On Sunday, delegates will have the opportunity to debate on today´s major communication plights and the pressing need to articulate the media news production that defend just causes. At the opening ceremony, the documentary Nueva Operación Verdad (New Operation Truth) will be premiered, which revives, through interviews with prominent national personalities, Fidel Castro’s historic initiative to gather, 65 years ago, dozens of foreign journalists to dismantle smear campaign against the newly-formed Cuban revolution in 1959.

According to organizers, the audiovisual showcases moments of the Cuban revolutionary defense of sanctions applied by courts of the new social project over murderers and torturers of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship (1952-1959).

Those trials and sanctions were the pretext for a strong smear campaign exercised from the United States against the Cuban revolutionary leadership.

The fact prompted the idea of historical leader Fidel Castro to counteract the hegemony of the imperialist press, which led to the emergence, five months later, of the Prensa Latina news agency, considered the first American challenge to the media hegemony of the big information monopolies, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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