Cuba Always Reborn: the Cultural Battle and Prensa Latina

By Stella Calloni on June 15, 2024

Cuba celebrates the 65th anniversary of the founding of Prensa Latina, the Latin American news agency born in the early days of the triumphant Revolution, on January 1, 1959, which liberated and made the island nation independent, an example of emblematic resistance against a criminal empire, whose heroic people could never be defeated.

The president of Casa de las Americas, Abel Prieto, described Prensa Latina as “the best weapon of the peoples” to confront the “machinery of manipulation of imperialism”.

From its first moments, Prensa Latina’s mission was to confront the imperial power located 90 miles from the island, which used and uses disinformation, manipulation and falsification of news as a weapon of war, violating all international norms, and ignoring that “truthful information” is a right of the peoples, which is a code of ethics of true journalism.

What exists in these times worldwide is “mercenarism”, by which, in the name of an alleged “freedom of expression” and co-opting most of the mass media of the media monopolies, disinformation has been turned into a weapon of destruction and death.

In this century of new communication technologies, this power – increasingly less hegemonic, but more savage and cruel – has appropriated the almost absolute majority of these media, forming a network of authentic media terrorism.

“In war, the first thing to be lost is the truth”, an important U.S. official has said, so they “need” lies, chaos and information intoxication, in order to render unconscious and deculturate large sectors of the population.

Prensa Latina was born from the experience of the liberation war waged from the Sierra Maestra, led by Commander Fidel Castro Ruz against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, in reality against the United States, which considered Cuba as its preferred colony in the Caribbean.

A small reminder of the circumstances in which the agency was created is important, inspired by the moments in which Fidel Castro and the doctor Che Guevara (Argentine-Cuban), one of the commanders of the revolutionary leadership, understood the need for communication through radio and other media, and they did so in those misty mountains.

The two of them, together with the Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti, decided to create and continue with a number of local media, but also to create a news agency to go out to the world. Masetti, at the age of 27, had managed to interview them when they were in the Sierra Maestra, in the middle of the liberation war.

In addition, he wrote his remarkable chronicles about those days he lived as a witness of that incredible struggle waged in such disparate conditions, which seemed an unattainable dream for the young rebel fighters.

After several meetings, Prensa Latina was born on the fifth floor of an apartment building in Vedado, where the Ministry of Health was located, with the participation of renowned journalists and writers from Cuba and several Latin American countries.

Over the years, the agency has faced very difficult times, as Cuba has been subjected to a blockade that has lasted until today since 1962, which is also a crime against humanity, due to the effects that this method of war has on the population, the economy, daily life and the development of revolutionary projects.

Cuba has maintained with creativity and imagination such important advances that place it as a power in medicine, health, education (free for the Cuban people), culture, science, solidarity, despite the enormous sacrifices and impediments, even for the arrival of medicines and necessary equipment.

It is like living under constant terrorist attacks, after having defeated in the twentieth century, the US invasion of Playa Giron in 1961, can only be measured in all its intensity if one knows the revolutionary will and love for the people.

If you go through the Agency’s archives, you will find remarkable chronicles, interviews, war stories and coverage in the most difficult circumstances imaginable, with correspondents risking their lives at critical moments in different countries around the world.

The wealth of information, in which prevails the truth hidden from the world by the hegemonic power, would enrich the universities that proliferate in these times on Communication, and journalism students, among others.

In these archives we can learn day by day what has been lived in the world since the mid-twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first century, and even before, by rescuing the true history of our peoples.

As well as all the achievements of the Cuban Revolution, Prensa Latina is still there at its headquarters in Havana, reborn every day, despite times like the current period we are living, a time of cyclical upheavals around the world.

The return of colonial and imperial wars, of fascism, with new modalities, and of wars by other means, need, as never before, truthful information.

The comrades of Prensa Latina were and are supporters of hope, an example that the empire in decadence tries to exterminate -and it must be said in these terms-, because it is the story of how Cuba continues to be reborn in the struggle of resistance that moves the world. Its culture emerges and renews itself in the midst of the cultural desert they want to impose on us.

It is necessary to thank Prensa Latina for reviving our hope as journalists, and to remember the prophetic words of Comandante Fidel Castro that fits this moment: “I believe that whatever happens, other times will come, because we are now in the midst of a great reactionary wave, and then a new great revolutionary wave will come, a great progressive wave in the world, that is inevitable”.

Stella Calloni is an Argentine journalist, writer, essayist, poet and researcher. She is vice-president of the Movement for Peace, Sovereignty. She has published several books of poetry and short stories, including Los Subverdes (1975), Memorias de trashumante (1998) and El hombre que fue Yacaré (1998)

Source: Cubaperiodistas, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English