Felipa Suarez and Alina Martinez
We are subjected to a war – which is not less dangerous for our survival as nation – that takes place in the cultural and ideological field and has history as one of its main targets. On this reality and how to counteract on this, Science Master Rene Gonzalez Barrios, president of the Institute of History agreed to this interview to Trabajadores Newspaper. This is the first part of the interview.
Why that attack to history?
Of course, to discredit history, the national heroes, dismantle the symbols and simplify or satanize native cultures is part of the tactics to use it, in pursue to the strategic goal of the United States (U.S.) to impose its hegemony.
The world lives today one of the moments of greatest tension in mankind history. An empire had never before got such power worldwide. That power goes to the military, economical, technological and cultural fields.
At the beginning of the 21st century they are still the first power in the world, but they feel they are giving special spaces to new immerging powers that are consolidating day by day. China and Russia are today its main worries. Latin America, its safe backyard in the past, gets independent every day. How can it counteract the loos of influence?
A bit after War World II ended, the US spread all its state machinery, with its different agencies to impose the world its cultural and political model. The cold war was one of the combinations of a war of ideas, confrontation and military push. In this stubborn determination, they won and started to spread that with the disappearance of the called real socialism, history will also disappear. Big mistake! Those who will violate its hegemonic project, would have been condemned to confront it or will take the risk to disappear as nation. The recent story is eloquent. There are the examples of the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria just to mention some cases.
In a world interconnected with Internet, and every day more dependent to the virtual sceneries for survival of the US as global superpower, it should not only impose to its rivals with its nuclear weapons (useless from the most elemental analysis of human reasoning for the consequences of its use), but for its cultural model and they have bet for that and will keep on doing it as its main power.
They did it that way with the socialist field and they still do it at present, not only against powers like China or Russia but also against the Arabs and Latin American States like Mexico, Venezuela or Bolivia, whom they try to impose models completely alien to its millenarian cultures.
The US has been the homeland of great intellectuals, musicians, actors, plastic artists and creators of the different art and science expressions that had pervaded in time for their brilliant ideas. That culture is universal and valid.
However, it is junk culture that advocates consumerism, individualism, violence, sex, arrogance and imperial chauvinism, among other topics. They are lascivious and try to impose contagious models of habits and conducts alien to reality and interests of the peoples worldwide.
In this context, the historical dismantling by cultural supports, especially the films and the literature, have been constant weapons for the American political and cultural machinery. I can mention any of the film versions of El Alamo (The Poplar) to appreciate the Texan colonial invaders as victims, and the Mexican soldiers as cruel and unscrupulous villains.
Walt Disney’s talent, a real genius of the movie was used by the empire to introduce in his films anticommunist speeches and political symbols.
The US film industry has historically distorted the Cuban history. There are three terrible examples: Message to Garcia by Darryl Zanuk where there is a lieutenant Rowan living an affair in the war of independence of Cuba, where he never lived and a General Calixto Garcia thanking in a passionate way the US intervention; Santiago, starring by Aland Ladd and Rossana Podesta where there is Jose Marti in 1898, living in a palace with black slaves in Haiti, or even more recent, the film Che, starred by the Egyptian actor Omar Scharif, financed, with the legal advice and produced by the CIA, just two years later of the Heroic Guerrilla Fighter’s murder.
History is a science and historians get to conclusions after serious and complex analysis of sources and data. The states support its national processes in the study of history in the widest spectrum and in the study of its roots. Attacking this spine of the political culture of a people and dismantling it, drives you to an inevitable destruction. The US Empire is an expert using this strategy.
In which aspects do we have to put special interest and who are the main targets in that dismantling job of the Cuban history?
In the case of Cuba, the American strategy is focused to illegitimate the Cuban Revolution and our nation’s social socialist project. The US as empire in its global hegemonic egocentricity, cannot forgive the great impacts of the Cuban Revolution in the universal history in the second half of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century.
The Revolution itself has been a great challenge, an irrefutable demonstration of the ideas’ values and the intelligence of a people together with its leaders.
The empire, powerless in front of the achievements, works to insert in the new generations –mainly in the youth that as consequence of the genocide blockade policy, which had lived with unavoidable economic limitations – germs of distrust to the historical generation that for more than 55 years have leaded our country.
They sweeten the 1950s as of economical splendor and supposed boom time of national development and the personality of Fulgencio Batista as a statesman focused to materialize a national integral developing and harmonious project.
The singers of these songs, of course, neither deepened in the corruptions, poverty, political demagogy, high indexes of marginality and underdevelopment in the Cuban field, nor in the crimes and outrages that Batista’s repression unleashed in Cuba.
They do not mention the illegality of the coup d’état on March 10, 1952, and when they do it, is to highlight Batista as the man who stopped gun law that was out of control in the authentic governments.
The terrorist Carlos Alberto Montaner, originally Cuban, an idol of the counterrevolutionary intellectuals from Miami said on May 20, 2013 that the history of the Cuban Revolution must be dismantled, and in a conference addressed for about two hours, he distorted, as he wished, what the history science has built all along many years. This personality is today one of the main figures of the dismantling. Many web sites in Internet that support the yearning of the capitalist past join him. They highlight their representatives and satanize all that has to be with the Revolution, specially its leaders and the members of the Communist Party of Cuba.
