The show is a prelude to the US-based Annual Conference of the National Network on Cuba, which opened Saturday here and was attended by veteran activist Baba Charles Simmons, an emeritus professor of Journalism and Law at Eastern Michigan University.
In an emotional speech Simmons highlighted his long love affair with the Caribbean country, which, he said, “changed my life”.
Founder of the Hush House Black World Museum and the Leadership Training Institute for Human Rights in Detroit, Simmons shared his memories with the audience. He spoke of the years in late 1960s when he found the support of Prensa Latina’s correspondent office at the United Nations.
“Here you’ll see photos taken by our correspondents and photojournalists that tell a little of the more than six decades of work by an agency that was founded six months after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution,” said Deisy Francis, Prensa Latina’s chief correspondent in the United States.
She went on to highlight the role played by more than 30 PL offices around the world and eulogized its staff’s performance in conflict zones such as Lebanon and Syria.
Prensa Latina’s first news report was transmitted on June 16, 1959, at at time when the agency barely relied on teletypes and typewriters, she expounded.
On the initiative by Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara, Prensa Latina emerged as an alternative to the big news monopolies, and since then, it has maintained the slogan “At the Service of Truth” that identifies it.
The photo exhibition was previously displayed in Washington DC and New York in May and June of this year as part of commemoratory activities for PL’s foundation, which has become the voice of the Global South.
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