Gaspar Esquivel

Las Tunas.- If, as José Martí said, "to move is to moralize", it is understood that Cuban art and culture have a long way to go and a world still to be secured. In that incessant "pull" to capture attention and thoughts, to build better human beings; culture, in its many forms, has the leading role on the set. Those who feel it, develop it and promote it, as well as those who enjoy it, know it.

The Cuban Revolution also breathes and, in essence, through the culture amassed during centuries and projected to the world and to the interior of the island with an authentically national seal, since 1959. And Cuba today needs the intelligence, the argumentative capacity, the capacity for dialogue and for thinking about society that emanate from this sector made up of intellectuals from various fields and artists who, for the most part, put their work at the service of the people.
For the faithful defender of Cuban popular music and the traditions of Las Tunas, Gaspar Esquivel, the present time of the country is a moment to strengthen our essence and "our roots, history, heroes... to defend the Cuban identity".
From his Guarachando Compay Gallo Project, he feels eternally committed to the country and convinced that "there is no Revolution without culture, nor culture without Revolution", they are inseparable.
In that "energy of creation" that Don Fernando Ortiz defined, we have to dignify our human condition, every day and in every work, maintains, in the same way, Carlos Tamayo; the writer and researcher who for three decades accompanied, from the creation and presidency, the paths of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Uneac, by its acronym in Spanish), in the province.
"Cuban culture has two great characteristics: sovereignty and independence, without them it would not exist. Our nation was forged in battle and resistance; that's how Cuban culture was forged throughout its history and today we are, once again, at war; in a cultural and media war, a war of offenses that does not dignify human beings," the intellectual said, referring to the subversive and colonizing avalanche that has been threatening the nation in the last year with greater vigor.
As always, it is inevitable to think and remember Fidel, who was also "an intellectual of enormous stature," he comments, and recalls that in the Uneac congresses and national councils of the organization, the Leader of the Revolution always referred to the issue of Cuban culture with the awareness that by saving it, we would save the nation. "Therefore, this generation and those to come have the challenge of making that legacy endure, of which great intellectuals and figures of national art have been depositaries," stresses Carlos Tamayo, who knows that today, more than before and as always, we cannot do without or renounce spirituality, that moral armor in the midst of an unequal and alienated world.
These challenges, as are those of other neuralgic areas (let's say the economy), are not exclusive to a sector of society, but of an entire people that has in its history, a capital letter teacher. So says a man accustomed to "rummaging" in the past, Victor Marrero Zaldívar, the historian of the city of Las Tunas.
"We must systematically turn to history to channel any project. We have been a country that has promoted social justice and therein lie the principles of our socialism, in which there are elements to privilege, such as the defense of the nation's cultural values," he stresses.
That first defense came with the Literacy Campaign and, even before teaching almost one million Cubans to read and write, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was already riding across the island. Only two months after the dawn of January 1st, without coincidence and with a lot of planning, a path began to be woven, not free of setbacks until today, but which placed the human being at the center of his sleepless nights. As the notable and wise Cuban intellectual Graziella Pogolotti would say: "Territory of spirituality, culture is the anchor of the nation. To it we owe ourselves first and foremost".