Havana, June 11 (RHC)-- Casa de las Americas issued a Declaration under the title Del lado de Don Quijote, in response to a manifesto published in Spain as part of the 82nd Madrid Book Fair in which Latin American countries and governments that refuse to accept Washington's dictates are attacked.

Signed by a group of writers, the booklet focuses its darts against Nicaragua, Cuba, Guatemala and Venezuela, accusing those nations of leaving a trail of death, imprisonment, dispossession, confiscations and exile, in an evident alignment with the most virulent attacks promoted by the international right wing against the governments and peoples of those Latin American nations.

The declaration of the prestigious Cuban cultural center proclaims its repudiation of the document "Literature, always on the side of freedom and democracy".

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 Ruben Dario, Dulce Maria Loynaz, Miguel Angel Asturias and Romulo Gallegos", warns the Cuban 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.