Cuba seeks to control fake news
National Assembly of People’s Power approves Social Communication Law
The National Assembly of People’s Power has taken a step toward controlling fake news in Cuba. It approved on May 25 a law mandating that information disseminated by state entities, mass organizations, media organizations, news agencies, radio, television, social media, natural persons, among others, must be truthful, objective, appropriate, current, verified, and understandable.
The National Assembly of People’s Power is the highest constitutional and legal authority in Cuba. Its 470 deputies are elected by the people in referendum style, as single candidates on the ballot, following their nomination by the delegates of the 168 municipal assemblies of people’s power, who have been elected from two or more candidates in elections held in 12,428 voting districts, who in turn had been nominated directly by the people through a series of neighborhood nomination assemblies. The National Assembly of People’s Power not only makes laws; it also has the authority to elect and recall the highest officials of the executive and judicial branches of the Cuban government. The deputies of the National Assembly of People’s Power are not professional politicians; they continue with their regular employment as they serve in the Assembly. For this reason, the Assembly meets regularly, usually four or five times a year, but does not meet in permanent session.
Precursors to fake news
Ideological distortions in order to justify domination and inequality have been central to human political-economic systems since the agricultural revolution, which occurred in different regions of the world between five and ten thousand years ago. Ideology entered a new stage with the sixteenth century European conquest of kingdoms and peoples of distant lands, focusing on the religious beliefs and practices of the conquered peoples. During the nineteenth century, the colonial world-system turned to an emphasis on skin color to justify inequality and domination, focusing on a readily visible characteristic that was an accidental byproduct of ancient human migrations to colder climates. During the twentieth century, colonialism and imperialism justified new conquests and continued domination with claims of a so-called civilizing mission.
Ranking among the most successful ideological constructions in human history was the Cold War of the post-World War II era. It constructed a false narrative, first, of communism as totalitarianism; and secondly, of anti-colonial Third World national liberation movements as communist inspired. In spite of its denial of fundamental historical and social facts, it continues to have vibrancy today. A variant of the Cold War has been the false construction of Cuba as a violator of human rights, overlooking the structures of people’s democracy and people’s power, briefly summarized above.
The War on Terrorism emerged in the early 1990s in the aftermath of the collapse of the east European socialist bloc, which overnight reduced the Cold War ideology to political uselessness. The War on Terror gained traction following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, an attack that was stunning in its amorality and in its lack of political common-sense intelligence. However, the War on Terror has been reduced to a secondary ideological terrain with the emergence in the second decade of the twenty-first century of a New Cold War, based in the resurgence of China, Russia, and the Third World project.
In the last decade, ideological distortion has entered an unprecedented stage with the emergence of fake news, with its mostly implicit and sometimes explicit denial of objective truth. Previously, when distortions of fact were presented, sincere efforts were made to present distorted versions of reality as truth. Ideologies made truth claims, which compelled ideologues to be constrained by what could be plausibly presented as truthful. Today, however, everyone is liberated to proclaim their truth, without concern for what the objective truth of the matter is, and without concern for a dialogue seeking consensus on how the truth ought to be understood.
Fake news has immense destructive power today because it exists in an era of post-truth, thriving in an environment in which all truth is subjectively constructed on the basis of personal or group experience. It exists on the foundation of the modern discovery of different points of view in different societies and cultures, combining this insight with a lack of commitment to the creation of a more advanced approach to truth, taking the insight into account. What has emerged is post-modern tribalism, where each social location, from the highest to the lowest, pursues power on the basis of its truth, that is, its own subjective, unverifiable truth.
As the Cuban Revolution has arrived to understand, no nation and no world order can be founded on the shaky epistemological foundation of post-modern tribalism. It understands, as Third World people’s revolutions in general understand, that truths are universal, and that the quest for the true and the right is the necessary foundation for a just, sustainable, democratic, politically stable, and prosperous world order.
The 2023 Social Communication Law
The fundamentals of the new law, seen as necessary for the transformation of the management of the social communication of the country, was outlined by the Communist Party of Cuba in 2018. Since then, it has gone through more than thirty drafts, with modifications based on consultations with journalists, academics, and other specialists. The process included a consultation in the various provinces of the nation in January and February of the current year, which led to an enrichment of the document’s contents, and which brought to 7,496 the total number of persons that had analyzed it. Esteban Lazo Hernández, President of the National Assembly of People’s Power, observed that the law had attained a high level of professional, academic, and social consensus.
The law is inspired by the legacy of Fidel, the great communicator of the Cuban Revolution, who listened to the people, understood their concerns, and gave explanations of the efforts made by the Cuban Revolution in addressing these concerns. Fidel was accustomed to visiting the people in their everyday activities, having found that the people, with confidence and trust in him, had no hesitancy in telling him about their concrete problems.
The law recognizes that social communication is the pilar of communication between the government and the people, permitting a permanent dialogue between the government and the population. In sustaining the interchange of data, information, knowledge, ideas, messages, and interpretations of meanings among the people, social communication is important for the development of the country.
The Social Communication Law does not make possible the selling of public media entities to private capitalists. To the contrary, the law gives additional legal substance to the management of the media and the press by the government. It is a law in keeping with the principles of socialism.
The new law sustains national defense and the continuity of the socialist model in the context of a scenario of a political, ideological, economic, communicational, and cultural war against the Cuban Revolution, launched from world centers of power. It seeks to protect the integrity of the public discourse. It increases the capacity of the state to defend the rights of Cuban citizens in the face of the excesses of international campaigns seeking economic power and social control over the Cuban people.
The law establishes that information disseminated via communicational processes ought to be truthful, objective, appropriate, current, verified, and understandable. The law further establishes that in a situation in which the population is negatively impacted, responsible public servers are obligated to inform of the fact.
The law has ample jurisdiction with respect to the process of social communication undertaken by media and community organizations and commercial enterprises. It regulates state entities, mass organizations, social organizations, professional and cultural associations, media organizations (news agencies, radio, television, and printed and digital social media), and natural persons (individuals), both Cuban and foreign, that reside in the national territory in a permanent or temporary form. It regulates information contained in the processes of social communication in cyberspace as well as the editorial management of media organizations of the country. All the organs of the state, including their directors, functionaries, and employees, have the obligation to respect the new law.
The revolutionary way in response to ideological distortions of truth
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel addressed the National Assembly of People’s Power on May 25, just prior to the vote on the proposed Social Communication Law. He declared in part:
I would like to share some considerations concerning the challenges that we face with respect to the implementation of the proposed law as well as the importance of social communication for our country and for our process of socialist construction.
But before doing so, I would like to express the profound admiration that I feel for the young deputies that have offered us here in this debate comprehensive, convincing, educated, just and committed arguments in relation to this Law. (Applause).
The Law represents a first step in the process of regulation and organization of the system of social communication in Cuba. . . . It is not written in stone, as cannot be anything related to social communication in the fastmoving epoch in which we live. . . . Although the declared objectives and the drafted articles of this Law have a necessarily regulatory focus, their greatest value is in the recognition of the potentialities and the benefits of social communication for the development of the country.
The long period of confrontation and aggressiveness that has characterized the criminal policy of the US government impacts all spheres of Cuban society, and especially the area of communication. However, this is not the reason for the Law. What we are convoked to approve today is fundamentally the design of a framework for possibilities pointing to the development of the system of social communication in Cuba, which we have conceived as one of the pillars of the management of government. The law recognizes and expresses the current knowledge and professional practice associated with communication in Cuba, which means that it necessarily will continue organizing itself and developing.
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Education for communication and the informational and mediatic literacy of our people must be promoted. I speak here of the pressing need to equip the population with the knowledge, capacity, and tools for understanding and critically evaluating the logic and the functioning of the media, in addition to facilitating access to the media and to informational and communication technologies.
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More than two thirds of the world population today have access to the Internet with a certain regularly, but this space is increasingly dominated by a reduced group of transnationals that through platforms, services, and systems have captured the traffic and the attention of practically all the users. This concentration of consumption in platforms that are not public property and that establish restrictions in the practices of the users in accordance with their interests, although with a discourse that says the opposite, as well as mechanisms for the filtering of information through logarithms, ensure that access to information and the possibilities of communication are increasingly less characterized by public use and control and increasingly less democratic.
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The law recognizes that the information of the communicational processes has to be truthful, objective, appropriate, current, verified, and understandable. These are basic principles.
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This legislation ought to enable us to overcome institutional inertia. Before a determined situation that is negatively impacting the population, the responsible public servers are obligated to immediately inform all possible spaces. For its part, the press has the responsibility to report first and responsibly all information that is important for the people.
It is the hour of employing all the resources of social communication in favor of participation and transparency in order to unite all our knowledge in the function of extracting and formulating the best ideas and generating consensus.
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Revolution is a true dialogue that puts truth and ethics above indecency and perversion. . . . We have to confront space taken by fundamentalist extremists . . . that act with a permanent disposition toward lies, manipulations, distortions, and incitation to violence and even military aggression.
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One of the experts who has contributed most to the legal texts, Dra. Hilda Saladrigas, has summarized the fundamental essence of this law with a sentence with which I would like to conclude: Cuba, in its particularity, can and ought to make all social communication practices in a different way, a revolutionary way.
Conclusion
In Cuba, the new norms that bound media actors to truth will be implemented by a political system of people’s power, which is a system habitually accustomed to promoting the common good rather than the interests of private capital. And they will be implemented by media organizations that in Cuba pertain to public media and are not owned by private interests. Therefore, the restrictions established in Cuba—by a people’s state and public media oriented to the common good—are different from restrictions emitted by privately-owned and concentrated media corporations in the advanced capitalist economies of the North. The government of Cuba should not be placed in the same category with Twitter; they function in fundamentally different contexts with fundamentally different objectives.
I also would like to note that the Social Communication Law has not been presented by the Cuban government and the Cuban press in a form that makes clear the structures of implementation. This may be a reflection of the characteristics of the law as a process of legal and constitutional regulation that has entered unchartered waters. The law is made necessary, in the first place, by new developments in information and communication technology; and in the second place, by the use of new information technologies in the unconventional war waged against Cuba by an imperialist power in decadence. Díaz-Canel’s references to the challenge of implementation and to the evolutionary character of the law suggest that legal structures of implementation will be developed as the law is implemented in practice.
There is no reason to think that the law will be implemented in a form that would be inconsistent with socialist principles and practices with respect to, first, public ownership of media, and secondly, the balancing of the individual right of freedom of speech with the societal need for consensual unity of ideas and values constructed on the basis of the political will of the majority. To the contrary, it has been presented in a form that suggests a socialist framework and direction. Furthermore, in the context of a neocolonial world-system in decadence, the authors of the Cuban Social Communication Law have declared their right to defend the integrity of the public discourse of the nation against the persistent ideological, political, and cultural interventions of an imperialist power.
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