Dear friends
In celebration of these 61 years of work and commitment to the culture of Latin America and the Caribbean, we send you the Message of Casa de las Americas on the anniversary of its founding.
International Relations Department
Casa de las Americas
www.casadelasamericas.org
laventana.casa.cult.cu
Facebook: Casa de las Americas_Havana, Cuba
Twitter: @CasAmericas
===============================
MESSAGE FROM CASA DE LAS AMERICAS ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF ITS FOUNDATION
Less than four months after January 1, 1959, a day like today, April 28, the Casa de las Americas was created.
In the midst of defamatory media campaigns, threats from President Eisenhower, airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks, the Revolution defended itself and took the first steps in its emancipation project. It turned the fortress of Columbia into a school town, handed over ownership of its land to more than 300 peasants, and founded the ICAIC and the National Press.
Soon the United States would use its power in the region to isolate Cuba and its “bad example” of sovereignty and social justice. They managed to exclude it from certain forums and to break diplomatic ties, agreements, papers; but it was not possible for them to break other ties associated with the instinct and roots of the people, their memory, their dreams. Casa de Las Americas, guided by such a luminous personality as Haydee Santamaría, together with a committed and loyal team, contributed decisively to prevent Cuba from being spiritually separated from Our America.
Inspired by Bolívar, Martí and Fidel, nourished on a daily basis by the anti-colonial thought of Roberto Fernández Retamar and the avant-garde vision of Mariano Rodríguez, the institution found allies in the best creators of the region. Martínez Estrada, Galich, Benedetti and many other relevant intellectuals and artists inhabited the House, made it theirs, and enriched its concepts and strategies.
Over the years, Casa de Las Americas has broadened its scope. To the examination and promotion of the letters, music, theatre, visual arts and Caribbean culture, studies on women, native peoples, Latinos in the United States and the presence of Africa in America were added.
We celebrate this anniversary in an emergency situation for the region and for the entire planet. A double pandemic is raging among the poorest: the coronavirus and neoliberalism.
Blacks and Latinos stand out in the statistics of the infected and the dead in the United States. The indigenous people of the North and South of the Americas, traditionally deprived of their rights, are extremely vulnerable. Informal workers, homeless, slum dwellers, undocumented immigrants, and so on seem predestined for certain death, even if they do not appear in the official figures.
Many artists, victims of the dismantling of cultural policies and of their own circumstances, are today in total distress.
The most sensitive and judicious personalities in the world have been calling for a confrontation with the crisis based on collaboration, coordinated effort and solidarity.
Casa de Las Americas, on the anniversary of its birth, wants to insist on that word: solidarity. Martí said: “Homeland is humanity” – and Fidel turned this definition into the patrimony of all Cubans and into a guide and sense of the international projection of the Island.
Cuban doctors are fighting today against the pandemic in more than twenty countries. They risk their lives, as they have done on so many occasions, to save others, and they leave an intolerable moral example for politicians and neoliberal ideologists. That is why they relentlessly use their powerful machinery of producing and circulating lies to attack the generosity of the Cuban Revolution and its children.
Casa de las Americas supports the open letter “Simply Enough!” by the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity, which, among other crucial issues, denounces the cynicism of those who promote the campaign against Cuba’s vocation for solidarity and internationalism and do not say a word about the blockade that prevents even the acquisition of any kind of inputs to stop the pandemic.
The fact is that the coronavirus has also exacerbated barbarism: the culture of hate, violence, fascism, xenophobia and racism. In the face of these dark tendencies, the House, like the worthy representatives of the Latin American and Caribbean peoples, is committed to the culture of peace, of brotherhood among human beings. A culture, moreover, that lives together respectfully with Mother Earth.
A valuable contribution to these debates is the issue 298 of Casa magazine, which includes the dossier “Encrucijadas de la América Latina” and from today it will be available to readers at www.casadelasamericas.org. We are using the Web and social networks to disseminate publications, works of art and research texts, as part of the raison d’être of the institution since April 28, 1959.
As in those difficult times of its foundation, the House works every day to maintain its links with those who defend, in the midst of the current crisis, the authentic culture of emancipation in Latin America, in the Caribbean and within the United States itself.
