The Center for Martí Studies (CEM) celebrates today the 49th anniversary of its founding, initiated by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, Armando Hart Dávalos, and Roberto Fernández Retamar. In an exclusive interview with the Cuban News Agency, Culture Minister Alpidio Alonso Grau congratulated the center's researchers, especially its director Marlene Vázquez, and expressed his admiration for their extraordinary work amid difficult circumstances.

Alonso Grau also greeted all the institution's collaborators and the large family of Martí organizations that, surrounding the institution, also work arduously to make the National Hero's body of work known. Through Martí, he said, anti-imperialism and his entire legacy are disseminated to guarantee the continuity of the Martí project, the Revolution, and socialism.

The culture minister noted that this site gathers the accumulated work of very important researchers who have delved into the study and interpretation of José Martí's work, capturing it in books, essays, documents, and audiovisual materials. He assessed that "they have organized events inside and outside Cuba, they have radiated Martí's thought, Martí's legacy, Martí's apostleship into society, which is an extraordinary force for social transformation in our country."

Alonso Grau considered it a great strength and a great privilege that Cuba can count on an institution dedicated to the study of José Martí's work. To this, he added, the core value of José Martí's work is central to the society Cubans aspire to—the socialist society we are building together.

The minister underscored the extraordinary trajectory of the CEM, founded by Fidel and Hart, whose first director was that great figure of national culture and great Martí scholar, Roberto Fernández Retamar. "We have here, as Fidel himself said, not only a great battering ram to move those ideas forward, but a great trench of living ideas that stand at the center of the battle we Cubans wage against all the imperialist policies of aggression," he stated.

The center, the minister noted, precisely fosters that by allowing a greater knowledge of Martí's work and the expansion of his work to different segments of Cuban society. "I believe we should all congratulate ourselves on the anniversary of this center, which is a source of pride for the cultural system and a source of pride for all Cubans, all Martí followers," he concluded.