HAVANA.-The acting poses and the pretentiously philosophical phrases with which the journalist Jorge Legañoa Alonso usually adorns his political analyzes they place him between a prop Tartuffe and a Cicero of an interprovincial railway platform. His ability to manipulate, distort or omit reality responds to the rules of the Castro manual that for decades has governed the regime’s most disciplined propagandists.
His recent role in the television program broadcast on October 14, in which he tried to discredit the opponent José Daniel Ferrer Garcíaadded a new page to his file of services to the dictatorship. With that performance, Legañoa reaffirmed his reputation as an intolerant person and his well-known vocation for “metatranqueo.”
During his time as vice president of the Institute of Information and Social Communication (ICS), he has been one of the main promoters of the so-called cyberclarias: digital armies that attack, defame and expose those who dare to question the regime on the networks. Because, according to the doctrine it defends, cyberspace—like universities—should be only “for revolutionaries.”
Legañoa’s service record for the dictatorship clearly shows his role in the offensive against freedom of expression. His darkest merits, along with a career marked by ideological servility and his role as political and cultural commissar in different spaces, consolidated the confidence of power in his unconditional loyalty. So much so that, just four days after his television attack against Ferrer, He was appointed president of the Prensa Latina Information Agency.
This collar-and-tie buffoon, who still preaches “sincere and uncensored journalism” in public, is one of the main architects of Law 162/2023 on Social Communication, a rule that regulates—that is, muzzles—communicative processes “in the social, media and community spheres,” and that turns free expression into a crime.
in the program Only the truthwhich airs every other Monday on Cubavisión, Legañoa deploys his talent to warp the public’s perception of any film, especially if it comes from Hollywood. From his pedestal as a commentator, he unleashes his ideological demons to reinterpret scripts and force political readings on topics such as cultural colonization, racism, homophobia or anti-communism, all in order to justify his twisted vision of the world.
In his film criticism one perceives not only a meticulous cynicism, but also a profound ignorance of the nuances and interiorities of the art he intends to analyze. Clumsy and dogmatic, he examines each frame with the magnifying glass of fanaticism, determined to find a subliminal message that reinforces his discourse and keeps it aligned with the official narrative.
As a good manipulator of Cuban political and sociocultural reality, Legañoa continues to play the role that Castroism assigned him: that of the apologist who denies the country’s nightmare and justifies the disaster with high-sounding phrases. Hopefully, for consistency, he does not end up ending up in the means of exile that he despises today.
Jorge Legañoa is condemned to be faithful to the Castroism that he carries within him until the last breath of the regime that he defends with such fervor. Otherwise, when the time comes for change, independent journalists and free citizens will remind you of your servility and your active participation in the censorship machinery.
