Patria Colloquium ended, with definitions for sovereign communications

More than 200 journalists and communicators gathered in Havana, and in a final declaration it was said that “today in Our America, the people and their communicators face the right and its new extreme articulations. They advance by implementing the ideological schemes of individualism, polarization and rejection of cultural diversity.” It was indicated that “we start from the firm conviction that the practice and political articulation of our present are going through a process of rapid and accelerated transformation that forces us to adapt our conceptions and provide ourselves with our own tools” in communications.

Havana. 3/22/2024. More than 200 journalists and communicators from 31 countries participated in the Patria Colloquium organized by the Union of Journalists of Cuba (Upec) and addressed important issues in communications today, including new technologies and the use of digital platforms. It was indicated that communicators, journalists, digital creators, designers and artists met at the colloquium to exchange on Artificial Intelligence and the legal, economic, narrative and activism challenges in the networks of the global South. Likewise, new developments in the digital field were presented and it promoted articulation and co-productions between experts from the different disciplines that impact social communication today. The following is the text of conclusions of the Patria Colloquium:

Declaration of the Third International Colloquium “Homeland”

Today in Our America, the people and their communicators face the right and its new extreme articulations. They advance by implementing the ideological schemes of individualism, polarization and rejection of cultural diversity. They try to break solidarity between peoples and people with the strategic objective of subduing the political, economic and social sovereignty of our states and nations.

In “Patria” we start from the firm conviction that the political practice and articulation of our present are going through a process of rapid and accelerated transformation that forces us to adapt our conceptions and provide ourselves with our own tools to make our political practice an effective instrument. for the construction of a more just world.

The incipient developments in artificial intelligence technologies allow, through automated learning systems, to produce forms of knowledge unprecedented in the history of humanity, but they can also become dangerous instruments that drastically transform the perception and intervention in the construction of the world. new one we want.

From popular and left-wing political traditions, we propose to incorporate analysis and strategies that allow us to face this historical moment. One of the necessary conditions to advance on this path is to abandon an instrumental view of technologies, to begin to conceive them as part of the political space itself, disruptive, but populated with emancipatory possibilities.

The III Patria International Colloquium assumes as unavoidable tasks:

• Promote a permanent space for articulation, training, development of shared technologies and communication, which provides us with adequate tools to stop the advance of the new rights in Our America and in the world.
• Confront the subordinate role in the global division of labor controlled by big technology. We demonstrate against the illegal extraction and use of our people’s data and its concentration in digital oligopolies. Facing privatization: technological sovereignty under public control and at the service of the people.
• Denounce the use and development of technologies applied to cognitive warfare, which are nothing other than the continuation of the usual war by other means.
• Continue the fight for the unconditional and immediate release of Julian Assange and Pablo González, imprisoned in Europe for having rigorously exercised their duty to inform.
• Firmly condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people whose occupying power, the Zionist entity, uses the most advanced techniques of new technologies to maximize extermination and communicatively justify its permanent criminal policy.
• Reaffirm our commitment to denouncing the US blockade against Cuba that hack technological sovereignty and prevents the country from fully developing its economic, productive and creative capabilities. A blockade that tries to condemn an ​​entire people to suffering and is a shame for humanity.

With the presence of more than 200 participants from 31 countries, representing four continents, we vindicate the words of the National Hero of Cuba José Martí: Homeland is Humanity.

In Havana, March 20, 2024.

Homeland Colloquium

Enrique Milanés León. “Cubajournalist.” Havana. 3/2024. As if three days of sharp debate and presentations were not enough, the closing of the III International Colloquium on Political Communication highlighted the scope of the event and its central noun, Homeland, when the UPEC (Union of Journalists of Cuba) awarded the “El Maestro” to the Latin American multichannel TeleSur, the “Félix Elmusa” Distinction to its director, Patricia Villegas, and the Dignity Award to the Lebanese television station Al Mayadeen.

Before the Deputy Prime Minister of Cuba, Inés María Chapman, the head of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, Rogelio Polanco, and Cuban and international guests such as the Venezuelan Minister of Communication, Freddy Yáñez, the recently proclaimed José Journalism Prize Martí for the Work of Life, Arleen Rodríguez Derivet, naturally enriched the resolutions of recognition given to two great women by the president of the UPEC, Ricardo Ronquillo, from colleagues.

The UPEC shares – it is difficult to accept that José Martí “gives himself” – El Maestro with TeleSur for being, as Arleen recalled, “a school and workshop for professionals from Our America at the service of truth, justice, integration and solidarity” .

That should have been enough, but more was said: it is the realization of a dream of Fidel and Chávez that crystallized in a family fighting hegemonic thought and cultural colonization. It is a medium, in short, that “has earned the right to be considered a Master.”

Receiving it would not be the only emotion of the afternoon for its director, Patricia Villegas, who will also return to Caracas with the Félix Elmusa Distinction, the most important one given by UPEC, on her chest as a brave reporter.

“It gives a lot of pride. I am moved. Both belong to TeleSur workers, who overcome all the difficulties. It’s for them. Fill the heart!,” she said.

The director of the Latin American multichannel assured that they will continue on the front line of battle: “Please have our commitment that we will tell what needs to be told on the new platforms to reach more people with the truth,” she assured.

Then came UPEC’s encouragement to the Almayadeen Canal, to which it gave the Dignity Award. Arleen once again commented, rather than read, the detailed granting resolution: this medium has operated since 2012 as a satellite channel that has become an indispensable platform for communicating the truth of the people.

Almayadeen has been a scourge against terrorism and Israeli occupation – which often turn out to be the same thing – and has made substantial merits in revealing the real History of Palestine and establishing the cause of that people as the central cause of the Arab world. To measure the size of the UPEC embrace, Arleen noted: this same Award was received by Fidel Castro.

Then, the Lebanese journalist Wafica Mehdi, director of its Spanish newsroom and a great friend of Cuba, dried her tears and read the message sent by Ghassan Ben Jeddou, general director of the channel. “What a beautiful word: dignity!” Ghassan wrote as a preamble to an analysis of how much that noun of light represents for all journalists.

The general director of Almayadeen recalled in his gratitude that dignity is one of the reasons to love life, but that sometimes the price for sustaining it is pain, agony, blockade (from another country), siege, punishment, distortion and deception, imprisonment and murder. In practice, his message was another conference – the most synthetic, surely – on political communication at the Patria Colloquium.

“The media committed to the causes of humanity have no other way,” Ghassan said in his letter, which was another channel of condemnation of Israel and the “sadistic imperialist shelter that with its capacity, institutions and mercenaries – including shameful communicators and the journalism of complicity – gives the United States.”

In counterbalance, the director declared that independence leaders such as Martí, Bolívar, Fidel, Che, Allende and Chávez are the symbols of the channel and mentioned “worthy presidents such as Miguel Díaz-Canel, Nicolás Maduro, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, Gustavo Petro and Daniel Ortega.”

Ghassan Ben Jeddou thanked President Ricardo Ronquillo and “the UPEC of Dignity in the Cuba of Dignity.” Finally, Wafica dedicated the Award to the resistance against the Zionist genocide and to Palestinian women, who this Wednesday were they celebrating? your Mother’s Day. “Cuba is counting on us; Palestine needs to count on Cuba,” she noted.

At the close of the event, Rosa Miriam Elizalde, general coordinator of the Patria International Colloquium, presented the Final Declaration that she immediately renamed “new stage of the event.” While they are already thinking about the fourth edition, the participants return home with the additional memory of a gala that reviewed before them several of the highly representative artistic manifestations of the Cuban nation. The Homeland also communicates with culture.

Homeland(s) in Colloquium and the democracy of tenderness

“Your promise has been overfulfilled,” the well-known communicator Wafica Mehdi, from the Al Mayadeen Channel, told the Cuban President during the reception that Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez gave at the Palace of the Revolution to the international guests and Cuban managers of the III Colloquium. Homeland International.

Wafica recalled the request he made to the president, during the celebration of “the first Homeland”, in 2022, for the organizers to look beyond Latin America, and the assurance that he gave him that we would do so. In the end, when the Palestinian cause has flooded the open veins of the current edition, the respected colleague only has gratitude: “Cuba impacts me more every day. “I don’t know where he gets the energy and the ability to love to go this far.”

Pressed for time and emotion, Wafica was grateful for something else: “You have been the only president in the world who took to the streets together with his people to condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza.”

Before multinational friends, the organizational secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, Roberto Morles Ojeda; the head of the Ideological Department, Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, and the president of the UPEC, Ricardo Ronquillo Bello, among multiple political communicators of theory, practice and sensitivity, Díaz-Canel corresponded to Wafica’s emotions: “Enough of genocide in Gaza ! We all need to raise our voices! It hurts much!”.

Afterwards, the President made a heartbreaking confession: in one of his meetings with Palestinian students in the country, several of those young people demanded that they be returned to their land to be with their people, but he could not please them because Cuba, which already had For them the role of teacher is now also the role of protective mother. “You are part of the future of Palestine and we are going to take care of you,” he told them then.

Another pain of the people that the host referred to was that of the Haitian: “How he has had to pay,” he said, “for having made that Revolution! The powers have driven it to misery and now the best they can think of is to send a multinational force. Why don’t they send doctors? “The Cuban doctors continue doing their work there and they are not afraid.”

Díaz-Canel commented that what happens in Gaza or Haiti can happen in any country because imperialism does not distinguish. Hence the importance of communicating from the left and from this Colloquium. “We have the will to strengthen it so that it becomes an exemplary platform for the world,” he assured.

For this reason, he invited us to move forward with an action plan and establish the corresponding monitoring mechanism to avoid leaving empty spaces between one event and another. “We are going to organize our truth, the truth of the people! “Count on Cuba for that!” he said.

The President also explained the policy of maximum pressure that imperialism applies against Cuba to bring down the Revolution, which is based on two central lines: economic asphyxiation and media intoxication, the effects of which any Cuban can feel. With Martí’s idea of ​​”(patriotic) plan against (the enemy’s) plan”, today’s response is based on strengthening unity, with greater popular participation; the improvement of ideological work – translated into the phrase “doing everything better” – and seeking the triumph of the gradual program of economic measures.

All of this goes through political communication, so it is coherent that Díaz-Canel affirms not only that in Cuba everyone already knows about communication as well as baseball and that “we need the Patria Colloquium. We wait for it. In this third edition we saw the family grow.”

Before these confessions by the president in front of communicators from the international left, Rosa Miriam Elizalde, the main “worker bee” in a large hive of Patria organizers, summarized the central balances for the presidency: along with the Cubans there are 117 colleagues from 31 nations that ensure a multiple dialogue on the always necessary and not yet achieved new world order of information and communication, the perspective of the Global South in this regard, the human intricacies of artificial intelligence, the strengthening of work networks between the participants and the exchange of communicative experiences from one people to another.

From there, Rosa Miriam granted, with the necessary restraint, the word that a few wanted to take, but in the end it was well represented with that of a few friends. The Ecuadorian Gabriela Rivadeneira began the dialogue with the dedication to Cuba of a phrase with Marti resonances: “Love is paid with love,” and she affirmed to continue learning from our History. About political communication? “Today something has to be done and that something is done from Cuba,” she stated.

The Brazilian Breno Altman maintains that the Patria Colloquium is already a reference in articulation and places the main originality in the integrative character it shows. In his opinion, it is not only a communication meeting but much more: an embrace of solidarity, especially evident with the support for the Palestinian cause.

A militant on the side of emotions, María Fernanda Ruiz said she was amazed to see how Cuba always knows how to find solutions through culture. “It overcomes everything and embraces us to achieve victory,” she stated before remembering that on Sunday, March 24, it will be they, the Argentine brothers, who will remind the world of the dignity of that people.

The American Manolo de los Santos is also impressed by the incredible tenacity of Cuba, which despite this complex moment opens doors to friends. “He shares with us the certainty of overcoming pessimism,” he said. Like other communicators, Manolo maintains that the left has already defeated the imperialist narrative about Israel and Palestine in networks and advanced ideas from the study “Hyperimperialism”, which he carries out together with other intellectuals to defend the idea that the world suffers from a single imperialism, led by the United States.

Interested in amplifying the voices of the people, Ghanaian Kwesi Pratt, director of Pan-African Television, is impressed by the potential for cooperation between equals that the event fosters to fight for that “new world without weapons of mass destruction, without hunger, with prosperity …guided by the example of Cuba in solidarity.”

Well, like the guests who respond to Patria, the Venezuelan communicator Miguel Pérez Pirela presented to his colleagues and the Cuban president the best idea to close this note of embrace: “This Colloquium has tenderness. It has been carried out with the required technical terms, but with great tenderness and a lot of aesthetic sense.”

After remembering Commanders Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, two vanguards of communication, Pérez Pirela reiterated what we all know: we must defeat, in their field, the dictatorship of the algorithm, but he then drew the very original sketch of the victory: “ Let us respond with the democracy of tenderness, beauty… and communication!”