I am grateful for the invitation to this important event, and glad to attend for the first time. I am here to speak on behalf of Cuba: a country that has been blockaded by the world's greatest power, subjected to relentless media aggression, and is now also grappling with the enormous damage wrought by natural disasters. Our thoughts, first of all, are with the Cuban people.
Throughout history, technologies have modified communication processes, but never before has the impact been so disruptive, so far-reaching, and so globalising as since the emergence of the internet, through the web, digital social networks, big data, and now the development of artificial intelligence. Not only have the media changed; the ways in which human beings consume information and interact with one another have also changed dramatically. Technology, as the renowned Latin American communication theorist Jesús Martín-Barbero observes, changes the way in which symbols are created, distributed, and consumed, and in so doing influences culture and identity.
Technologies are not neutral, Barbero asserts, for today more than ever they constitute enclaves of condensation and interaction between economic and political interests, social mediations, and symbolic conflicts. For that very reason, they are constitutive of new ways of building public opinion and new forms of citizenship: the new conditions in which politics is said and done.
Nothing better illustrates this than what is happening today in the United States with the arrival of Donald Trump in power. The billionaire magnates of the major technology companies have literally placed themselves in the front row of power alongside him. We saw this at Trump's inauguration, with all of them seated in the front row, and again at the lavish dinner that King Charles III hosted for Trump during his recent visit to the United Kingdom. We are witnessing, in the words of Spanish academics Francisco Sierra Caballero and Antonio Maíllo, a new form of imperialism, one that is not based on territorial conquest but on the control of information, the modulation of discourse, and the oligopolistic control of technologies.
Some, such as Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, call it techno-feudalism. I prefer to call it techno-fascism, given the dangerous xenophobic and exclusionary expressions of the extreme right that imperial power and its major technology corporations together advance. How does Cuba wage the battle in this scenario? 'The truth, in our time, navigates stormy seas. That is the challenge for Cuban journalists.' These words were addressed by the leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, to communication professionals in Cuba in a message of 2 July 2010. Hatred and lies, programmed and favoured as algorithms by digital social networks and the principal global communication channels, are shaping the communicational processes of our times at great speed and to enormous audiences. For Cuba, however, this is nothing new.
Since the very triumph of the Revolution in 1959, the United States and its powerful media and meaning-making apparatus have made recurrent use of lies and hatred against the Cuban social process. As the Mexican philosopher and communication theorist Fernando Buen Abad puts it, imperialism deploys against Cuba the most prolonged, systematic, and sophisticated cognitive war in the inventory of semiotic domination of our era. It is waged not only against a territory or a government, but against a historical possibility of human thought.
For more than six decades, the US empire has deployed against Cuba every tool, every means, and every language of seduction, manipulation, and domination. This is not a debate of ideas; it is an attempt to saturate consciousness with toxic effects until the critical capacity of Cubans is nullified. In the 1960s and 1970s, the instruments of choice were print publications, shortwave radio stations broadcasting from Florida or Central America, and news agencies, serving as the principal vehicles for daily campaigns against Cuba.
In the 1980s and 1990s, beginning under the Reagan presidency, the decision was made to invest first in a government radio station and ten years later in a television station directed expressly against Cuba, both treacherously bearing the name of the Cuban national hero José Martí. Between 1985 and 2025, the United States has allocated more than 900 million dollars from its budget to sustain these failed Radio and TV Martí projects, whose signals Cuba has managed to block at a far lower cost. It has been the most expensive, corrupt, and unsuccessful communications venture in the history of the United States.
An audit report by a panel of experts appointed by the US Congress determined in 2019 that these anti-Cuban media outlets produce both bad journalism and ineffective propaganda. The Torricelli Act, passed in 1992 under George H. W. Bush, prohibited Cuba's access to the internet by any means other than costly and slow satellite connections, despite the numerous submarine cables surrounding the Cuban archipelago, and made clear that the ultimate purpose of even that limited connectivity was to promote political change in Cuba. Cuba could not connect to the internet until 1996, and then only at speeds lower than those a household might have today; yet as early as 1994, the Clinton administration had begun to develop digital media projects directed at Cuba, an effort that the George W. Bush administration continued to encourage and finance.
It was the Barack Obama administration, however, that most clearly identified the digital space as the arena par excellence for symbolic and cultural contest between our political systems: the space where young people were present, where new flows of information exchange were taking hold, where media outlets tied to US funding and private capital were proliferating without regulation, and where the public media system was being steadily weakened. The web, in the words of US academic Ted Henken, one of the field operators of this strategy against our country, forms part of a larger political battle. Under this new consensus, multimillion-dollar funding began to flow into the creation of a dense network of digital media operating from Miami, Madrid, and other Latin American capitals, and even from within Cuba itself, functioning as a kind of smear machine and deploying its full arsenal against our country.
During the first Trump administration, Cuba opened up mobile data connectivity and more than 60% of the population became connected; the strategy of communicational and symbolic influence promptly extended itself to digital social networks. Now, in this more fascist and plutocratic second Trump term, the anti-Cuban communications strategy has deepened and become closely linked to the maximum pressure policy against Cuba advocated and executed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Florida politician of Cuban origin. A few weeks ago, on 25 September, the US administration announced an increase in funding for disinformation operations, approving an additional 400 million dollars for activities aimed, among other purposes, at countering what it calls the Marxist and anti-American regimes of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
The United States continues, moreover, to block Cuba's access to the fibre optic submarine cables that encircle our entire archipelago, and maintains its ban on Cuba's access to hundreds of software programmes, applications, scientific and specialised publications, and telecommunications equipment. It is telling, in these times of obscurantism and deepfakes, that the very first operation Cuba launched, as early as 21 and 22 January 1959, was called Operation Truth: Fidel Castro summoned more than 300 journalists from across the world to clarify the justness of the criminal proceedings brought against the Batista henchmen whose dictatorship had been financed and supported by the United States.
From those days came the idea of creating the Revolution's first international media outlets: the Prensa Latina news agency and the shortwave radio station Radio Habana Cuba. Both have played a part in breaking the information blockade against our country. At the helm of Prensa Latina stood the Argentine revolutionary and journalist Jorge Ricardo Massetti, friend and disciple of Che Guevara, who stated with complete clarity: 'We are objective but not impartial. We consider it cowardly to be impartial, because one cannot be impartial between good and evil.'
The arrival of the internet and, above all, of the web opened new communicational possibilities by breaking down national barriers, but Cuba entered this landscape later and with far less connectivity than other countries. It was Prensa Latina, Radio Habana Cuba, and the newspaper Granma that became the first Cuban media outlets on the web, in mid-1996. At that time, the digital editions of these publications had to be carried on a floppy disk to the Ministry of Science and Technology to be uploaded via satellite at a connection speed of just 64 kilobits per second, which would be unthinkable today.
In 2003, amid a fierce media campaign against Cuba and threats from Bush to bring the war to our shores, Cubadebate was founded as a native digital media outlet to confront media terrorism and expose the campaigns against Cuba. Cubadebate, which I have the honour of leading, was the first Cuban media outlet to embrace the interactivity of Web 2.0 in 2009, when less than 10 per cent of the Cuban population had internet access, and the first to establish a full presence on digital social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, from June 2009 onwards. The purpose was clear: to communicate Cuba to the world, whatever the technological obstacles.
Cuba at that time could still only connect via satellite. As Fidel Castro noted: 'We must find a way to reach the informed masses. The solution is not in the newspapers; the internet is more accessible.'
This conviction led him, after retiring from government, to begin publishing exclusive articles in Cubadebate in 2008, by which point it was already the most widely read and visited Cuban publication in the digital public space. Today, Cubadebate is a multimedia publication with six thematic digital outlets, a presence across multiple social networks, its own mobile applications, more than 230,000 reader comments, and millions of monthly visits, 70% of them from Cuba. Worth noting: in September and October 2025, China ranked second after Cuba in the number of visits to Cubadebate, something without precedent in the publication's 22-year history.
This may be due to the weekly column we publish in Spanish and Chinese together with Renmin Ribao, a collaborative model we also maintain with TeleSur of Venezuela, Sputnik of Russia, and Nodal in Argentina, and have recently begun with Brasil de Fato. It demonstrates that we can coordinate to amplify our messages across allied media. Cubadebate is the principal pillar of IDEAS Multimedios, a leading organisation in communication and innovation in Cuba, which also runs the Fidel Castro, Soldado de las Ideas website and three television programmes, among them La Mesa Redonda, 25 years on air as Cuba's foremost news and opinion programme, in which Fidel Castro appeared on 45 occasions and the current President Miguel Díaz-Canel participates regularly, including today. Our principal strength lies in the interactivity of our media, editorial leadership, and constant innovation, within a context of growing connectivity, though still at speeds that fall short of current global standards.
At the start of this century, barely 0.5 per cent of Cubans were connected to the internet; today that figure exceeds 70% of the population, principally through mobile data. This widespread connectivity brings with it significant challenges for the Cuban media and communications system, as audiences are permeated by dominant communicational practices and subject to persistent campaigns of manipulation and symbolic construction against Cuba. It is no longer enough to possess the truth and the news; one must be able to communicate them quickly and effectively, across multiple channels, in varied formats, and to diverse audiences, contending with adverse algorithms and manipulated emotions.
Cuba faces the disadvantage of lacking a millennial civilisational culture like China's, a critical demographic mass for an enormous domestic market, a language of its own, or sufficient financial resources to rapidly develop exclusive digital platforms, though the country is making efforts in certain areas of national development. Our response is to generate more and better content, to continue training professionals in these fields, to make use of available technologies and direct them towards our objectives, and to foster the digital literacy and culture that enables the majority of the population to see through the manipulations and lies that pervade the digital world. The Revolution and Socialism in Cuba must be built with communication as an indispensable instrument.
Communication to inform, to educate, to mobilise, to listen, to participate. Communication to cultivate a higher consciousness in those willing to build a prosperous and socially just society. We are living through a period of algorithmic dictatorship, moving from a model of social conversation dominated by digital social networks to one shaped by artificial intelligence, with all the challenges that entails. The quality of information has deteriorated as the media have been reduced to a secondary role. Disinformation, manipulation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech hold sway on digital social networks; polarisation is amplified, and mistrust of politics, the press, institutions, and science is fed and deepened.
Media laboratories are funded to construct and manufacture imaginaries and realities through big data and neuroscience. We must recognise that ultra-conservative sectors have grasped well the role of social networks in reshaping global communication and conversation, and their value as indispensable tools for winning and holding power. It is no coincidence that the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu declared in New York in early October that weapons change over time and that today the most important are social networks, adding that the most consequential acquisition now under way is that of TikTok. He expressed the hope it would proceed, as it could prove momentous.
The Zionist government of Israel is expert at using information operations to support its criminal military campaigns against the Palestinian people. We are now entering a new stage with artificial intelligence, which offers real advantages for development but also poses serious problems: the privatisation of collective knowledge at enormous speed, the introduction of ideological biases under the guise of objectivity and algorithmic opacity, significant ecological and cybersecurity challenges. Alternatives must be found. In the face of this predatory, dystopian, opaque, and uncertain model, the path forward lies in returning to the report produced in the 1980s by a commission led by Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Seán MacBride, which also included Colombian Nobel laureate in Literature Gabriel García Márquez. That report proposed communication policies for independence and self-development and laid down key guidelines for building a new international economic order.
That report remains relevant and necessary today, as a foundation for building a new communicational reality. A new international economic order, new global governance and security, and a new information and communications order are all indispensable. None of them will be achieved without a battle of ideas across every possible arena. The powerful will not readily relinquish their privileges in controlling the global stage, the institutions that produce meaning, and the imposition of their cultural and symbolic power.
The countries of the Global South must unite in this crucial struggle. The BRICS countries in particular must forge a more solid common front in the field of information and communications, articulating a counter-hegemonic, inclusive, and peaceful discourse. Joint research, the development of our own technologies and applications, the infrastructure that connects us, and concrete steps in the field of artificial intelligence, as discussed today, must all be actively pursued. We must also coordinate to share in our media the best thinking and journalism produced in our countries, multiplying the reach and impact of progressive and humanist thought against the rising tide of neo-fascism and barbarism.
Today, more than ever, as the cultural and ideological struggle intensifies, as obscurantism and neo-fascism seek to prevail, as lies and hatred flood public conversation, as artificial intelligence begins to impose its own ways of doing things alongside its mirages and distortions, let us recall the words of the Italian communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci:
Let it educate you, because we need all our intelligence.
Let it move you, because we need all our enthusiasm.
Let it organise you, because we need all our strength.
Organise, create, tell stories, move people with intelligence, emotion, and strength, as Jesús Martín-Barbero put it with profound simplicity, 'We need to make our story so that they count on us when it comes to doing the math.'
Thank you very much.
Watch the whole speech here: