By Stella Calloni, Prensa Latina Contributor
The president of the House of the Americas, Abel Prieto, yesterday described PreLa as “the best weapon of the people” to confront the “manipulation machinery of imperialism.”
From its first moments, PreLa’s mission was the confrontation with 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 people’s right, which represents a code of ethics for true journalism.
What exists in these times worldwide is “mercenarism”, through which in the name of an alleged “freedom of expression” and co-opting the majority 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, that power – less and less hegemonic but more savage and cruel – appropriated the almost absolute majority of these media, forming a network of authentic media terrorism.
“In war, the first thing that is lost is the truth,” said an important American official, which is why they “need” lies, chaos and information intoxication, to de-aware and de-culturalize large sectors of the population.
Prensa Latina, was born from the experience of the Liberation War fought from the Sierra Maestra headed by Commander Fidel Castro Ruz against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, in reality against the United States, which considered Cuba as its favorite colony in the Caribbean.
It is important to briefly review the circumstances in which the agency was created, 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 from the radio and other media and this is what they did in those misty mountains.
The two, together with the Argentine journalist Ricardo Masseti, decided to create and continue a number of local media, but also to create a news agency to go out into the world. At the age of 27, Masseti had managed to interview them when they were in the Sierra Maestra in the middle of liberation war.
Adeás wrote his remarkable chronicles about those days he lived as a witness to that incredible struggle waged in such disparate conditions, which seemed like 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, on June 14, 1959, with renowned Cuban journalists and writers and from several Latin American countries.
Over the years, the agency faced very difficult moments, with Cuba subjected to a blockade that has lasted to this day since 1962, which is also a crime against humanity, due to the effects that this war site has on the population, the economy, daily life and the development of revolutionary projects.
With creativity and imagination, Cuba has maintained such important advances that position it as a power in medicine, health, education (free for the Cuban people), culture, science, solidarity, despite the enormous sacrifices and impediments, even so that necessary medicines and equipment arrive.
This, like living under constant terrorist attacks, after having defeated the United States invasion in Playa Girón in 1961 in the 20th century, can only be measured in all its intensity if the revolutionary will and love for the people is known.
If one goes through the Agency’s archives, one finds notable chronicles, interviews, stories of wars 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, where the truth hidden from the world by the hegemonic power prevails, would enrich the universities that proliferate in these times in Communication and journalism students, among others.
In these archives you can learn day by day what has been experienced in the world since the middle of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century, and even before, by rescuing the true history of our people.
Just like all the achievements of the Cuban revolution, PreLa is still there in its headquarters in Havana, being reborn every day, despite times like the current period we are living through, 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 needs truthful information like never before.
The companions of PreLa were and are supporters of hope, an example that the declining empire 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 resistance struggle that moves the world. Their culture emerges and is renewed in the middle of the cultural desert that they want to impose on us.
It is necessary to thank Prensa Latina for reviving our hope as journalists and remember the prophetic word of Commander Fidel Castro that adapts to that moment: “I believe that whatever happens, other times will come, because we are now in the middle of a great reactionary wave.” , and then there will come a new, great revolutionary wave, a great progressive wave in the world, that is inevitable.”
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