"Destruction is in imitating"
I remembered the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in October 2022, when some young people outraged the country and the Cuban culture with Ku Klux Klan-style hoods. Many in those days must have taken the ever-sharp advice of a thinker like Fernando Martinez Heredia: "It is necessary to develop well-made, attractive and effective offensives -not ripostes- of patriotic and socialist education", claimed the intellectual, "to organize campaigns of condemnation and discrediting of the crude or less disguised aspects of the imperialist cultural-ideological system."
Cell phones, tablets, computers, video games, films, advertisements and Smart TV, with social networks and the Internet as a complement, give body to the powerful and sophisticated machinery of injecting anti-culture and poison.
Such is cultural colonization, the most lethal, subtle and sly "snake" that inhabits the planet, to the misfortune of it and its other inhabitants, and that goes everywhere, with its tricks and its deceitful facade, a device to dazzle and devour the illusive.
With those "fangs", the venomous one exalts its symbols, inoculates violence, alienation, consumerism, also false narratives; the arsenal is wide and does not exclude any kind of banality that contributes to its recolonizing objective.
Such is the "potion", a weapon to sweep away cultures and identities, to disqualify social projects that discomfort it, to demobilize liberating resistances, to delegitimize unacceptable governments and to oppose their peoples.
Everything is very well made up, of course, so that the consumer "tastes" the "pill" in a Voice Kids, a Latin Grammy, an Oscar or a beauty Miss, in the NBA or MLB show, McDonald's or Coca Cola exalted, a commercial brand, an article of clothing or a fashion show.
Capitalism -let's call the colonizer by its name- has created endless tools and spaces to promote its values-antipodes of societies like ours, and carcinoma in its own nations and in those of the South; ideas, memory and feelings are favorite targets of that anticultural avalanche.
The modern "choral" claws its jaws into the minds and emotions of children and young people like the one in the episode I still remember, which occurred on the bus of a local route in Guantanamo.
With the gringo flag at chest height on a flannel, and on his neck the swastika or swastika -both symbols of events that deny the human condition-, the boy walked along the interior of the vehicle, as one walks along a footbridge.
He ignored the disapproval his act generated among the other passengers, except for one, who nonchalantly suggested that the matter did not merit any heat. "Everyone enjoys what they like," he said. Ignorance? Ingenuity? Forgetfulness?
Matters like that -and even others with less complex appearance, which the colonizer manipulates with equal subtlety and identical perversity in purpose-, in this war of symbols can cause severe disorders. Thinking about this, I remember Eduviges, a prestigious historian of Guaso, who passed away years ago.
I saw her stand up when someone said that "it doesn't matter if it's cutara or chancleta, (Spanish words for slipper) because the name doesn't modify the object"; but "it re-signifies its origin, it distorts it -she said-, thus depriving us of a thread to the past and falsifying the authorship of something that our ancestors created.
"Chancleta, more than a name can be a shot", warned the researcher; apart from semantics, her reasoning showed a different meaning in the names of the "cutara", the "cayuca" (boat) and other aboriginal words inserted in our historical-cultural heritage.
They are skeins that some would like to dismantle from the "ball", to induce oblivion and avoid that the twists of memory remind us of our ancestors, their extermination and the culprits of that tragedy; something that would make more docile the one who pretends to colonize, and would facilitate the colonizer's work.
The "corolla" is also aimed at the autochthony of the peoples, fortunately the "vaccines" against its poison are manufactured in the Island's neighborhoods. In Guantánamo, for example, this is evidenced by projects that involve children and adolescents in the cultivation of Kirivá and Nengón in the community of Güirito, in Baracoa; the dance of La Puntillita, in Maisí; or the Festival of Traditions, in Yateras and other areas of the Upper East.
However, I have the impression that this "immunizing" line shows discontinuity when its carriers jump from high school. And I also think that our media can -and should- make more and better products in which "being" prevails over "having".
Names like those of Elon Musk or Bill Gates, together with those of famous sportsmen, artists, and figures with noble titles, sound close to not a few adolescent and young alligator ears; they know nothing of the spiritual and human abundance or deficiencies of those, but they call them "men of success", just because they amass millions.
On the other hand, Petronila Neira, Berlanga, Conchita Campa, Soler Muñoz... authors of patriotic, scientific, productive feats, successful men and women compatriots, Heroes of Labor, not millionaires, are not always spoken of with the same precision by our new pines.
To make better known the virtues of these paradigms of flesh and blood, and those of other heroes and heroines of education, sports, defense, art, production, would be to reanimate a reproductive cataract of our values and symbols.
That would reinforce the shell of an island clinging, despite the storms, to the utopia of crowning dreams postponed in the colossal human work that we build. From our socialism, as Fidel said, culture is the first thing to be saved.
Forces and tools, antidotes against cultural colonization, we have them; experience too; we need to synchronize them all and go on the attack; the war is permanent, diverse in its dimensions, and intense.
