Declaration of the First Meeting of Young Writers and ALBA Intellectuals The participants from countries and organizations attending the First Meeting of Young Writers and ALBA Intellectuals, from Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, organized under the Integral Cooperation Agreement between Cuba and Venezuela, have gathered in Caracas, between 18 and 20 November. During these days, we reflected on the realities of our people, the participation and inclusion of artistic creation made by young people in cultural policies that promote our governments. The discussions addressed issues related to the use of alternative cultural spaces in the urgency to develop alternatives to the growing imperial hegemony, the need to unlearn the domination canon to implement themes and language that express ourselves, the urge of a look to our own reality that could provide us the tools to confront neoliberal globalization, that deprives us not only from our natural wealth but also our spirituality. There becomes essential an intellectual goes beyond the artistic space and operates towards and from the social side and is a guarantor of change. In the context of neoliberal globalization, driven by hegemonic centers of power with the clear aim to erase our identities, we recognize the importance of culture as an instrument for the preservation of our values. For it, we consider to be essential to support the intercultural dialogue, as way to recognize us and to work jointly to defend, from the respect of the differences and valuing cultural diversity, our existence as nations and villages in the context of the Bolivarian and martinian integration that represents the ALBA. Meanwhile the youth is a strategic and inestimable actor who contributes to the social, cultural, economic and political development of our countries and possesses the impetus, the knowledge, the workmanship and the competences to take part appropriately in the processes of regional integration, we recommend to the Culture highest authorities of the member countries of ALBA to address the following requests: • To generate, to stimulate and to strengthen enclosing spaces of participation that guarantee the incidence of the young writers, artists and intellectuals in the conception, design and application of the political cultural ones of our countries. • Address the experience and cutting-edge projects that have been developed in our countries and are related to the interests of integration of the ALBA. •To incorporate strategies to ensure the diffusion and mobility of cultural expressions and the young talent at the local, regional and international levels. • To guarantee the access and the use of the new technologies of the information and the communication towards the exchange and the integration of the creative youth of the countries of ALBA and the necessary dialogue south - south. • To consolidate and to diversify the grand-national projects, with emphasis on the promotion and the formation of the young artists and intellectuals of our America. Without considering the debates exhausted, the participants at this meeting request to the Ministers of Culture of Cuba and Venezuela to present before the Cabinet of ALBA Culture, the creation of grand-national projects, coordinated by a team of young people, which looks over the pursuit of the agreements and the realization of projects. The representatives of every country in the team mentioned above will have to be attentive to the interests and needs of the young writers, artists and intellectuals, and to define initiatives grand-national projects in line with the agreements of this first Meeting and with those who result from the next ones. We suggest that the team should be part of the initial task force of the Grand National projects earlier enunciated and we proposed the following actions: • To ensure continuity of these meetings, projects and initiatives arising from them, opening participation to young writers, artists and intellectuals of the ALBA. • To promote regular exchanges between writers, artists and young intellectuals, that will make possible, the recognition of cultural and linguistic diversity of our countries. • To generate projects to gather the literary, artistic creation, and the thought of the young people in our countries. • To design and to support a multilingual web portal where there should be promoted and spread the different cultural expressions of our youth and that, at the same time, there should make possible the promotion and management of cultural projects of Grand-national interest. We ratify the need, in meetings of this nature, to ensure the presence of representatives of all countries that are part of ALBA and, in particular, writers, artists and intellectuals in Honduras, which under a repudiable circumstance could not participate at this conference. We take advantage of this opportunity to ratify the support of the younger generation of writers and intellectuals of ALBA member countries to the integration effort that represents the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America. Therefore, we condemn the U.S. intervention in Latin America, represented in the coup that overthrew democracy in Honduras, the failed attempts in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, as formulas completely out of context in a century that has reshaped-from active participation of the people- the democratic order of their forms of government. We believe that the dictatorship is no longer relevant, and violence can not be measured at this time with the creativity of our people to rebuild and to draw a self-determined path. Being respectful of the sovereignty of each country, we stated concern for human rights violations and disappearances in Colombia and Mexico. We are also concerned about the presence of U.S. military forces in Latin American lands; they represent a potential threat to security and peace in the region. Moreover, we reaffirm our belief in the sovereignty of Argentina over the Falkland Islands and we believe that any activity done by another country illegally violate the sovereign rights of the Argentine state. We sympathize with the people of Haiti, who led the independence movement in Latin America and the Caribbean, because even if nature has not been kind, Mother Earth is not the real enemy: the imperial hegemony that has made our sister a colonized nation and a neo-colonized country, and, consequently, devastated, submitted to the most precarious forms of life. We condemn the unjust and inhuman blockade imposed by more than half a century the U.S. government to the Cuban people. Similarly, we join the demand for the immediate release of five Cuban antiterrorist fighters unjustly held in U.S. prisons. Participants at this meeting recognize the significant role played by the same one in the consolidation of a space of integration which defends the identity of our countries, based on common values and on related realities, underlining the value of the diversity as unavoidable element that enriches the unity. Caracas, November 20, 2010 HÉCTOR AVELLAN (NICARAGUA) (Cubaminrex-Embacuba Venezuela) |