Cuba in the Media. Cuba on the Media. Cuba and the Media.

Cuba is always in the news. Understandably so, since for more than 60 years Cuba has been influencing the future of many countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. This influence has taken place in multiple aspects, among which we can remember, for example:

The military: suffice it to recall Cuba's crucial role in the independence of Angola and Namibia, or Vo Nguyen Giap's public gratitude for its support during the Vietnam War.

The political: suffice it to recall Nelson Mandela's gratitude to the Cuban government for its support to the struggle against Apartheid, or Hugo Chavez for his support during the 2002 coup d'état.

The cultural: suffice it to recall Evo Morales publicly thanking Cuba for having made Bolivia officially free of illiteracy.

The medical: just remember Margaret Chan, former Director General of the WHO thanking Cuba for being the first to take the step in response to the call of the UN and the WHO to end Ebola, or the applause of the people at the Madrid airport for the Cuban doctors heading to Italy to treat patients of COVID-19.

Cuba makes international news every year when the UN General Assembly passes resolutions calling for an end to the U.S. embargo, supported by the overwhelming majority of the world's countries. Cuba was in the news when the Obama administration wanted to ease the conditions of the embargo, and Cuba is again in the news when the COVID-19 hits the whole world and strains to the limit all countries healthcare systems, but also their economic and social capacities. But Cuba is a different and complex country. Among other things that make it unique, it is the only living example of socialism in the American continent. It has a double currency, which is something the Western world is not familiar with at all. It has a network of neighborhood committees unlike anywhere else in the world, the CDRs, that exist to promote social welfare and report on counter-revolutionary activity and that shape society in ways that defy shallow analyses. It is the only country in the world that has established international medical missions, treating since 1961 more than 70 million people and saving the lives of 2 million. It is the only country in the world that has endured what has become the longest economic, commercial and financial embargo in the history of mankind. Imposed by the most powerful country in the history of mankind. It is a country with too many complex characteristics that no other country in the world has, and there´s so much for the media to contextualize before rendering any piece of accurate news. A magazine as American as National Geographic, in its article on Cuba in its November 2012 issue, feels the need to be honest and alert the readers about Cuba: "the place is exhausting in its complexity and paradox". The magazine reflects about “the essential weirdness” of the double currency. Any news about Cuba is always complex, whether it appears to be or not, and it is necessary to avoid simplistic analysis. And it is impossible not to analyze its socioeconomic situation in the light of a reality that no other country in the world has experienced: the longest embargo in the history of mankind. Washington has repeatedly declared in public its intention to overthrow the Cuban government and restore capitalism on the island. Obama tried to change strategy, not purpose, but the Trump administration reversed the changes and the Biden administration has kept its predecessor´s policy. More than 240 new sanctions have been added, 55 since the beginning of the pandemic caused by COVID-19. Of all the possible strategies that empires throughout history have tried in order to maintain their spheres of influence, the US has invented none, but has perfected them all. These can be divided into direct domination strategies, basically the open declaration of war, or indirect domination strategies, basically undeclared military warfare, economic warfare, political warfare, cultural and media warfare. Let us briefly analyze them and dwell on the latter to analyze it a little more closely.

The open military war strategy is based on the threat, public and permanent, to end the sovereignty and integrity of the country, including its territory as well as its government and its institutions. A verbal threat with real attempts to be carried out, as during the attempted invasion in 1961, with the existence and maintenance of an illegal military base in Guantanamo and with 638 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA World Factbook, which analyzes the most important parameters of all the countries of the world, has an analysis for Cuba that it does not have for many others: that of its capacity to repel a military attack (high, by the way).

Covert military warfare is based on two lines: internal and external. The internal one is based on the Pentagon's use of Special Operations Forces (SOF), in close coordination with the intelligence services - CIA, FBI, DEA and NSA, especially - to carry out acts of sabotage and attacks. It had $58.7 billion allocated for secret missions for the 2015 fiscal year. In Cuba, it has left to date a balance of more than $55 billion in infrastructure losses and the attack on people has left to date a balance of more than 3000 civilians dead and more than 2000 disabled. The external line is based on the use of non-American mercenary personnel (mostly from the country in question, in this case Cubans), often trained and coordinated by the SOF, and the financing of their acts of sabotage to infrastructures. Examples are the Alpha 66 group, the Torriente plan, or the flotilla of Ramon Saul Sanchez, USAID sending agents for subversion, or Operation Mongoose, which used covert military warfare techniques, such as espionage and counter-espionage services, torture, kidnapping and assassination. Part of their acts have included chemical warfare, with bacteriological attacks on crops. The 1976 bombing of the Cubana de Aviación CU-455 plane in mid-flight, for example, is both an attack on infrastructure and people. All crew members and passengers died, among them the 24 members of the Cuban national youth fencing team, who were returning to Cuba after winning all the gold medals in the Campeonatos Centroamericanos y del Caribe.

Part of those $58 billion are dedicated to create a perception against the enemy and in favor of oneself. The media play a pivotal role, as they are used to transmit propaganda in news format. The objective is to generate real damage to bring down the enemy, and if this is not achieved, to build an opinion matrix holding the enemy responsible for that damage, in order to create DDR: defeatism, desertion and rebellion. This is thus reflected in declassified Pentagon counterinsurgency manual US Army Field Manual FM 31-20-3, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics, Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces.

Today, espionage, counter-espionage and propaganda are also part of cyber warfare, through spy satellites, drones and ultra-sensitive eavesdropping systems, within the actions of the Pentagon's Military Intelligence Program (MIP). In March 3 2021, President Joe Biden published his Interim Strategic National Security Guidance, where the manipulation techniques that have always been used by the U.S. Army are now called Military Information Support Operations (MISO). The purpose is to spy, block and attack, disrupt and collapse Cuban websites and the use of the Internet by the Cuban government, institutions and citizens, in addition to stealing sensitive information and infiltrating hostile information typical of psychological warfare contexts. For example, during the protests that took place in July 2021, attacks were confirmed using the TOR network from IPs from the USA to the website of the Cuban Presidency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/1494979/cuba-announces-cyber-attack-on-foreign-ministry-website, as well as one of the most important portals of the country.

In the case of Cuba, the economic warfare is based on the economic, commercial and financial embargo on the country. It is technically an embargo, and that is how the U.S. government calls it, although it is considered and called a blockade by the Cuban government. In practice it has the full force of a blockade, given that by definition a blockade requires the use of military force and affects third countries, and the truth is that many of its stipulations would not be put into effect if it were not for the real power of the US army to force third parties to comply with them: Cuba cannot export or import any product to the US; it cannot receive tourism from that country; it cannot use the dollar in its transactions abroad; it has no access to international credits, nor can it carry out operations with financial institutions, and its ships and aircraft cannot touch US territory. The ship of a third country that touches a Cuban port will not be able to enter a U.S. port for six months, if it obtains a new permit, that is. And this makes a difference between an embargo and a blockade, the governments, institutions or companies of third countries that negotiate with Cuba are exposed to severe fines. The island has a U.S. military base in its soil. Since 1909, at the London Naval Conference, it was defined as a principle of International Law that a blockade is an act of war. It is defined as an act of genocide in article II of the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948.

The question many people ask is: Is the economic, commercial and financial embargo effective? On the one hand, it has not been effective in overthrowing the government because it has not found any serious echo internally. This is a necessary point to understand: a government that is under pressure from the most powerful empire in history cannot stay afloat if it is not for the massive support of the population, which is the result of all the advances of socialism and the comparison with the capitalism that is reserved for Cuba; not the European one, but the Caribbean one. Take Haiti for instance, that capitalist country, the poorest in the Americas, sovereign only in theory, with a recently assassinated president. Embargo or blockade, what is certain is that the Cuban economy has a balance of $130 billion in losses to date, contributing to the lack of industrial, economic and financial development of the island, to the poor real estate development or the lack of goods and services available in the world market only through credit. It has contributed to the more or less acute shortages of food, medicines and electricity. An example of the real impact is that Cuba is deprived in one week of the money needed to produce primary school textbooks for an entire school year. How many weeks have passed since it was imposed in 1960?

The proof that the embargo is effective is that it is not lifted. The resolutions against it that are voted every year in the UN General Assembly have identified the embargo and subsequent sanctions as the main cause that adversely affects the Cuban people and deprives them of basic foodstuffs. The Mercosur parliament, the Parlasur, has referred to the embargo, rightfully calling it blockade, as follows: "the magnitude of the damage caused to the Cuban people by maintaining this policy which violates human rights". The Latin American Parliament, the Parlatino, has defined it as: "the greatest violation of the human rights of Cubans and the greatest obstacle to Cuba's development". Oxfam International has stated: "Despite the fact that a new wave of COVID-19 infections is affecting many countries in the world, Cuba is the only one that has blocked access to the means to face the epidemic". Therefore, analyzing the news coming from Cuba as if the embargo did not exist is like ranting about the lack of space in the room without seeing the elephant in the room. This does not mean that everything that happens in Cuba is due to the embargo, but it does mean that everything that happens in Cuba is related to the embargo. And the fact is that the embargo does not only affect the economy. At the political level, for example, the embargo, the covert war and the invasion attempts have put such pressure that they have contributed to create a war mentality in the government that raises the level of rigidity in the control over dissent, criticism and the expression of differences, including those arising within the revolution itself, a mentality that limits internal debate and impregnates political, social and also cultural participation with hierarchy and verticality.

But there is also a political warfare going on, based on the diplomatic and institutional isolation and the international criminalization of Cuba. Remember how, in its day, the US expelled Cuba from the OAS. Despite the fact that Cuba has never imposed sanctions on the US, has never tried to destabilize the US government and has never financed an internal opposition, the US has included Cuba on the list of countries that support terrorism since 1979, with strict sanctions, which are used to constantly pressure the embassies of third countries to be hostile to Cuba, for example, by voting against the resolutions they sign every year at the UN General Assembly calling for an end to the embargo, or to constantly pressure the embassies of third countries to be hostile to Cuba by not accepting Cuban internationalist aid workers, doctors or teachers, as happened for example with Panama, among others, in the early days of COVID.

Let's look at the culture warfare and especially the media warfare. As we all know, the United States has the most powerful cultural industry on the planet. There is its cinema, radio, television, among other platforms. And it consciously uses them as a weapon of soft power. In a musical nation like Cuba, the average Cuban already has a greater exposure to foreign cinema and television than to music itself. Cinema and television, in Cuba as in any other country, are transmitters of fashions, trends, idols, attitudes and values generated by the consumer industries of industrialized countries, which surpass in production those generated by Cuba in these two areas, and whose values compete with those transmitted by schools or many of the country's cultural institutions. The Cuban government and the institutions in charge of cultural creation and research have developed an enormous work in the expansion of knowledge and values, to the point that, unlike the other former European colonies (with the exception of the United States itself), Cuba has been able to generate and export -embargo included- knowledge, which is one of the characteristics of the post-industrial societies of the first world countries, the former metropolises. In that sense, it is interesting to take a look at the Cuban art magazine, or the cultural production of one of the most prestigious institutions in Latin America, the Casa de las Americas. However, they have not been, and are not being, really able to stop the adoption of cultural models and values generated by the media apparatus of the capitalist world, and especially, due to its proximity, of the North American capitalist world.

The five national television channels, for example, produce documentaries, soap operas, humorous programs, serials, adventures, cartoons and musicals, as well as political and current affairs content, but they also import content, mainly from Brazil, the United States and Spain, all capitalist countries. It should be added that the Cuban television panorama is not exempt from internal problems, and this is not so closely linked to the embargo. There are criticisms ranging from the low cultural quality of certain television programs, to self-censorship and lack of depth in the analysis of the problems of Cuban society, to the lack of diversity and the promotion of banality in Cuban TV and cinema.

Not to mention that the CIA has for years been recruiting disgruntled Cuban university professors and students with aspirations to fabricate grand CVs, in exchange for helping them to publish according to CIA guidelines and to lead organizations and movements within their field that follow CIA guidelines. Likewise, for years, together with the Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI) and various NGOs, now integrated in the Department of Defense (DoD), it has been recruiting professors and among the brightest American university students with the highest loan debts, to work in their "development" programs abroad, designing plans for regime change in various countries of the world, including Cuba channeling millions of dollars to "cultural groups" whose aim is to subvert both the youth and the Internet in Cuba.

But let´s have a look at the media warfare, based basically on A) the convergence of ideological, political and economic interests of the US State Department with the large media conglomerates of the US, Latin America and Europe, the use of information has the covert purpose of stigmatizing and isolating Cuba, overthrowing its government and reinstating capitalism. This is the case for example of the GDA (Grupo de Diarios de América), the PAL (Periódicos Asociados Latinoamericanos), or the 78 newspapers of the SIP (Sociedad Interamericana de Prensala, the most powerful press society of the subcontinent. B) Washington using the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to obtain information to disseminate propaganda against its adversaries as a way to maintain the aforementioned imperial influence. Radio and Television Martí are a case in point: created in 1983 and 1990, respectively, they receive an annual budget of about $28 million to broadcast the endless propaganda of the counterrevolution, illegally invading the Cuban radio-electric space. Alan Weinstein, one of the founders of the NED, said in 1991: "much of what we do was done by the CIA 25 years ago". USAID executives recognize that through this entity, the White House maintains a close training relationship with news outlets in many countries to create news that shape states of opinion favorable to their interests.

To achieve their objectives of political and economic change, they make use of multiple and varied techniques. Let us analyze some of them, without intending to be exhaustive in an article of these characteristics:

The open lie: the creation of the news when it does not happen, with a complete lie, provoking the facts that want to be reported but do not occur, turning the media into political actors, and thus becoming part of the political and psychological war. For example, we have read extensively about Raul Castro fleeing Cuba as a result of the July 2021 protests
The open half lie, with two aspects: A) the creation of the news when it does not happen with a half-truth: the Spanish newspaper ABC accuses the Cuban government of having detained one of its correspondents as a result of the July 2021 protests, and here we see how the Cuban government confirms that ABC has never had an accredited correspondent on the island. B) the manipulation of information in the editing process, as when Fox News erases part of the images of the pro-government demonstrators in the streets of Cuba to make it look like they are anti-government demonstrators.
The cover lie, exposing the truth but omitting previous or subsequent information, decontextualizing it. In the absence of a context, the receiver tries to interpret any piece of news based on the knowledge of his most immediate social and political context: in the Spanish television channel La Sexta documentary on Cuba: Salvados, recortando la revolución, for example, the Spanish viewer is presented with complex Cuban situations, like the double currency, the CDRs or the economic blockade itself without prior explanation, creating the feeling that society in Cuba is strange, contradictory and unlucky, adding to the chauvinistic trend in Western media that that world outside the West is always worse.
Insinuation could be considered as part of the covert lie: In the BBC documentary This World 2012 Cuba with Simon Reeve, we are told that in Cuba there are hardly any civil rights while the image of two police cars and some blurred slow motion images of some policemen are shown to corroborate it.
The concealment of the nature of the actors involved. In the BBC documentary mentioned above, Human Rights Watch is cited to talk about the repression of dissent. We are not warned that HRW receives 75% of its funding from American bankers and billionaire investors; it has had board members with connections to the White House and several of its advisory committee members have or have had relationships with the CIA and the U.S. military
The incrimination of one of the parties in conflict (Cuba) and the exculpation of the other party in conflict (the US). In this news, the US is good because although it imposes sanctions, it does so because the Cuban government is a dictatorship and because the Biden administration continues to look for ways to alleviate the humanitarian plight of the Cuban people. People like Julian Assange have already exposed at a global level how our present day empire is not interested in the humanitarian plights of any of the countries it touches.
The exaggeration of the positive traits - or that are considered positive - of one of the parties and the exaggeration of the negative traits -or that are considered negative - of the opposite. Here, three Cuban doctors, out of the thousands abroad on medical missions, deserts the mission. The thousands that do not are not news. The numbers of protesters in July 2021 in Cuba pale in comparison with those in the previous months in Colombia or Chile, but the Western mainstream media attention and intention exaggerates the situation.
The exaggeration of the negative traits of one side and the positive traits of the other. For example, Cuban rappers Navy Pro, David D Omni, Soandri HDC and Escuadron Patriot enjoy full freedom of expression against the Cuban government, which is nonetheless portrayed as a tyranny, while Spanish rapper Pablo Hazel is imprisoned for using the same human rights in a country that calls itself a democracy.
The association of ideas. Here we see how a news item about a zoo and lions becomes a headline about a facebook comment about the hunger of Cubans.
The contradiction between the intention of the headline and the information within the body of the news. Here we see the headline: "Cuba, the first country in Latin America and the sixth in the world with the highest number of Covid-19 infections. Now let's read the information in the body of the news: Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador and Paraguay are among the countries with the highest weekly death rates in the world. Now remember that infections are not deaths. The intention is to criticize Cuba, and by association, socialism. But the fact that the other countries are capitalist is not mentioned. And so are the first five in the world. Nor is it that none of them have suffered the longest economic, commercial and financial embargo in the history of humankind.
The concealment or disappearance of the unwanted news: while the July 2021 protests were taking place in Cuba, there was also a group of Cuban Americans, led by high school teacher and war veteran Carlos Lazo marching from Miami to Washington, D.C., to call for an end to the embargo, which a non-Western news agency reported.
The use of information noise: the use of distraction and confusion, with gossip and rumor elevated to the level of news. Information noise can be based on A) gossip about the target information (in this piece of news: whether there are some altered images with Fidel Castro with an earpiece in his ear or not) in order to distract from the most relevant information, which in this case was that Cuba and the USA announced at that time that they were starting talks to reestablish relations between the two countries. B) the saturation of information from other fields not related with the target information (in Spain, the sports and events sections) that cannibalizes the plurality of information and the in-depth analysis of the important news. An example: in Spain, the average citizen knows every week which the weekly matches of the national soccer league are, but does not know how many years the Cuban team of the internationalist mission doctors had been in Haiti when the first Spanish doctors arrived after the 2010 earthquake.
The use of manichaeism and hypocrisy in the analysis and commentary of the news. Manichaeism: everything one side does is good, everything the other side does is bad. Hypocrisy: the same fact is bad only when the enemy does it. In Cuba, every negative aspect of the Cuban reality is not only bad, it is always the proof of the intrinsic evil of socialism and its definitive downfall. Meanwhile, that same aspect, even more serious, is reported in a capitalist country never as the end of capitalism, but as a technical problem specific to that country. In this piece of news, it´s terror time when trials start after the protests of July 2021. Terror is when brutal police officers are acquitted after beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, cause the message sent is: terror is ok. Racism in Cuba, with its large black population, is not the problem it is in the US, but in the US it´s referred to simply as “racial tensions”. Now go and try to find words like “tyranny” and “dictatorship” in the mainstream media reporting on Rodney King beating or the ensuing riots.
Silencing one side and taking into account only the other. Let us compare this piece of news, where the US and its words are the relevant thing with this other one, where the silence around the US is emphasized.
The disqualification at the time of making analysis and commentary of the news: here we read that the Great Dictator Fidel Castro had Alzheimer's (without proving it), and that this is the obvious proof that he did not write his articles. Of course, it´s impossible to accept that Fidel Castro wrote what he wrote, so a justification must be found.
The speculation of political fiction where the end of the world or the beginning of hell is always predicted for those who help Cuba.
More modernly, the substitution of field research for opinion in social networks, turning any blogger or tweeter with an opinion favorable to editorial interests into an authoritative source. One cannot fail to mention blogger Yoani Sánchez, whom the U.S. magazine Foreign Policy came to qualify as one of the most influential intellectuals in Latin America. Her blog has been cited as the most reliable source of information by the Western press, among others, by The Huffington Post, the Miami Herald, the New York Times, by El País in Spain, or by Clarín in Argentina. For his part, Iroel Sánchez Espinosa, journalist and essayist, member of the Cuban internationalist contingent that defeated the apartheid troops of South Africa in Angola, former president of the Organizing Committee of the International Book Fair in Havana, director of TV programs, founder of cultural magazines and online encyclopedias, whose blog is one the most widely read in Cuba, is a well known pro-system blogger, but here in Europe his name and scope are almost unknown. Even more modernly, we should mention the massive use of automated fake accounts in social platforms with content replicated by bots to outnumber any articulated info attempt from the enemy.
The use of several strategies at the same time. This CNN news item is utterly confusing, having one title but containing two news items - creating mental associations -, only one side is taken into account while the other one is silenced, one side is criminalized and the other is victimized, and manichaeism and hypocrisy are used in the analysis (with politicians playing the role of commentators).

There is, indeed, an economic, commercial and financial blockade, on Cuba. The aim of this article is, however, to highlight that, from an informative point of view, there is also a real blockade on the rest of the world by way of a systematic misinformation use -through concealment, manipulation or creation-. The aim is to hide the true dimension of the achievements of the Cuban model (here, 22 of the main ones. The aim is to present reality in such a way that it makes a large part of the workers of the world believe that the existing problems are due to the genetics of socialism, truncating to a certain extent (to a great extent?) the international solidarity of the working classes, which would benefit from a real socialist society in their places. The media blockade not only confuses us with respect to the real situation of the island, but it also tries, and succeeds, to limit and hijack debates about the questions that the Cuban situation poses us, for example, about what socialism is, about the dictatorship of the proletariat, about the alternatives within the anti-capitalist positions, such as participatory and self-managed socialism versus state socialism and market socialism, or such as public versus governmental policies, about the role of the state during the counterrevolutionary phases, about the characteristics and struggles of societies in transition, about the effectiveness of the different health models... and a long etcetera we are very hungry about in Europe. And just as, when faced with the most transcendent questions of man, the lack of science is supplemented with religion to find the answers, the lack of political culture is supplemented with apriorisms and dogmas. The three main apriorisms of many detractors of the Cuban system are: the unquestionable evil of socialism, the fact that capitalism inevitably leads to democracy and the genetic corruption and oppression of the Castro family and the Cuban government. The three basic apriorisms of many supporters of the Cuban model are the presupposition that state socialism is the only possible socialism, the reluctance to accept that Cuba is not communist, but is frozen in or transitioning some imperfect and finite stage between socialism and communism, and as a logical conclusion, the idea that there is no beyond, so questioning the shortcomings of the Cuban model always equals being a counterrevolutionary, without distinguishing between the criticism made to improve and the criticism made to destroy. As if Fidel Castro himself had never stated: “Revolution means changing everything that must be changed”.

Apriorisms do not allow us to analyze the complexities of reality and life. For example, since we are talking about the media, there is a general lack of knowledge about the media situation inside Cuba, its conflicts and its challenges. The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) has been the one that has traditionally set the guidelines for the management of the press and its access to information. For its part, the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) has been showing its desire to abandon didacticism and apologetics in favor of description and criticism since the 70's and 80's. These are the two sides of the eternal conflict: a bureaucracy that responds to the U.S. media war with a psychological state of defense and control, and that sees the media as a weapon in the battle of ideas, and a press that has to work between the need to publish realities and opinions and the need to help circumvent the embargo. The journalistic sector, which has never shown a disregard for its social function and the reality with its northern neighbor, maintains that professional criteria have the right to clash with political criteria. They are also aware that citizens have broader communication needs than the political education insisted on by the PCC, and that true political education involves transmitting all the needs of citizens, not only their political ones.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put a strain, as in any other country, on the healthcare system, and has cut the flow of tourists, with its billions of dollars a year. The Cuban government has prioritized people´s health over the economy, so citizens don´t get infected because they don´t go to work. The embargo affects the purchase of materials that are not produced on the island and for which there are very pressing need peaks. The new embargo measures prohibit the sending of remittances from abroad. As a result of the political warfare, Brazil and Ecuador have dismantled the internationalist medical missions that allowed several billion dollars a year to enter Cuba. The Cuban government never succeeded in making Cuba self-sufficient in food, having to import 70% of all the food in the island while at the same time allowing large tracts of land to remain idle for a long time. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Cuba, the island was already going through a complex moment of political and economic, social and cultural changes, the contradictions of which escape quick or superficial media analysis. The island, with its financial and infrastructural underdevelopment, was already immersed in a transition from a centralized, planned, state socialist economy to a mixed, decentralized economy, with both capitalist and self-managed socialist aspects, testing economic liberalization. Although the once omnipresent state has not relinquished control and planning of health, education, sports and transportation, it has ceded space to private business, which operates within the parameters of the capitalist model, such as supply and demand, maximum profit at minimum cost, and profit motive. It has also ceded ground to the cooperative regime, gradually abandoning the centralized planning of the economy, the dominance of state ownership, and the strict redistribution of wealth. The cooperative regime, made up by agricultural, industrial, construction and service cooperatives, is more a model of workers' self-management and represents a certain attempt at self-managed ecosocialism, outside state socialism. There is a coexistence or a clash between these three models, and there is a lot of trial and error in every model. This has generated varied positions among the population: trust and distrust, hope and disenchantment, criticism -against the revolution and from within the revolution-, denunciation, defense and debate. There are those who, for example, feel frustrated because their high level of education does not find opportunities in a country with such a poorly developed economy, and those who accept to be part of the internationalist medical missions as a way out. The new generations are not impervious to the idols, aesthetic manifestations, collective imaginaries or group codes of their peers in the western world; they are aware of the needs that are covered, but logically they aspire to cover those that are not, and they also have needs that did not exist at the time of the triumph of the revolution. As in any other country in the world, not everyone has the same social commitment, the same capacity for sacrifice or the same threshold of resistance. There are those who take to the streets spontaneously, which is instantly seized by all Cuban enemies, and there are those who take to the streets in return for briberies. Why should this be “the news”? It should be “the olds”, because it is as old as the hills when it comes to social struggles.

With its achievements and successes, with its failures and contradictions, Cuba has been able to show the world the great road that can be traveled with the practice of solidarity internationalism. Those of us who also suffer the rigors of the capitalist values of chauvinism and selfishness would do well to join in the praxis that Cuba continues to demonstrate. Some of the things that can be done in this line, can be to always look for the Cuban perspective on the world, without intermediaries, such as for example the news agency Prensa Latina and its English version. We can contact the nearest Cuban embassy or consulate to ask for ideas and join their events in our cities and contribute our time and work or intellectual experience. Or the associations of friendship with Cuba in our countries (for example here in the US, here in Spain). And why not contact the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) to find out how to do internationalist solidarity work stays in Cuba. Once there, do not return without making friends who can show you Cuban everyday life first hand, and with whom you can keep in touch back home. It is worth living the experience of giving back to Cuba a little bit of everything it has given, and continues to give, us.

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