Manifesto against Latin American countries rejected from Cuba.
Cuba’s Casa de las Americas today expressed its rejection of a manifesto presented at the recently concluded Madrid Book Fair against the governments of this country, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
Entitled «On the side of Don Quixote», the declaration of the prestigious Cuban cultural center proclaims its repudiation of the document «Literature, always on the side of freedom and democracy».
The text demands «the establishment of democracy and respect for human rights in those countries where totalitarian regimes have left a trail of death, prison, dispossession, confiscations and exile».
It would seem a completely fair claim, were it not for the fact that it soon becomes clear that it refers «to the land of Rubén Darío, Dulce María Loynaz, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Rómulo Gallegos», warns the capital institution.
Casa de las Americas calls attention to the authors’ evident interest in joining the hegemonic press campaign against anyone in Latin America who refuses to accept Washington’s dictates and the validity of the bicentennial Monroe Doctrine.
It considers it shameful that those who consider «the word as a sacred right» use it to join in the harassment and thus justify the sanctions suffered by some of the countries mentioned, their peoples and, as part of them, their writers as well.
Havana’s denunciation points out that those who defend the manifesto, whose launching platform was «sadly» the Spanish event, are allied with the powerful of this world.
It stresses that the signatories of the libel, even if indirectly, put their word at the service of those who try to crush any emancipatory process in Latin America and place themselves far away from the Don Quixote who is the champion of freedom, justice and utopias.
«It was not by chance that in Cuba the first title published by the National Printing House, founded three months after the triumph of the Revolution, was precisely The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha. We stand by that symbol», concludes the Cuban proclamation.
