By Frank González
The news agency that had its main promoters in Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara and its first director in Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti, was the first Latin American challenge to the media hegemony of the United States and its allies.
About twenty journalists, like Cuban’s Juan Marrero and Gabriel Molina, Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez and Argentina’s Rodolfo Walsh, made up the founding group of the media outlet that resulted from Operation Truth.
That counter-information action, organized by the revolutionary government on January 21 and 22, 1959, brought together hundreds of journalists from all over the world in Havana, so that they could learn first-hand about Cuba’s reality.
The objective was to dismantle the fierce media campaign unleashed against the Revolution by the United States and its servants in the field of mass communication.
Prensa Latina made its way onto the international media scene committed to truth and objective, but not impartial journalism, as Masetti had proclaimed.
In its first 65 years, the new agency was present in the coverage of the main international events in all political, economic, social, cultural, scientific-technical and sports fields.
Despite big obstacles in the economic and technological order, Prensa Latina grew and faces old and new challenges today, including self-financing through the marketing of its products and services and the consolidation of its presence on the internet with its multimedia content for which it has capabilities and experience in all languages and genres of journalism.
Currently, Prensa Latina has 36 correspondents in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, publishes some 350 dispatches every day in several languages and provides photography, radio and television products and services.
It also has an editorial division dedicated to the production of periodical publications, its own or for clients, while forging international alliances with other alternative media such as the recently created Voices of the Global South initiative.
After 65 years, Prensa Latina remains faithful to its founding principles, in good health and with much to be done, in light of the disinformation and single-minded strategy by the United States and its allies, in all areas of communication.
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