By Elson Concepcion Perez on December 16, 2024 from Havana
Fidel and the beginning of Mesa Redonda
Twenty-five years ago, our Fidel, in the midst of his creative work, conceived a television program to address international and national problems, as part of his conception of education and the formation of our people, based not on dogmas or whims, but on his own analysis and convictions always attached to the truth.
Fidel was the undisputed example of a leader who communicated with his people, and who, in addition, conceived ways and means to do so, so that the information would reach everyone and they could be part of it.
Thus, during those years of great communication efforts, he also devised and carried out the television project in the municipalities.
Our Commander in Chief addressed all his ideas and communication objectives in the plenary sessions and congresses of journalists, where he “provoked” us to give our opinion, to contribute, and also exercised journalism himself, with a knowledge that went beyond the questions he asked us, and went into the deepening of each topic, which in his opinion, was not sufficiently clarified.
Many of us are witnesses of how he followed the issues addressed in the Round Table, and debated with the panelists, one on one, when he wanted to know something more or a different side of the topic in question.
Once the program on the Middle East was over, he waited for us at the door of the elevator leading to the studio from where the Round Table was being broadcast. He greeted the panelists, in this case Randy, Dimas, Dufflar and myself, put his hand on our shoulders and “evaluated” each one of us and set up a debate referring mainly to what was happening in Libya, as part of the U.S. onslaught against progressive nations in that region.
There, standing up, and in a lively dialogue, we participated for more than an hour in a master class on a problem that today, almost two decades later, has remained as it was then, or rather, has deteriorated until reaching the Israeli genocide against Gaza or the complacent irruption of extremist military groups in a kind of stroll through Syrian soil, the taking of Damascus, the capital, and the abandonment of power by the president of that Arab nation.
From Fidel’s genius as an educator and communicator, the Round Table was born, with topics such as “the return of the child Elian Gonzalez”, literally kidnapped in Miami by the Cuban-American mafia, while his father, in Cuba, claimed him after the death of his mother in the dangerous maritime transit, stimulated from the United States.
The Round Table, like the open tribunes also conceived by Fidel, where the people marched and demanded the return of the child, immediately became powerful weapons of combat and challenge to the ferocious empire that hates us, and to those who one day, or were born in Cuba or had some kinship on the Island, and then became sick haters who for a few dollars have even called for a U.S. armed intervention against the island of dignity.
How not to highlight the role, not only communicative, but of popular participation, played by the Round Table during the years in which our Five Heroes were unjustly imprisoned in the United States.
The Round Table, in my opinion, has been the media par excellence that, under Fidel’s guidance, was part of the great communicational battle to achieve; first the return of the child Elián González and then, the liberation and arrival to the Homeland, of Gerardo, René, Tony, Ramón and Fernando, our heroes or simply The Five, as the people and the world knew them for their conduct, firmness and attachment to the Revolution they were protecting.
The Round Table, which today celebrates its 25th anniversary, had, in each seat, specialists in medicine, prestigious psychiatrists and psychologists, teachers, intellectuals, journalists, economists, historians, sportsmen, military men, and, in a very special way, men of the people, heroes of labor and internationalist missions, cadres of the youth…, and the top leaders of the Revolution headed by Fidel.
I remember the frequent visits of our Commander in Chief to the place where we were preparing for our participation, a few hours later, in the television program.
I am sure that, remembering today those two and a half decades of the Round Table, we are remembering Fidel and self-evaluating each of its participants, to know more than anything else, how much we owe the Commander in Chief, to whom we committed ourselves to make it good, accessible to all our people, deep and simple in its analysis, without any topic, which was not subjected to debate and timely criticism.
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English