February 12, 2007
There is a key issue, maybe in the most important practical and immediate order: that of countering the terrible effects that the control of information and of the mass media and culture broadcasting have. Our friends have unleashed their anti-cultural offensive and that compels us to analyze our actions in that field and how to make them even more efficacious.
Latin America and the Caribbean make up a setting of a huge importance to set up a launching pad against that offensive. This region of the world has a history and a calling towards the social and cultural integration of peoples and countries. Among us there are no conflicts embittering the relations among the peoples from other regions and we are better prepared to tackle these challenges.
We have a social and popular base and the cultural ground to start the counteroffensive towards those promoting both disorder and anarchy.
Imperialists and their allies are trying to disassemble not just the ideas of Socialism which after the collapse of the former USSR they reckon as finished, but the whole thought and the culture created by humanity in millennia of history. They are trying to dismount the human capacity of thinking, of living and of being in solidarity with others.
From the Caribbean, where the history of modern age began to be shaped up, we must carry out actions in the ground of informatics and of the culture against the campaigns of misinformation, distortion and deception that the oligarchic sectors of the United States have been conducting. I suggest doing it with an idea exposed by José Martí when he sentenced: The greater war that is been born to us is that of thought: let’s win it by thought.
Every class civilization so far has needed and still needs culture and its distortion aimed at changing its essences for the sake of just a few. The point in socialism is to highlight culture in its core value: justice, and to apply it universally.
As the great humanists of history have stated with scientific rigor, and as it is confirmed by the deepest sociological and anthropological research works, the exploitation of man may be exercised, precisely, by the selfish profiting of different expressions of culture for the sake of minorities and against the immense majority.
This can be visualized if we examine the mercantile system based on the fetishism of goods. It is a cultural fact, or rather an anti-cultural one, that is produced due to the hiding of certain major values of human culture. It may be asserted that the history of the exploitation of man by man is also the history of cultural deception.
In this decaying stage of the Empire when it throws over board ethical and legal principles in which modern civilization claimed to sustain itself, it is our task to raise the banners of culture and of spiritual values. The need to rescue the universal humanist ethics becomes urgent. Facing the unheard of and barbaric fact of legalizing torture we need to honor and to highlight human rights seriously, and the first is the right that humanity has to survive. We have to preserve the most important spiritual heritage of civilization, that is, man.
Imperialists have the weapon of material civilization. We, in Latin America and the Caribbean, have that of spiritual culture. And if that other one tried to squash ours, it itself would be crushed, because without moral values there is no enduring civilization. Humanity will succeed only by the time the ethical and spiritual culture overcome: Balance will exist among nations, as Martí hoped for, when the terms civilization and culture be harmoniously integrated into only one identity. This is the great dream of the New World.
Translation:
Alberto González Rivero (Cubarte)
Thanks to David Walters of Marxist Internet Archive who
sent this.