poets will resist, poetry will be victorius: declaration from the participants in havana poetry biennial 2019

Those of us who are here today, on May 28th 2019, convoked by Havana Poetry Biennial and the Cuban chapter of the Network In Defense of Humanity, gather our voices against war, violence, aggression, and threats with imperial skin and raise the banners of peace and life.

Although terror and death adopt many faces, few times Latin America and the Caribbean have been as close to the danger of a conflagration as the one that United State government prepares with the silence and complicity of some countries.

They intend to make us give up for hunger, for lack of medicine, electricity, basic supplies, for tiredness, for despair, because of the supposed end of utopias.

They pretend to lock us up, break the bridges. Pretend that we pay dearly to have sung high and strong, while aspiring to dazzle our children with screens and rattlers.

They want to kill poetry, precisely now when we need it the most and we must defend it.

Our planet, plundered and impoverished by greed and waste, approaches the limits of survival. The fight we are fighting today is for life.

Poets will resist, poetry will be victorious. Our voices will keep singing to pain, to uncertainty; but also, today more than ever, to love and its endless potentialities.

As Martí said: “Poetry, which gathers or disintegrate, fortifies or anguish, points or demolishes the souls, which gives or removes men from faith and breath, it is more necessary than the industry itself, because the first provides them the way of subsisting, whereas the second give them the desire and strength to live”.

Greed and deceive will not impose. Arrogance and contempt will not gain power. Conceit, cruelty and crime will not rule.

Enough of disrespect to sovereignty and independence.

Enough of blockades, threats and lies.

Let us be the kingdom of peace and equality, the universe of poetry.