Cuba celebrates the Granma Rebelde International Festival on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Granma and Juventud Rebelde newspapers, founded by Commander Fidel Castro Ruz. Our correspondent Belen De Los Santos has all the details.
00:00Cuba surveys the Grand Ma Rebelde International Festival on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Grand Ma and Juventus Rebelde newspapers founded by Commander Fidel Castro Ruz.
00:10A correspondent, Mariano De Los Santos, has all the details.
00:13Pleasure to meet you here from Havana, Cuba.
00:17And we are at the opening day of a very special festival that is happening here in the Cuban capital.
00:24This is the Grand Ma Rebelde Festival in honor of these two iconic newspapers of the Cuban revolution.
00:33The Grand Ma on the one hand and also the Juventud Rebelde newspaper.
00:39That's the youth newspaper, two iconic outlets that Fidel Castro created 60 years ago in order to answer maybe one question,
00:50one key question that had to do with how to continue doing journalism after the revolution or what is a revolutionary journalism.
00:59And we are joined now by Duane Stilwell.
01:02He is, well, he is living at the moment in the U.S.
01:07He has experience with journalism, experience with this question as well, and has been here for this opening day.
01:13I wanted to ask you first, thank you for joining us here in Tell Us Through English.
01:17Thank you for having me.
01:19And what do you think about this question?
01:21What does doing a revolutionary journalism mean today?
01:26Well, you know, there's, in my opinion, there's two kinds of journalism.
01:31There's the journalism to inform people about the truth, what is happening today, what they need to know to make sense of the world around them.
01:41There's a different kind of journalism as well.
01:44And that's the kind of journalism that gives you context, that gives you historical information, that gives you also factual information.
01:54It may be harder to read, but people also need to get that fuller kind of reporting that has a bigger view and has a more historical view and a sense of what's happening.
02:11Because we have something called parachute journalism, where you send a journalist to some place in the world where they know nothing about what's going on in the context.
02:24They might tell you what's happening, but they don't really help people understand why it's happening.
02:31And we are so deluged with so much information.
02:36It's very hard, especially for young people, to make their way around and figure out what's important.
02:43Like, should somebody who's 15 read the Financial Times?
02:48My two sons did, because they would ask me, Dad, you know a lot of, like, how, you know, how is it that you always know what's going on?
02:56Well, rich people make a lot of the history, you know, they are in power, right?
03:01What's important to them is in the financial pages of the newspaper.
03:05Yes, you should read the front page. You should read what's going on in the world.
03:10But you should also read the financial part of the paper, so that you understand what are the contradictions that, you know, from the other side.
03:20And so they're able to see more than one side of a story.
03:24And they, you know, I'm very proud of them because they move a lot now.
03:31They live very fast.
03:33And when they move to a new city, they read three or four books about the history of that city.
03:39And it gives them a, they live, when they live there, then they live a richer life because they know the history of the city.
03:47Not that many people do that, but that's, I would say to young people, if you move to a new city, read about the history of that city.
03:57You've never lived there before.
03:58You find out what's its history and then you will live a fuller life.
04:03But that's how we have to deal with life in general.
04:07Dwayne, you're living in the United States and in a moment in time, well, maybe this could be said about any moment in time, but particularly now we are hearing so many narratives and specifically regarding Latin America that are shaping the way that the United States is dealing and starting to take a more aggressive stance on the region.
04:31I wanted to ask you how to take, how to shape that counter perspective from inside the United States itself.
04:41How does journalism achieve that?
04:44Okay, the first thing I would say is you have to read Fidel Castro.
04:48You have to read what Fidel Castro, you have to read his speeches of the United Nations.
04:53Because then you'll understand that immigrants who come to the United States are following the wealth that the United States has stolen from their countries.
05:06You don't hear that very often.
05:09But they have a moral right to follow the wealth that the United States has forcibly extracted from their countries.
05:18You know, we've had globalization for 70 years.
05:22That's because the United States deindustrialized, sent many, many communities in the United States were just devastating.
05:34The factories were moved to Mexico to other countries to take advantage of cheaper labor, you know, cheaper labor.
05:43And so they extracted labor from our countries, not just raw materials.
05:54Mexico, for example, has a six-day work with them.
05:57That means that they get more surplus value from the work of, you know, one week of work of a Mexican worker is more surplus value.
06:06And, you know, the United States takes advantage of that and it's powerful enough to do that.
06:13Well, if the immigrants who come have a moral right to follow the wealth that is being stolen.
06:22So that's first of all.
06:23But the other thing that's important to know is that there used to be a lawful, legal way to enter the United States.
06:33And over time, over the last several decades, they've chipped and chipped and blocked and changed it so that it's almost impossible to come legally.
06:42So now people come illegally, right? So for many years they let that happen because those people are in the margins.
06:53They have no political voice. They can be super exploited, you know.
06:57So you wanted to have them as second class citizens and exploit them.
07:01And now you want to return them like they're garbage when they contributed so much to the United States.
07:07So you see what my perspective is. It's not that difficult.
07:13But in the media environment of today, where everything's concentrated in a few totally monopolized narratives, people don't get this perspective very much.
07:25But there are working people in the United States who are very willing to defend their brothers and sisters who are being brutalized by this administration.
07:39And just one last thing, Gilmar Abrego Garcia, who we've all heard about, is an example of how the labor movement can help defend those workers.
07:52Because his union, smart, has gone all out to defend him publicly and to make a campaign to defend his right to remain in the United States.
08:07And it's an example to the labor movement, not just in the United States, but in Europe and everywhere else.
08:13And definitely the possibility of, well, you were talking about finding that counter narrative, that narrative that is not the one that is trying to be imposed time and time again.
08:25And we were thinking about the evolution of journalism as well.
08:29And many take to social media and think, well, there was a first take that thought of social media as a very democratizing tool.
08:37But then we are now faced with this social media that is breaking up these narratives and imposing them on repetition and repetition.
08:45And we have a new challenge on how to tell these stories from a different perspective, differently.
08:50One of the things that is being discussed at this festival is how do we achieve that?
08:55Well, Fidel had some ideas in terms of going deeper into the journalism perspective and thinking and having a more well-rounded idea of, well, what is that story telling us?
09:08Right. I think one thing that has helped me is to think, for example, there's many labor leaders in the United States who look at politics from the point of view of what's best for American workers, only American workers.
09:26And that gives you already not a very wide perspective because you can defend the American worker and defend the imperialist system, too.
09:36So you have to begin by what is in the interest of the world working class.
09:42That for me has always been my North Star.
09:45So internationalism.
09:46Exactly. Internationalism.
09:48That's what Cuba represents.
09:51That's exactly why Cuba is so important, because it's not just a socialist country.
10:00It's a country that built a sugar refinery in Nicaragua.
10:05They brought the engineers, they brought the materials, they built it and then they turned the keys over.
10:10They built the airport in Grenada.
10:13Both of those, you know, revolutions did not become the Cuban revolution.
10:19But Cuba has always extended the hand to others who are fighting to make this a better world.
10:27And you have to begin with that.
10:29What's in the interest of the poor, the working class of the world, wherever they may be?
10:36Sri Lanka, Japan, you know, Congo.
10:43It doesn't matter.
10:44It's what's good for us as a class worldwide.
10:48And then you can begin to distill.
10:50You listen to a narrative and you look at what interests are they defending.
10:55So you put it against the world working class.
10:58And then you can decide.
11:00Maybe not, you know.
11:02That's been always my North Star.
11:04It's a great reading perspective as well.
11:07Thank you so much, Dwayne, for joining us for this conversation in this festival,
11:13the Grandma Revelder Festival that is just seeking to answer some of these questions.
11:20Thank you so much.
11:21You're very welcome.
11:22So that was Dwayne Stilwell here in Tell Us Your English,
11:25going over this first day of this festival that looks into a revolutionary journalism
11:31for the decades that brought us here and also for the decades to come.
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