Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel held and encounter with journalists and media executives,

Havana, August 20 (RHC)-- Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on Thursday that it is essential to understand communication management as something vital.

During an exchange with journalists and media executives, the President described communication as a pillar in the government's actions and the work of the Communist Party. However, this does not occur equally at all levels of management, nor do all actors play their role adequately.

Participants warned that journalism is still confused with propaganda or is considered spokesperson of the institutions and that criticism is assumed as opposition.

José Alejandro Rodríguez,  from Juventud Rebelde,  said the media could not be oblivious to different opinions. He insisted that the media must reflect the Cuban reality with its lights and shadows.

Criticizing and polemicizing cannot be bad words, added Lirians Gordillo of Editorial de la Mujer, who also called for embracing the country's diversity and showing it, to look into the causes of things and not to assume stereotypes that stigmatize.

The participants called for greater information transparency and more immediacy in disseminating news to establish the opinion matrixes on the country's issues, something constantly manipulated and distorted from abroad.

In this regard, Dr. Rosa Miriam Elizalde, vice-president of the Union of Journalists of Cuba (UPEC), commented that since July 11, all unconventional warfare tactics have been applied against Cubaand that those tactics have taken advantage of existing communication gaps.

She stressed that digital communication cannot be managed as analogical communication and that the Cuban media system has to diversify its messages to reach different segments of the public.

The director of Alma Mater magazine, Armando Franco, said that institutions and official sources' silence or the time taken to respond or react to a given situation is harmful.

We must review what kind of journalism we are doing in each media, said Ricardo Ronquillo, President of UPEC. He pointed out that given the attacks on the Cuban press model, it is necessary to improve it to become a valid instrument of popular control.

At the meeting, they acknowledged the journalistic work carried out in general during the Covid-19 pandemic and the importance of putting resources where they are most helpful and where they are best used, and building the new type of newsrooms with the help of science.

The Cuban President commented that, although social media are a permanent scenario of confrontation and the matrices about Cuba tend to deny all the good done, we cannot allow ourselves to be crushed by those messages.

'To get out of the current circumstances, we must be very optimistic,' remarked Díaz-Canel, who recalled how real is the damage caused by the US economic blockade and the 243 measures imposed by the administration of Donald Trump (2017-2021) and maintained by that of Joseph Biden.

Covid-19 interrupted spaces for dialogue that were being built, he considered. However, the will to transform the communicative panorama has not changed, and its primary expression is that we defend it as a fundamental pillar of our work, the President affirmed.