On the 61st anniversary of its foundation, faithful to its vocation to opening doors for the continent’s peoples, the Casa de las Americas insists on the sacred value of solidarity, reaffirming its commitment to Martí’s vision of Homeland is humanity, and to the legacy of Fidel, who made this definition the patrimony of all Cubans, a guiding principle for the country’s international projection.
The institution – that emerged amidst defamatory media campaigns, airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks on a Revolution that was defending itself and taking the first steps in its emancipatory project – issued a statement on its anniversary recognizing “Cuban doctors who are fighting today against the pandemic in more than 20 countries. They risk their lives, as they have done on so many times, to save others, and they leave a moral example that is intolerable for neoliberal politicians and ideologues.”
The document denounces the U.S. government which continues the same script and relentlessly deploys “its powerful machinery to produce and disseminate lies to attack the generosity of the Cuban Revolution and its heirs.”
As inspired, today as on the first day, by Bolívar, Martí and Fidel, and nurtured by the luminous personality of Haydée Santamaría, the anti-colonial thinking of Roberto Fernández Retamar and the vanguard vision of Mariano Rodríguez, and the best creators of the region: Martínez Estrada, Galich, Benedetti, García Márquez and many others, the Casa reaffirmed its vocation for justice.
The anniversary statement condemned the reality that “Blacks and Latinos lead statistics on infections and deaths in the United States. The indigenous people of the North and South of the Americas, traditionally deprived of their rights, are extremely vulnerable. Informal workers, the homeless, those living in precarious housing in the suburbs of cities, immigrants without documents or destination and a long etcetera seem predestined to certain death, even if they do not appear in official figures.”
In the text, the renowned cultural institution supports the open letter entitled “Simply, Enough” from the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity, which, among other crucial issues, rejects the cynicism of those who promote the campaign against Cuba’s vocation for solidarity and internationalism and do not say a word about the blockade that prevents the acquisition of supplies needed in the COVID-19 battle.
“We are celebrating this anniversary in an emergency situation for the region and for the entire planet. A double pandemic is raging among the poorest: the new coronavirus and neoliberalism,” the Casa states, adding, “Many artists, victims of the dismantling of cultural policies and of the current circumstances, today find themselves total unprotected.”
The statement notes that the coronavirus has exacerbated the barbarity: the violent, fascist, xenophobic, racist culture of hate. “In the face of these dark tendencies, the Casa, as the honorable representatives of the Latin American and Caribbean peoples, is committed to a culture of peace, of brotherhood among human beings. A culture, moreover, that lives respectfully with Mother Earth.”
As the cradle of regional integration for the intellectual vanguard, and as in the difficult times of its foundation, the Casa insists that it continues to work “day by day, in the midst of the current crisis, to maintain its links with those who defend, the authentic culture of emancipation in Latin America, the Caribbean and within the United States itself.”