Havana. A two-day international journalists’ forum ended in Cuba on Monday. 70 representatives from 34 countries took part in the meeting, which was themed “New Operation Truth” (Nueva Operación Verdad), based on a historic press conference by Fidel Castro in 1959.
The conference was organized by the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina together with the pan-Arab television channel Al Mayadeen and aimed to exchange ideas and problems of alternative media that “show and defend the reality of progressive countries.” In various forums, participants discussed topics such as the current world order in the area of information, news and the Internet as well as the news agenda in times of hypermedia.
Wafica Ibrahim, Latin America specialist at Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen, stressed the media’s responsibility to “condemn the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people,” pointing to the imbalances in reporting worldwide. “We have to move away from the hegemony that the West imposes on alternative media,” said Ibrahim. In addition to fake news, he also listed the dominance of US corporations in the area of social media among the most important challenges. Technical development helps, but also brings with it credibility problems.
Johana Tablada, deputy director general of the US department of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, criticized the US’s “brutal communications campaign”. This attempts to “discredit the government’s efforts to create a more sustainable society.”
As part of the conference, guests paid a visit to the Fidel Castro Center in Havana, which opened in 2021.
The head of Prensa Latina, Luis Enrique González, thanked the participants for the intensive debates, in which Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel also took part. Prensa Latina will “commit to the coordination and promotion of media initiatives in defense of the realities of oppressed peoples, despite economic constraints,” said González.
For his part, Díaz-Canel pointed to the environment of “hegemonic politics, cultural colonization and artificial intelligence” in which progressive media operates today. He praised the work of journalists in the Gaza Strip who reported “at the risk of their lives.”
“Operation Truth” was a press conference held by Fidel Castro at the Hotel Riviera on January 22, 1959 in front of 380 journalists. In it, shortly after the victory of the revolution on January 1st, Castro took a stand against criticism from US congressmen and called for the creation of a Latin American news agency, which is considered to be the birth of “Prensa Latina”.