Defending the pride of being Cuban through culture has a lot to do with what Fidel asked of us in the most critical moments of the 1990s: the first thing to be saved is culture. Today that culture is saved from the realization of concrete actions, in pursuit of its preservation as support of the national identity, which runs through our blood since the beginning of the formation of our nation until today.
The complexity of the present times indicates us that the debate on the cultural challenges of contemporaneity, the challenges that have in today's Cuba, aspects associated to the immaterial component of the human being, to its identification with the identity values that define us, in an adverse scenario in which the cultural emulates with other more orthodox methods of colonization, cannot be postponed.
These issues and others brought together, in Camagüey, from April 10 until yesterday, a group of Cuban intellectuals and artists in the First National Colloquium “Proud to be Cuban”, which seeks to create a platform of anti-colonizing thought, and build itself as a space for debate and reflection on aspects that are essential for the defense of our sovereignty.
These days have been an opportunity for dialogue and learning, through the experiences of the whole country about the consolidation of spaces that transcend in time, that go to meet other audiences, the necessary face to face with the people.
Consolidating the values that have brought us this far, in the face of the fierce cultural war that is being waged against us, does not depend solely on the Ministry of Culture and its institutions, or the Ministry of Education and its schools. It requires articulation in various sectors of society. The call of Alpidio Alonso Grau, Minister of Culture, was aimed at this unity.
“Today, in the digital social networks, there is a battle against the pride of being Cuban, they want us to feel inferior, to destroy the Revolution”, said the renowned intellectual Abel Prieto Jiménez, president of Casa de las Americas, who warned that campaigns like Milei's and other ultra-right-wingers who rule in the region, were won in the networks, and added that in Cuba's present time, events of this type are useful; but now we must move to action.
Historian Ernesto Limia recalled in several spaces that art legitimizes politics. From this derives an indisputable mission of culture: to confront the cognitive war that is being waged against us.
And how good it is to know that this culture defends the Cuban nation, the homeland, the Revolution and Socialism, because history shows that when the avant-gardes move away from the masses, they cease to be avant-gardes. We have no other option and that is clear, we have to win the cultural war and defend the pride of having been born in this land called Cuba.
