This article by Gabriela Arévalo Guízar appeared in the May 3, 2025 edition of Pie de Página and appears here in translation.
There is an urgent need for the Latin American left to reflect on which programs we can join forces on, how we articulate different experiences, and how to communicate with social sectors that are not yet politicized to build a common emancipatory horizon.
CUBA – Cuba remains, as it has been for more than 60 years, one of the focal points of the Latin American left. This is evident in the ongoing Patria International Colloquium, a gathering of communicators, academics, and activists to reflect on the use of communication and new information technologies as political tools for the emancipation of the global south.
The event, now in its fourth year, brought together more than 400 attendees at the University of Havana, including journalists, communicators, academics, content creators, public officials, and others who, from a leftist perspective, use traditional media (print, radio, television) and social media to confront both corporate media’s hegemony and the right wing’s advance around the world.
The central theme of the colloquium, organized by the Union of Cuban Journalists, was technopolitics, exploring how power dynamics are changing in a digital environment where, while large-scale communication and information exchange are facilitated, disinformation and hate speech are experiencing unprecedented growth. Despite this undeniable reality, the meeting is meaningful because it recognizes that “digital territories also offer the possibility of concerted collective actions and developing emancipatory strategies, fostering networks of hope and popular mobilization with an informed, critical, and active citizenry.” Hence, the colloquium’s motto was “we are peoples weaving networks.”
Thus, the colloquium addressed important topics such as digital sovereignty, critical digital education and media literacy, platform decentralization, artificial intelligence and its use in countries of the Global South, among others. In short, the colloquium focused on the use of technology in political communication for popular resistance and emancipation, recognizing the central role that the media plays in social mobilization.
Homeland: a Bit of History
It was in March 1892 that the first issue of Patria, the newspaper founded by José Martí and which the Colloquium honors by bearing his name, appeared in New York City . In that first issue, Martí declared:
“Patria seeks to honor the good, tell their stories, spread the message of how to fight successfully, prepare for the victory of equal freedom over the mere means required for its triumph, and raise up a people. This newspaper was born by the will and with the resources of the independent Cubans and Puerto Ricans of New York, to contribute, without haste and without rest, to the organization of the free men of Cuba and Puerto Rico.”
Along the same lines, the journalistic aspect of the great left-wing theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries is well known: from Marx to Engels, from Lenin to Trotsky, from Luxemburg to Kollontai, not to mention Gramsci, of course. Furthermore, many of them made important reflections on the role of the press (and, we could say, of the media in general) not only as spaces for propaganda or the dissemination of Marxist ideas, but as tools for revolutionary collective action. In this sense, they founded media outlets with the idea that these outlets would be organizing elements of political action and unifying the militancy of the working classes.
“Every day, workers can see for themselves that bourgeois newspapers report even the simplest facts in a way that favors the bourgeois class to the detriment of the working class.”
In return, in addition to making journalism one of his main activities, he founded L’Ordine Nuovo under the motto “Telling the truth is revolutionary.” This newspaper, first as a weekly and later as a daily, was aimed at the Italian labor movement. Later, with the founding of the Italian Communist Party, L’Ordine gave way to L’Unità, the party’s organ, also founded and directed by Gramsci. As he rightly points out in his Prison Notebooks (1975: 153), for Gramsci the action of intellectuals, the party and journalism (or perhaps we should say, the press, since in his writings he refers to multiple publishing companies – books, magazines, manuals, daily newspapers, weeklies – of which he even characterizes based on their contents, uses and purposes) should be part of the same movement in order to educate and inform the working class, and civil society in general – that is, to direct public opinion – in a critical consciousness that leads to revolutionary action:
“The unitary national formation of a homogeneous collective consciousness demands multiple conditions and initiatives.”
Along the same lines, Lenin— who would later influence Gramsci’s theory of political action —reflected on the role of the press as an organizer of the proletarian revolution in connection with the launch of Iskra, the first newspaper he founded, and the controversial article “What Is To Be Done?” He wrote:
“(…) compels us so strongly to insist on the plan of an organisation centred round an all-Russia newspaper, through the common work for the common newspaper. Only such organisation will ensure the flexibility required of a militant Social-Democratic organisation, viz., the ability to adapt itself immediately to the most diverse and rapidly changing conditions of struggle […] the principal content of the activity of our Party organisation, the focus of this activity, should be work that is both possible and essential in the period of a most powerful outbreak as well as in the period of complete calm, namely, work of political agitation, connected throughout Russia, illuminating all aspects of life, and conducted among the broadest possible strata of the masses. But this work is unthinkable in present-day Russia without an all-Russia newspaper, issued very frequently.”
Iskra brought together the reflections of different currents of Marxist thought, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Later, together with the Bolsheviks, she founded Pravda, a newspaper that would play a fundamental role in the October Revolution. For her part, Rosa Luxemburg participated in the founding of The Workers’ Cause and later founded and edited The Red Flag (Die Rote Fahne), an organ of the Spartacist League, from which she warned of the dangers of German nationalism. The newspaper survived her death and was published until 1945.
20 years of Telesur, Media Outlet of the Global South
This 2025, the Patria Colloquium was dedicated to celebrating the 20th anniversary of the multiplatform Telesur, which raises the question of whether it can be considered the contemporary Latin American version of the political-communicative efforts of the classical Marxist theorists presented in the previous section.
Thus, the meeting was dedicated to recalling, in different spaces and formats (conferences, round tables, immersive room), the beginnings of this communication project with Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro as central figures, as well as their efforts to build a medium through which the countries of Latin America and the global south could tell their own stories and, at the same time, overcome the information blockade and fake news that proliferate in the hegemonic media against any political project that declares itself on the left, especially if it involves Venezuela or Cuba.
A clear example of this need is how the outlet itself is described on Wikipedia : “The channel has been accused of biased reporting, engaging in Chavista propaganda, promoting socialism, and distorting facts in favor of the governments of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, as well as governments with leftist ideologies in Latin America.” In contrast, neither the BBC nor the EFE Agency articles, to cite an example, accuse them of being channels that produce propaganda in the service of the English, Spanish, or European bourgeoisie.
In any case, this simple example serves well to underscore the importance of emancipatory leftist projects having their own media outlets, and that these, in addition to providing information, also serve as a record of the projects’ development: successes and failures, struggles and difficulties, hits and misses. Many of Telesur’s key players participated in this recollection: its director, Patricia Villegas; Brazilian journalist Carlos Alberto Almeida (both responsible for Telesur’s first broadcast); sports journalist Víctor Hugo Morales, among others.
The commemorations reached their most moving point in the celebration held in Havana’s “Los Avioncitos” neighborhood, a space with a strong grassroots organization. There, the Telesur team spoke about their history, Hugo Chávez’s legacy, and the journeys they have endured over the past 20 years. At the same time, they were able to be questioned by the community about the most difficult journalistic moments. The answer was clear: the war. Thus, the team recalled that Telesur was present during the war in Syria, with journalists on the ground, to report what other media outlets had kept quiet. Now, it’s raising its voice against the genocide in Palestine. This event concluded with a concert by “Arnaldo y su talismán.”
If there is any criticism of Telesur’s long history, it would be that, 12 years after Chávez’s death and 16 years since Fidel left power, there are no other figures capable of assuming the regional leadership of this communications project. If history has taught us anything, it’s that every political project needs generational successors to keep it alive.
Themes of the Patria International Colloquium
We already outlined the main objectives of the colloquium at the outset, as well as its thematic lines. However, it’s worth briefly reviewing some of its most striking episodes. One of these is undoubtedly the space dedicated to the presentation of communications projects. In it, various projects (mainly developed on social media, but also radio, print, television, and audiovisual projects) that have an openly leftist militancy, are counter-hegemonic, or emancipatory, explain their proposals: who they’re aimed at, how they’re implemented, what their scope and future tasks are, etc. In this dynamic, where nearly 65 projects from various countries were presented, two experiences particularly stood out: the Palestine project, presented by Murid Abukather, and the Western Sahara project, presented by Eida Abdu Mahhmud. Both are examples of the best use of social media to denounce the systematic violation of rights in countries experiencing humanitarian emergencies.
Another important space is the theoretical workshops, where knowledge and experiences are discussed to develop new anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist projects for the future. Topics covered included the political challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) for the Global South; Big Tech and the US military apparatus; neo-fascism in Latin America; far-right ideologies and how to combat them; and anti-imperialist solidarity and communication. Specialists from Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Finland, Spain, and Russia, among others, participated.
Finally, like every meeting, the colloquium featured a packed program of talks and expert panels discussing the use of AI in news generation in China; digital sovereignty and decentralized networks; media literacy; how to mitigate hate speech in digital environments; censorship and information resistance during the Palestinian genocide; algorithms and social control; influencers and content creators; cognitive warfare and information manipulation, to name a few. Speakers’ countries included Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, China, India, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Lebanon, and more. Thus, all activities focused on leftist emancipatory projects and the use of new information and communication technologies.
What Is To Be Done?
In closing, and paraphrasing Lenin’s text, we now propose some future perspectives for the Patria International Colloquium. The meeting proposed a final declaration with the following objectives:
- Promote Telesur as a permanent articulation space
- Denounce the technological and economic blockade against Cuba and other peoples
- Condemn the Palestinian genocide and tactics of social control
- Build a new global technological order based on cooperation and sovereignty
- Defend free software and develop a digital bill of rights
- Promote a new militant sensitivity from cultural diversity
Beyond these irrefutable actions, it’s worth remembering that Cuba is hosting this meeting while experiencing one of its worst economic crises since the Special Period of the 1990s. We can also point out that the reach of social media has prevented us from turning a blind eye to what many call “the first genocide broadcast in real time,” referring to the Palestinian genocide in Gaza. However, these same networks and platforms have not been enough to stop it.
This calls us together to generate, from these spaces of encounter, national or regional communication projects that foster collective political action from the left. It’s about getting to know each other and coming together, yes, but especially about generating common projects that bring together diverse social struggles, that give voice to traditionally excluded sectors (women, migrants, ethnic minorities), and that participate in building an anti-capitalist social consensus and, ultimately, against all forms of domination. In this way, the social function that theorists like Lenin and Gramsci envisioned for the media would be fulfilled.
The task, while complex, is not impossible. Each of the experiences presented at the colloquium already has a field of action that could be leveraged in conjunction with other similar projects. In this regard, it would be useful for various actors in the Latin American left to reflect on which programs we can join forces on, how we connect with different experiences, and how we communicate with social sectors that are not yet politically sensitized to build a common emancipatory horizon. To achieve these ends, we are called upon as communicators and journalists, academics and specialists, left-wing civil organizations, and others.
A pending connection is, without a doubt, the one that can best be achieved between academia and journalism, both from a leftist perspective. It is fertile ground for the convergence of theory and practice, so that people can weave the networks that the Patria International Colloquium calls for. Our present urges us to make it a reality.
Gabriela Arévalo Guízar is an editor and academic at the Institute for Research on the University and Education of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.