Prensa Latina, whose leading founders were Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti, its first director, was the first Latin American challenge to the media hegemony of the United States and its allies.

Some 20 journalists, including Cuban’s Juan Marrero and Gabriel Molina, Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Argentina’s Rodolfo Walsh, made up the agency’s founding group that emerged during Operation Truth.

That counter-information operation, organized by the revolutionary government on January 21 and 22, 1959, brought together hundreds of journalists from all over the world in Havana to learn first-hand about Cuba’s reality.

The event aimed to dismantle the ferocious media campaign unleashed against the Revolution by the United States and its allies in mass communication. Prensa Latina joined the international media scenario committed to truth and objective journalism but not impartial, as defined by Masetti.

In its first 65 years, Prensa Latina has covered the most significant international events in all political, economic, social, cultural, scientific-technical, and sports activities.

Despite economic and technological obstacles, Prensa Latina has grown and faces new challenges nowadays.

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