Havana, Cuba.- The Cuban intellectual Eusebio Leal highlighted Monday the validity of Operation Truth and Fidel Castro”s thoughts in the current context of information characterized by media hegemony.

‘True testimony is more necessary than ever, the ability to transmit and make it known’, said the Havana historian at the opening of the International Journalism Forum for the 60th anniversary of Operation Truth, held in Cuba’s National Hotel hosted by Prensa Latina news agency.

He assured that in events like these it is essential the participation of the holders of the news, because, he added, these issues are not of a generation but of actuality.

He also called for integrating the new generations into these debates and emphasized the role of education in transmitting love for the homeland, worshipping the truth, radicalizing ideas and seeking justice.

He added that it is essential to understand what is currently happening with the reversal of progressive and anti-imperialist movements in the American continent and the affirmation of extreme right-wing and supremacist groups, as well as what is happening with the control of information and the supposed neutrality of international agencies.

He warned that these right-wing groups have a particular attack on Cuba because of what, he said, they reserve for us moments of special concern and special militancy.

He stressed that this is the moment of unity, of pursuing it and of continuing the ideas of strategist Fidel Castro, whom he described as a powerful force of Latin American thought.

Leal recalled that, after the Triumph of the Revolution, on January 1, 1959, its top leader, Fidel Castro, called to make the truth known and became a journalist and editor in the face of campaigns intended to distort the just, popular and social character of the Cuban process.

‘The Revolution found itself (…) alone in the middle, with honorable exceptions, in a Latin American scenario of tyrannies’, said Leal, who pointed out that the only way in that context was to fight with the truth, a mission led by Fidel Castro.

He said that after the processes of exemplary justice occurred in Cuba in the first years of the revolutionary government, it became imperative to carry out an Operation Truth in the face of the news distortion and a campaign led from the United States.

In this way that action became an extraordinary event, which continued along with the revolutionary process and to ratify Fidel’s role as author of the Revolution’s unity and in the defense of historical continuity, he pointed out.

The historian pointed out that this is the reason why the Prensa Latina Latina news agency was created, ‘from the political acuteness of Fidel, from the will of Che (Ernesto Guevara), and they prove it nowadays in every demonstration in the most distant corners of the world’, he added.

He also highlighted the participation of Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti in Prensa Latina creation, as well as his publications in defense of the Cuban social project.