Abel Prieto: cultural colonization in Cuba is disturbing

 

HAVANA, Cuba, Feb 1 (ACN) “We are witnessing in Cuba a growing presence of patterns related to cultural colonization,” said Abel Prieto Jimenez, president of Casa de las Americas, in an ad hoc panel at the International Congress Pedagogy 2023.

Prieto Jimenez mentioned cases such as the one in the city of Holguin in October 2022 of young people who showed up in a public square wearing Ku Klux Klan hooded robes, “an example of ignorance and colonization combining to have effects which are equal or similar to fascism”.

He referred to the ongoing program Sembrar ideas, sembrar conciencia (Sowing ideas, sowing conscientiousness), named after a phrase of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz that invites Cubans to develop critical thinking and cultural resistance and based on workshops in schools and communities on how to tackle the consumption of banal contents.

He also highlighted Cuban cultural and educational policies implemented since 1959 through the Cuban Film Institute, the National Printing House, Casa de las Americas and the National Theater, with special stress on the Literacy Campaign in 1961, which allowed the nation to declare itself free of illiteracy, and Fidel's speech Palabras a los intelectuales (Words to the intellectuals), an unprecedented anti-dogma and anti-sectarian instrument.

According to Prieto Jimenez, Jose Marti and Fidel Castro are two key bastions of decolonization in Cuba.