By Graciela Ramírez Cruz on March 15, 2024
Arleen Rodriguez receiving the Marti Journalism award with President Diaz Canel
Arleen Rodríguez Derivet receives the José Martí National Journalism Award for her life’s work.
To honor Martí, 132 years after the founding of the newspaper Patria, and those who from journalism leave in each line a part of their soul in the ethics and passion for the truth bequeathed by the Master, the Juan Gualberto Gómez and José Martí National Journalism Awards for Life’s Work were presented on March 14, -Cuban Press Day.
The emotion and joy at the recognition of women and men from different areas of the Cuban press filled the beautiful José Martí Memorial. Today in a celebration of the journalists of Cuba were honored and rewarded.
One in particular, the José Martí National Journalism Award for life’s work was granted to the endearing and talented Arleen Rodríguez Derivet.
Present were Tubal Páez, Pepe Alejandro Rodríguez, Juana Carrasco, Marina Menéndez, Ángelica Paredes, Maricela Recasens, Adán Iglesias, the last three with awards and mentions in the Radio, Television and Graphic categories; Ariel Terrero, Maribel Acosta, Magali García, Gustavo Robreño, Juvenal Balan, Rosa Miriam Elizalde, Yoerky Sánchez, among so many journalists who filled the room.
It was a emotional moment when Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel entered the hall with his wife, Director of Cultural Events Lis Cuesta, and prominent members of the Revolutionary Government: Roberto Morales Ojeda, Rogelio Polanco, Inés María Chapman, Ulises Guilarte, among others.
Together with them Ricardo Ronquillo, president of the Union of Journalists of Cuba (UPEC) and the new vice presidents Bolivia Tamara Cruz and Francisco Rodriguez.
Díaz-Canel’s embrace, his face of joy and pride, his raised arm and the gesture of immense affection as if he was placing a star on Arleen’s forehead, marked the unforgettable day and this Award to ethics, intellectual honesty, to her brilliant letters and to the integral and faithful human being that Arleen Rodríguez Derivet is.
Díaz-Canel congratulated all the press on this day and he said about Arleen: “In addition to the admiration for her work, I am united by a relationship of friendship and brotherhood, a very good person, a good Cuban and a good Guantanamera, an excellent friend and sister; Arleen is a complete revolutionary”.
He thanked “Her contribution to the Revolution, the Cuban press, to the work of the Party. “Also her advice”… ” she is a well-deserved José Martí Award”.
Then Arleen spoke, while her life partner Roberto Verrier held a beautiful bouquet of flowers, her nephews Alejandro and Fidelito took pictures, and all of us who felt more than friends, brothers, listened to her with great affection and admiration.
With her beautiful voice Arleen expressed her gratitude for this Award, the pride of her Guantanamo origin, of her beloved parents, her passion for Marti and Fidelismo and for defending and loving Cuba.
Because of the importance and depth of her words we share them with you, as the gift that she always gives us when she sees us, when she helps so many, teaches so many and when she embraces us.
JOSÉ MARTÍ” NATIONAL JOURNALISM AWARD FOR LIFE’S WORK 2024
Dear friend, brother Miguel, dear President, dear colleagues of the Presidency, Ronquillo and other dear ones of UPEC, Randy who spoils me so much, dearest colleagues and friends, all loves that accompany me:
Two colleagues of different generations asked me, each one in his own way, about the meaning of this award and to both of them I answered, but without explaining all the tears that came out by themselves, while Maribel Acosta read the beautiful jury’s decision.
Today I have the duty to do so. José Martí is the intellectual who most deeply touched my feelings since I was a child when I learned by heart, and without any effort, some of his texts that eventually led me to others, all of them deep, tender, moving. From the Versos Sencillos to Nuestra América, a thrilling and dazzling essay. From the Golden Age to the unfinished Letter to Manuel Mercado and its mysterious final message: “there are affections of such delicate honesty”.
Martí delights me so much that an edition of his Selected Works, from the Centennial year, a dear inheritance from a Marti master: my uncle-in-law Mario Castro, goes with me everywhere in a small booklet, with a worn cover due to the abusive handling of its bible paper sheets. By the way, more than one colleague who has seen me with the book in my luggage or on the bedside table of a hotel on a trip, has believed that what I carry is a Bible. I tell them: yes, it is my Bible. It is Martí.
Only Martí and García Márquez have been able to get me out of the creative slump that has assaulted me more than once in 42 years of journalism. I read them and inspiration springs forth. I can now write, as the Apostle said in the letter that interrupted his death on that fateful May 19, 1895.
Those of us who lived the challenging decade of the 90s of the last century in Juventud Rebelde feeling like a family of diverse members in all senses, who slept just a couple of hours, all crammed together in the only office we had left with air conditioning, carried in our blood a love for the newspaper only comparable to that of Martí for Patria.
Like him, we were passionate about revising the page proofs and even packing and distributing the newspapers on the days and at the hours when others of our same age were resting or partying. The weekly was the party. And reading and criticizing each other, was our own “Saturday night fever”.
There we had Fidel for a whole night in September 1990. He came to inform us, with the respect and affection of a colleague that he never hesitated to show us, the measure of the Special Period that would affect the newspapers. Juventud Rebelde would be a weekly and would have fewer pages. For the prestigious DDT, we would give up the back cover. But that decision, like the decision to publish on Sundays and adjust the contents, was made by our collective and came later.
Half of the staff would be relocated to other media such as radio or television, but “they will never stop serving them, because they will come back”, Fidel guided the then director of the newspaper Bruno Rodriguez, our current chancellor and the rest of the management team who did not believe the plans that Fidel drew for us in a yellow envelope that must still be preserved, while outside our borders the socialist camp began to fade away.
That night, Fidel gave us one of his legendary prophecies: “Five years, if we resist for five years, we will overcome this crisis”. José Luis Rodríguez has written and explained a great deal about the ways in which this prophecy was fulfilled. In 1994 the fall was halted.
I have allowed myself this account because my passion for journalism was born in Juventud Rebelde. Reading it first and doing it later. That was my second home and my greatest school.
As I said, when I received the news of the award, the first thing I thought of was my colleagues who deserved it first. In those who died without receiving it like Guillermo Cabrera Alvarez or Ricardo Saenz Padron and in those who are alive and I will not mention because the list is long and begins in my native Guantanamo.
With their pardon, I allow myself three exceptions: Tubal Paez, who refused out of genuine modesty to be nominated while he headed UPEC, Pablo Soroa, who gave me the correspondent’s office and taught me as much as he dazzled me with his encyclopedic knowledge and Hilda Pupo Salazar, from Holguin, a classmate and roommate at the University of Oriente, who has been fighting for many years against a cruel ataxia without ceasing to practice our fight for Cuba.
Allow me to share this Award with them, with you, all of you who know that it was your turn first.
Comrades:
I am not going to make chronology, there is no time and there is no need. I will only say that I am deeply grateful to all those who believed in my possibilities more than I did and forced me to grow. I think again of the Juventud Rebelde that welcomed me as a recent graduate and which I left with sadness one day, nostalgic for the director’s sofa, where there was room for so many who commanded more than me, through me. Almost everything good I was able to do there got a push from that door I could never and would never close.
The commercial challenge in Opciones, Haciendo Radio in Rebelde, Globalization in El Economista, the Third World in Tricontinental, the high demands of the Round Table, the digital world of Cubadebate and now in Ideas Multimedios, the radio fight for the freedom of the Five with Una luz en lo oscuro; Nuestro Norte in Telesur and our South in Al Mayadeen; books, documentaries and podcasts…everywhere I learned something and I delivered what I could. Like Martí when he got off the boat in Playitas de Cajobabo, “only the light is comparable to my happiness” when I think of Journalism.
But what is my happiness worth if it does not serve to make the happiness of others? How useful to the country, how illustrative of the times is what we do?
Patria, the newspaper founded by Martí on this day in 1892 has keys that never get old. “This newspaper is born -the Apostle wrote- at the hour of danger, to watch over freedom, to contribute to make its forces invincible by union, and to prevent the enemy from defeating us again by our disorder”.
“The hour of danger” remains. And journalism has again been called to arms by our own conscience.
I clearly understand that not everything can be a battle against what is coming at us, from outside, because the victory outside depends a lot on how much we advance inside. But let us not forget what Martí wrote in Patria para la hora del peligro:
“…the press is different when the enemy is in front of us. Then, in a low voice, the signal is passed on. What the enemy has to hear is nothing more than the voice of attack. That is Patria in the press. It is a soldier. For the adversary himself it will be sparing of answers, and in vain will be wanted to attract him to useless skirmishes, because each line of the newspapers of freedom is indispensable to found it; even the adversary will find in us more balm than steel. The weapon is to wound, and the word to heal the wounds […]”.
Forgive me if I take this commitment too much to heart. The enemy, emboldened and vile, is betting everything on the final hour of the Cuban Revolution. He knows that only disunity will be able to break the fortress and he is betting on that. His lies are aimed at fracturing, dividing, sowing insecurity and chaos.
I responsibly assume the risk of fighting for the truth, with the same passion with which I fight, criticize and confront everything that is incompatible with the social justice that is the hallmark of the Revolution I learned to love and defend in the humble neighborhood at the entrance of Tiguabos where I grew up, while my island grandfather, almost illiterate, taught me my first letters, writing with a vine on the dry earth of the courtyard, for when my mother taught me to love books above any other property on earth.
I recognize myself in those memories of 60 years ago, as in the images that right now show other girls, at the feet of other grandparents, but not learning to write, but fleeing from the bombs of Netanyahu and his Zionist army. If that was not my destiny, it was not because of the aggressors’ kindness – I lived through all the tensions of the Cold War – but because of the courage and resistance of many generations. May it remain so.
Let me end with a fragment of my favorite text by José Martí:
“The conceited villager believes that the whole world is his village, and as long as he remains mayor, or mortifies the rival who took away his bride, or his savings grow in the piggy bank, he takes the universal order for good, without knowing about the giants who carry seven leagues in their boots and can put the boot on him, or the fight of the comets in the sky, which go through the air asleep engulfing worlds. What is left of the village in America must wake up. These times are not to go to bed with the handkerchief on the head, but with the weapons on the pillow, like the men of Juan de Castellanos: the weapons of judgment, which defeat the others. Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone. There is no plow that cuts through a cloud of ideas”.
In my personal understanding of this idea, rests my personal commitment to Journalism.
Thank you very much
Source: Cuba en Resumen