Cuba warns about the Dangers of Cognitive Warfare

HAVANA, Cuba, Aug 28 (ACN) With a call for unity among progressive intellectuals in the region and the world against the imperialist offensive, the discussion "Cognitive Warfare Against Venezuela and Cuba: Response Options," led by journalist and researcher Raúl Antonio Capote, took place today at the Che Guevara Studies Center.

The meeting was attended by scholars and personalities, as well as members of the Cuban chapter of the Antifascist International, diplomats from the embassies of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, and the Russian Federation, along with the Palestinian representation in Havana.

From its conception, the meeting was intended as a theoretical-practical exercise on cognitive warfare today and how to act in increasingly sophisticated war scenarios where the deployment of large armies is not even necessary.

Capote defended the need to propose effective and well-founded responses in defense of popular causes against the propaganda and technological machinery of reactionary forces that seek to dispute and rewrite history and truth.

He pointed out the antecedents of the current cognitive warfare in the U.S. intervention in the 1895 independence struggle, and how it was forged through a strong media campaign to move public opinion towards certain induced thoughts.

He emphasized that this work on social networks focuses primarily on groups of marginalized youth, not necessarily counter-revolutionaries, who use video games and community forums on trendy topics as a strategy of emotional manipulation to induce them towards subversive activity as a way to seek fame or social validation.

Regarding advances in artificial intelligence, the university professor also invited people to question what is real and what is not in every piece of content they consume, with an increasingly blurred line, and with the risk of a dispute over the truth that culminates in the demobilization of revolutionary forces.

Although it is called a psychological war, the latent possibility of an aggression against any country in the region contrary to U.S. interests is no less alarming, supported by an economic war that limits reasoning capacity and the control of algorithms that influence the formation of public opinion, he warned.

Cuban intellectual Abel Prieto Jiménez, director of the Casa de las Américas, pointed out the silent danger in American culture of comics, superheroes, and the film industry, as the main ideological standard-bearers of cultural domination.

As part of the event, there was also a debate on the practices of political communication put into practice by Commander Ernesto Che Guevara and the need to articulate communicators and specialists in that area to update them and replicate them on digital platforms.