The Casa de las Americas cultural institution, the Office of the Jose Martí Program and the World Council of the José Martí project of International Solidarity today rejected the glorification of the European colonization of America.
Through a statement, these organizations condemned the past and present violence derived from the process initiated on October 12, 1492 with the arrival on the continent of the navigator Christopher Columbus.
In this sense, they denounced any attempt to “impose a rose-tinted legend or glorify perpetrators and ideologues of colonization.”
The document states that the arrival of Europeans to American lands was the beginning of the colonization of the world and the conversation of the history of humanity in a single history.
He explains that today the legacy of the oppressed is vindicated and above all that of the resistance embodied in those who revolted five centuries ago against the Europeans.
Cuba commemorates October 12 as an opportunity to address the need to recognize and understand the colonizing process and associated violence, rather than celebrating it as a “discovery” or “Columbus Day.”[as celebrated in the USA].
According to the professor at the University of Havana and vice president of the José Antonio Aponte Commission (against racism) of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, Rolando Julio Rensoli, the event commemorates cultural and armed violence; “It is a day of all possible violence.”
We must remember the colonizing process that began then: there was no discovery, it was not an intercultural encounter, it was the beginning of violence, he remarked in an interview on national Cuban television on the occasion of the anniversary.
He also affirmed that the cultural decolonization program in Cuba, which goes hand in hand with the National Program against Racial Discrimination, has as a task the deconstruction of terms that cloud the understanding of the consequences of that colonizing process.
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