To 35 communication professionals from the national media; 50, from provincial media and from the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud and three workers from the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), were awarded, on March 9, the Félix Elmusa distinction, which recognizes, in the context of the Day for the Press Day, “a relevant execution at the service of Cuban journalism.”
The ceremony took place in the Embajadores room of the Habana Libre hotel, the same place where – as Eduardo Yasells, the José Martí National Journalism Award Winner recalled in 2017 – UPEC was born on July 15, 1963.
From that moment, Yasells, one of the founders of the organization, remembers many names and many of the purposes that, since then, those who helped build the Union of Journalists in the country had.
For this reason, he concluded his speech with a phrase that Honorio Muñoz, the first president of UPEC, used in his speech and that now seemed totally topical to Yasells: The tools of journalism are many; intelligence is one of them, as long as it is used in terms of revolutionary journalism.
At the end, Yasells gave Dayana Rebollo, the hotel’s commercial director, a framed photograph of the day the UPEC was founded, which will be placed, as a reminder, on the outskirts of the room.
For the journalist of the Cuban Television Information System, Abdiel Bermúdez, “the value of journalism, its immense burden of humanism and the effort to overcome daily troubles in the fulfillment of the social mission, do not fit in the calamine of a medal.”
On behalf of all those recognized, Abdiel expressed: “The light of the Cuban press passes through the path of truth that comes our way day by day, full of potholes and pitfalls. Overcoming them depends on our ability to adapt to a very diverse media context, even outside of the institutional.
Likewise – he added – it is about understanding that the risk is not in what is new or what is different, but in reluctance and silence and “depends on the articulation of a more functional press model, with the economic vision that beats today in Cuba, in a communication context that demands new ways of telling our stories”.