February 26, 2024, Statement from Casa de las Americas in Havana
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has just launched its latest offensive, February 21-24. Dedicated, as its name indicates, to promoting “conservative values” in the world, CPAC is today a showcase for an ostentatious gathering of the forces of the new fascism.
Among the well-known representatives of the extreme right who paraded on the podium of the Conference, Santiago Abascal, leader of the Spanish Vox party, stood out, who returned to the delusions of the so-called “Iberosphere”, denounced the threat of “socialism” and attacked the Cuban Revolution with gross slander. Heir to the decadent imperial Spain so many times defeated by our mambises, he allowed himself to grotesquely use the slogan “Long live free Cuba”.
The speakers spoke generally in the name of freedom, the family, Christianity, tradition, respect for sacrosanct property, and repeated the commonplaces of reaction, in a tone somewhere between apocalyptic and messianic. They proclaimed themselves saviors of a world in danger, not because of the climate crisis or savage capitalism, but because of the presence of “dissolving” tendencies implied for them by the very idea of social justice, the fight against climate change, feminism, the defense of the regulatory role of the State, the LGBTIQ+ movements, the invasion of migrant “hordes” and other “enemies”.
In an openly electoral speech, Trump had no shame in presenting the ills afflicting the United States today as those of “Third World countries” and “banana republics”, as if it were possible to disassociate the histories of exploitation and plunder of our continent, and of the entire South, from the interventionism of the Empire.
According to an analysis published in La Jornada of Mexico, the former US president “reiterated the threat to carry out the largest deportation of immigrants in US history”. And he added: “there is no other option because (…) they are killing our people, they are killing our country”, because “millions and millions of people are arriving to the US territory directly from jails, mental institutions and asylums”, where “patients who practice extreme forms of torture and even cannibalism are interned”.
Xenophobia, racism, irrational fear of the “others”, white supremacism, patriarchy, blatant lies, are features of this extreme right that presents itself as “dissident”, as “rebel”, as leader of an anti-system subversion.
In the face of what it called “dehumanizing manifestations” of CPAC, La Jornada insisted on the “urgency of finding the social and intellectual tools to combat a rhetoric based on fallacies and appeals to the most primitive and aggressive instincts of society”.
From Casa de las Americas, we call to denounce relentlessly the growth of the new fascism and its efforts to create an international of barbarism and the culture of hate. We must continue to work, through all the means at our disposal, to promote critical thinking against manipulation and in defense of humanism and solidarity.
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity, translated by Edelso Moret