Let us enumerate the challenges faced today by western civilization, a world which is not alien to us given that with the globalization of social and economic life of recent years, problems have also been globalized. Let us do this from a cultural perspective as I am convinced that it is in this field where the drama of contemporaneity is debated and decided. 

That’s the challenge faced today by western civilization and culture. It can only be saved from chaos and death by extolling its most beautiful humanistic traditions and accepting it in all its implications, that is, not to serve the insatiable appetite of a part of the people, but to defend the rights and interests of all the people. This can be understood and achieved if we study and analyze the profound meaning of an idea expressed by Martí: To be educated is the only way to be free.

Culture is committed to human destiny. It plays a functional role in history. Situated in the central nervous system of civilizations, it synthesizes the necessary elements for action and functioning of society as a live organism.

Pragmatism and its twin brother, technocratic thinking, fragmentize the diverse categories of social life, they compartmentalize their various contents, they obstruct their communicating vessels, which are what gives culture its most profound human and social value. It is necessary to overcome the pragmatic notion to enrich and diversify knowledge, cultivate a spirit of deeply-rooted humanist sentiments and thus trigger the necessary energies to promote our actions and, therefore, the social will of transforming reality in favor of justice.

Changes in human civilizations resulted from the recovery of old ideas and noble traditions that had been put aside. Recognizing them and adopting them, setting them in motion and projecting them towards the future is valid both at the national level and for each community in particular.

An era that aims to go beyond the modern age has to consider forcefully reintroducing the values that were cut short. Precisely what was put aside or what was not completed was a greater willingness of men to create a future of justice, of extolling hope and utopia. Yet, the worst human instincts prevailed.

We must rescue the spiritual legacy of modern man. To this end, we must acknowledge the value of symbols and myths in its broadest sense.

Modernity rejected many of the existing myths because they had been distorted by vile human passions, but, in fact, it ended up promoting those of reason, science and technology. Behind these myths, needs that are inherent to social evolution are revealed. The rashness has not been accepting the validity of ideal paradigms and motives, but in not taking them as a starting point to search for their roots and fundamental causes. Without these values and their formal expressions, civilizations, the meaning of life and the functional role of culture would all disappear.

The exaltation of reason and science by western civilization had the merit of conceptually —and this was important enough— eradicating the atavistic tendencies towards irrationality. However, in order to reverse this at a real plane, neither rational thinking nor even the highest levels of dialectic thinking suffice. It is necessary to make efforts in education and culture conducive to the transformation of man in favor of man. This is the only way that an ethics worthy of the levels of knowledge and information achieved by humanity can be secured. There is no other way to be free.

The human ability to consciously collaborate for a common purpose was one of the first steps in culture; it is an attribute of the biological and anthropological bases as a result of a long natural and social history.  Promoting solidarity is not alien to the scientific bases of social life, or even of the history of organic nature; none of this contradicts material reality in motion, changing and constantly developing— it is inserted within it.

In order to achieve the final victory of reason, it must be crowned with ethical principles. It is essential that the ability of each man to associate with other men for common purposes be promoted and strengthened from the cradle to the grave. This can be organically attained by making our knowledge, feelings and emotions grow until we reach what we call love, which is the true force of life and history as evidence has shown.

Without this awareness and without a dialectic among individual and social wills, modern civilization will not prosper; quite the contrary, it will accelerate its severe crisis. The matter is so grave that some believe it may be the last one.

Cuba defends its identity in the midst of a crisis of ethical, political and even legal values, which is reflected in the vast emptiness and spiritual anguish of modern civilization. We do so taking culture —characterized by the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz as the synthesis of a diversity of universal processes— as our starting point. To undermine the integrity of this nation, as the last nine US administrations have sought to do, is a crime against humanity.

We are the historical result of the best ideals of the modern age. When these values are allowed to go by the board by a cheap and vulgar materialism imposed by the so-called unipolar world, our homeland rises as a banner of human dignity.