas are worth more than the trenches of stone,” Martí asserted. It falls to us to build those trenches of ideas through every means at our disposal.
We must understand that this war is global; it belongs to the entire South, and to the South that dwells in the very heart of the North. We must join forces with all those who refuse to accept the status of “inferiors” and “disposable people” attributed to us by the supremacist and perverted elite of multimillionaires in the North.
That call for unity among the “proletarians of all countries” remains relevant; though now we must rally all the “losers”—whether they are proletarians, the unemployed, the underemployed, retirees, migrants, or people living on the streets, Christians or Muslims, atheists or spiritualists, heterosexuals, bisexuals, homosexuals, the sick without health insurance—all those whom neoliberalism has brutally cast aside and condemned to “lose all hope,” as the sign Dante imagined for the gates of Hell read.
We are fighting a very powerful enemy; but it is not all-powerful. And, as we know, it is a giant in decline with feet of clay. Fidel taught us that every revolutionary must be optimistic and confident of victory.
Emilia Trabucco is a Psychologist with a Master’s degree in Security. She is also the Director of NODAL. Analyst at the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE) in Argentina.
Source: Nodal, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English