The communicational battle is not won in the media, but at school. This certainty and the fact that we are living in the era of digital socialization of information should raise the question of whether it is necessary or not to introduce in our school curricula, in a more rigorous way, elements of semiotics and other related subjects -although such relation is not visible at plain sight-, such as art appreciation, Cuban culture, history of science.
The idea is supported by what communication theorists have been working on for decades. Perhaps Umberto Eco is the one who put it best, when referring to the phenomena of mass communication, he warned that, regardless of the communicational hegemony of some power, which is capable of drowning the social space with its messages, "it was observed that what the message intentionally said was not necessarily the same as what the public read. The most obvious examples were that the image of a barnyard full of cows is "read" differently by a European butcher than by an Indian Brahmin, that the advertisement of a Jaguar awakens the desire of a wealthy viewer and provokes frustration in a less privileged one. In short, a message aims to produce certain effects, but it can collide with local situations, with different psychological dispositions and desires, and produce a boomerang effect".
The message always depends on what the receiver understands and that is where the battle is decided.
Let us note, to add to Eco's examples, that for a news item on Ukraine, where the journalist seeks the empathy of the public by asserting that the people in Kiev "are people like you and me. I have seen Dolce & Gabbana bags, Louis Vuitton clothes, in other words, people who could be in Madrid perfectly well," there are two types of readers. One type will accept the idea that the human condition crystallizes by the brands they consume and the place the live. The other type, who breaks down the unwritten meanings of the message, will reject it for instrumentalizing the human being in terms of its consumption and its xenophobic background, for reducing to the human condition, those who may have the right to walk the streets of Europe.
Other examples hit closer to home and should trigger our alerts. In spite of all the communicational hegemony against the blockade prevailing in the Cuban media, there is a part of the population -one we should not overlook and that is perhaps growing- that reads in it a justification for internal errors, which speaks of the danger of not understanding that the message always depends on what the receiver understands. Those who scroll across social networks and their Cuba bubbles will observe how this idea of the blockade as a mere smokescreen has an important weight in the opinions expressed.
Beyond certain examples, it is even more serious the conformation of a consumer of information who has not been educated to look outside the immediate information, implicit or explicit in the messages, for sources that make it possible to decode what is read. Sources they have even had access to, but they are unable to make the necessary connections. Very often, I read assignments by my students at the University. They have received hundreds of hours of history lessons, Marxism and other contents of Social Sciences, however, they believe that the Cuba-U.S. dispute and its instrumentalization through the counterrevolutionary sector of the exile, is a problem of "loving each other", and overlook the historical, geopolitical and class basis of the confrontation.
The issue is that it is not enough to teach, it is necessary to ensure that learning not only creates instruments of analysis, but also accessible examples when needed.
This same inability to relate all the knowledge received, is the one that makes a part of the population to have receptive ears to the vile argument that pretends to whitewash the Batista "justice" that assassinated one out of every 2,3 assailants to the Moncada Barracks, that tortured by castrating, mutilating and gouging out the eyes of the imprisoned combatants. Batista persecuted in the streets and murdered young men who had nothing to do with the combative action and then, and only then, brought to trial the survivors he could not kill, who survived thank to the heroic acts of decency of honest people and members of the army.
This argument pretends to compare Batista's "justice," and make it seem less harsh, with the trials of the vandals for the violent acts of July 11, for which no one has been tortured, nor have there been murders in dungeons, nor young people have been hunted to death in the streets; for which less than one out of every 50 participants has been sentenced to prison terms, and only those who engaged in violent acts in the midst of a socio-health emergency that put the country in tremendous tension to preserve human life. Acts of violence where pharmacies, polyclinics and hospitals were assaulted at the very moment people were fighting for their lives. Acts of violence where calls were made to lynch the policemen, those who are also children, neighbors and part of the people, and who at that moment were mobilized to transport the oxygen balloons to where they were needed, and who worked tirelessly to ensure the logistics in the extraordinary battle against the pandemic.
The fact that the enemy (let's not fool ourselves, it is always the enemy, because we are at war, even if they want to sell us the opposite) has learned how to make the receiver understand what they want to say, spreading it from cell phone to cell phone, serve us to set us to change what needs to be change.
Every lie that manages to prevail is a portrait of our incapacities. In our favor we have the truth, history and purpose for the future as our main advantage. No matter how much they try to hide it, the counterrevolution cannot be rigorous, because it needs lies. But we also have the schools, the public spaces, our media as essential instruments to design the rearguard and the stage of this battle.
And we have the people, who will always be the protagonists of the struggle, and from whom their leaders emerge.
Translated by ESTI
