By Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez on February 17, 2026
foto: Ladyrene Perez, The front page of Granma on the release of the remaining member of the Cuban 5. December 17, 2014.
We know that Granma’s contribution to the Latin American communication experience cannot be understood as an anecdotal chapter in the history of regional journalism; rather, it is a historical laboratory where words are assumed to be a material force and truth is a disputed territory. Since its founding in 1965 as the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba, Granma has operated in an area of tension where reporting is not only about transmitting data, but also actively participating in the symbolic configuration of reality.
In Latin America, where communication has been poisoned by colonial asymmetries, economic dependencies, and monopolistic media hegemonies, the emergence of a media outlet that declares its commitment to a revolutionary project implied a radical redefinition of the status of news. The press, far from conceiving of itself as a neutral observer, recognizes itself as a historical organizing actor, as a trench, and as a tool for political education. It is a tool for the scientific direction of society.
This organizing condition is not reduced to epic rhetoric; it is expressed in concrete semiotic practice. “Truth in combat” is not an ornamental metaphor, but a working hypothesis; all production of meaning is traversed by conflicting forces, by interests that attempt to naturalize their version of the world as if it were the only one possible. In this scenario, Granma takes on communication as a symbolic battlefield, where the construction of truth requires unmasking the ideological operations that seek to present themselves as “common sense.” Faced with the global media machine, which, from corporations based in centers of power, sets agendas and hierarchizes events according to commercial or geopolitical logic, the Cuban newspaper sets out to dispute the meaning of events, reorder priorities, and offer interpretive frameworks based on national sovereignty and internationalist solidarity.
Granma workers march in the May Day parade, 2007, foto: Bill Hackwell
And the Latin American experience of popular communication finds in Granma a precedent and an interlocutor. While in other countries community radio stations, workers’ newspapers, or alternative television stations emerged in response to dictatorships and neoliberalism, in the Cuban case, the revolutionary press became the political philosophy of the state, which generated a singularity: the possibility of coherently articulating education, culture, and communication under the same strategic horizon. This is not to deny the internal tensions and dialectical challenges inherent in any revolutionary institutionalization, but rather to recognize that the existence of a media outlet with national reach, explicitly committed to an emancipatory project, altered the symbolic map of the region. Granma not only reports on Cuba; it proposes a continental narrative in which the struggles of the peoples are read as chapters in the same history of revolution against imperialism.
We believe that the semiotics underlying this experience are based on a dialectical premise: the sign is not innocent, the word is not sacred, the image is not neutral. Every headline, every photograph, every editorial constitutes a device of meaning that organizes social experience. In contexts of economic siege, disinformation campaigns, and diplomatic disputes, the newspaper becomes a space for programmatic clarification. It does not limit itself to responding to accusations; it attempts to dismantle the codes from which those accusations derive their plausibility. Thus, truth in combat is not a closed dogma, but a process of collective production, where reality is contrasted with the daily experience of the people and with the historical memory of the Revolution.
In Latin America, wounded by media coups and psychological operations, the lesson that emerges from this experience is that communication cannot be separated from the correlation of forces. Objectivity, understood as political abstention, often conceals the uncritical reproduction of dominant information matrices. Granma, on the other hand, assumes that all objectivity is historical and that intellectual honesty consists of making explicit the place from which one fights. This position does not eliminate the demand for rigor; it redoubles it. Hence the insistence on verification, on coherence between discourse and practice, on the correspondence between what is proclaimed and what is lived.
Today, the narrative unfolded by the newspaper articulates a revolution of meaning and everyday life. The semiotic epic is not empty exaltation, but rather a recognition that contemporary Cuban history has been marked by extraordinary challenges, economic blockade, widespread injustices, induced energy crises, and imperial military threats. In this context, the chronicle of a harvest, the inauguration of a school, or scientific progress take on symbolic density; they are read as revolutionary acts and an affirmation of no return. Its philosophy of dialectical communication prevents it from becoming petrified in slogans and allows for the social recognition of a revolutionary process in permanent motion.
Thus, the regional contribution of this experience is also a methodologically exportable model for challenging media hegemony from a revolutionary perspective. In times when transnational digital platforms impose algorithms that rank content according to commercial criteria, the commitment to communication guided by political and social values takes on renewed relevance. Granma has managed to adapt to the digital age, expand its presence on the internet, and engage in dialogue with new generations accustomed to immediacy and fragmentation. This transition has not been without contributions and achievements. How can analytical depth be maintained in environments that privilege brevity? How can discursive coherence be sustained in networks where rumors and fake news proliferate? The answer has been to strengthen professional training, integrate multimedia resources, and maintain a critical perspective in the face of global bourgeois intoxication.
Fighting for the truth also involves educating the reader. It is not just a matter of sending out messages, but of training people to read any message critically, including their own. In this sense, the Cuban experience is in dialogue with Latin American traditions of popular education, where communication is understood as a participatory and emancipatory process. The newspaper, rather than a consumer product, is conceived as an instrument for organizing collective militancy. Letters from readers, opinion columns, and coverage of popular assemblies and consultations, art, science, and literature reveal a desire for interaction that, even with its limitations, seeks to avoid absolute verticality.
Thus, the narrative dialectic that runs through the development of Granma is based on the awareness that truth is not a static object deposited in a text, but a living relationship between facts, interpretations, and historical projects. Revolution of consciousness. On a continent where the word “democracy” has been hijacked to justify the exploitation of workers, interventions, and looting, reclaiming truth as a sovereign construction is a political act of the first order. Granma has contributed to this debate by maintaining an editorial line that prioritizes the struggle for the self-determination of peoples, regional integration, and the denunciation of the structural inequalities of global capitalism. And the truly new and more forward-looking plan is government of the community by itself: communist.
Thus, the contribution to the Latin American communication experience unfolds on multiple levels: as an example of a press committed to a revolutionary project; as a school of journalists trained in the awareness that every sign is a field of dispute; as a platform for symbolic articulation between Cuba and all continents; and as a permanent reminder that absolute neutrality is, in contexts of domination, a fiction functional to power. Truth in combat is not a closed slogan, but an invitation to think of communication as a praxis of transformative organization. This invitation echoes the conviction that to narrate is to intervene, that to inform is to take sides, and that communication, when undertaken with historical responsibility, can become one of the highest forms of political action. Revolutionary.
Source: Cubaperiodista, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English