The prelude
THE Baseball Classic and World Cup football fill stadiums and enthuse the masses in every part of the world. Of course, we all consider ourselves experts on the subject – myself included – and argue heatedly with any and everyone.
However, when it is about the economy, in which events are taking place that are decisive for the world, those interested in the issue can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I searched for the event in our press and not one word appears on the G-20 meeting that will begin in London in two days’ time. Yesterday, it was mentioned on the television evening news, in order to highlight the spectacular security measures being taken by the British authorities. They told us that Obama is to take 200 men from his secret service, all experts in protection. In passing they told us details about the sophisticated four-engine Boeing that is transporting them, with 80 television channels, close to 100 telephone lines and the machinery with keys to order a strike from its nuclear warheads, always ready to be deployed. We also learned about the helicopter, specially designed to transport him by air to the conference center, and the invulnerable and impenetrable armored car in which he will move on land. These constitute the latest advances in science and military technology placed at his disposition.
On the significance of the Summit, not one word. This is not a criticism of our news media, it is simply our way of acting in the face of the international economic issue. Exactly the same is happening in other countries. Nevertheless, the very near future of billions of poor people who are living off their labor is dependent on the agreements reached at that Summit.
Using information supplied by the international news agencies, specialized magazines, speeches and interviews given by heads of state and leaders of United Nations agencies, I will try to follow the course of the meeting, in which the major economic and ideological contradictions that characterize the complex world of today – immersed in a profound crisis – will be present.
In a statement to BBC1, Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia, from the Labour Party, stated that the heads of state and government of the G-20 countries will not approve an economic stimulus package at the London Summit. He noted that the previous Summit had already approved 1.5 trillion euros and that it is now the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) turn to decide what additional support the economy might need.
The UK government has denied the content of a draft communiqué allegedly to be emitted by the G-20 leaders, leaked via the German Der Speigel magazine.
A spokesman for Gordon Brown stated that the document was an old one and that it related to the previous G-20.
The Bank of England stated that the British economy was not in any position to go further into debt.
According to another news agency, G-20 leaders are affirming that support for the financial sector, increased public spending and extra financing to the IMF would pull the world economy out of recession by the beginning of 2010, stated a draft communiqué published on Sunday by the Financial Times.
"We are determined to ensure that this crisis is not repeated."
President Dmitry Medvedev informed the BBC that Russia, as one of the most heavily export-orientated countries, has suffered a lot from the ongoing financial crisis. He said that the G-20 leaders need to reach an agreement at the Summit, "because it is the future of our countries and our peoples that depends on our accord, on our determination to introduce fundamental changes into the world financial architecture."
The heads of state and government of the world’s 20 largest economies prepared a draft statement for the Summit in which they commit themselves to combating protectionism and completing negotiations for international trade.
Official sources told the Financial Times that the text of the communiqué will not change ahead of the Summit. "A global crisis requires a global solution," the draft says. The G-20 leaders are determined to ensure that this crisis is not repeated and are seeking "an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions…"
The head of the British Foreign Office stated that London and Washington will not pressure G-20 governors to announce specific spending commitments. He played down the importance of the distancing between countries backing a larger stimulus, such as Britain and the United States and those urging prudence, like France and Germany.
In his turn, President Obama stated yesterday, March 30, to the same British newspaper, that he had issued a call for G-20 unity. He assured that the world leaders know that they must deliver a strong message of unity in the face of crisis for the good of the global economy. He played down talk of a split between the United States and the European continent countries, in particular the opposition of Germany and France to introducing further stimulus packages. However, he conceded that "… there has been a backlash at home against higher spending that may make it difficult to offer further economic stimulus measures soon."
"In all countries there is an understandable tension between the steps that are needed to kick start the economy and the fact that many of these steps are very expensive and tax payers have a healthy scepticism about spending too much of their money…"
"If voters perceive that it’s a one-way street that we are just pouring more and more money into institutions and seeing no return other than avoiding catastrophe then it’s harder to make an argument for further intervention."
More than 180 countries of the world will not be present at the London meeting. No wonder that it is being affirmed that only representatives of the 20 largest economies will be there. However, there are profound contradictions among them, both within the Western countries and between these and the emerging ones, which are waging battle against the financial crisis on behalf of their right to develop.
A synthesis is not an analysis. It is simply about transmitting to my compatriots the essence of the G-20 debates in London, and always in the fear of over-extending myself and being boring.
Fidel Castro Ruz
March 31, 2009
1:29 p.m.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
China in the international news agencies (Taken from CubaDebate)
IN reference to the Reflection entitled "China: the future great economic power," taken from CubaDebate and published in our press on Monday the 30th, the majority of international news agencies only reported my criticisms of Biden’s statements in Viña del Mar. Only EFE devoted a few lines to the principal subject of the article at the end of its dispatch.
However, the mainstream press continues talking about China’s forceful economic power. Yesterday, the 29th, the DPA news agency stated that "China took the United States by surprise with its daring proposal to replace the dollar, as the central international currency, with a new ‘supermoney.’" It goes on to note that China is fighting against the dominant power of the United States in the world financial system, echoing the opinion of the Chinese Central Bank, which considers the crisis and its consequences throughout the world to be a reflection of the internal fragility and inherent risks of the international monetary system that its country wishes to change via a new reserve currency. In support of its thesis, it alludes to the fact that the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed a global currency in the ‘40s.
The same cable points out that "China is aspiring to obtain an executive position within the IMF, an agency to date dominated by the United States and which, in line with G-20 precautionary measures, must assume national financial systems."
"As the largest of the emerging countries, China exerts more influence in terms of poor states, particularly hit by the crisis."
It reiterates in its argument the known fact that China, with a total of $740 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, is the principal creditor of the United States.
It should not be overlooked that Germany, headquarters of the DPA central office, is concerned at the ruinous role that U.S. economic policy is exercising on Europe. Germany is currently the industrialized country which exports the highest percentage of its GDP. The economic crisis is affecting it more than any other.
Word public opinion has the duty and the right to know more about the economic problems of a crisis that is presently hitting all the peoples of the world.
Fidel Castro Ruz
March 30, 2009
1:20 p.m.
However, the mainstream press continues talking about China’s forceful economic power. Yesterday, the 29th, the DPA news agency stated that "China took the United States by surprise with its daring proposal to replace the dollar, as the central international currency, with a new ‘supermoney.’" It goes on to note that China is fighting against the dominant power of the United States in the world financial system, echoing the opinion of the Chinese Central Bank, which considers the crisis and its consequences throughout the world to be a reflection of the internal fragility and inherent risks of the international monetary system that its country wishes to change via a new reserve currency. In support of its thesis, it alludes to the fact that the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed a global currency in the ‘40s.
The same cable points out that "China is aspiring to obtain an executive position within the IMF, an agency to date dominated by the United States and which, in line with G-20 precautionary measures, must assume national financial systems."
"As the largest of the emerging countries, China exerts more influence in terms of poor states, particularly hit by the crisis."
It reiterates in its argument the known fact that China, with a total of $740 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, is the principal creditor of the United States.
It should not be overlooked that Germany, headquarters of the DPA central office, is concerned at the ruinous role that U.S. economic policy is exercising on Europe. Germany is currently the industrialized country which exports the highest percentage of its GDP. The economic crisis is affecting it more than any other.
Word public opinion has the duty and the right to know more about the economic problems of a crisis that is presently hitting all the peoples of the world.
Fidel Castro Ruz
March 30, 2009
1:20 p.m.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
A rest
YESTERDAY, Tuesday, I had a large pile of cables with news on the meeting of the most industrialized powers in Japan. I will leave the material for another day, if it doesn’t go cold. I decided to rest. I preferred to meet with Gabo (Gabriel García Márquez) and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, who are visiting Cuba until the 11th. How much I longed to talk with them, to recall almost 50 years of sincere friendship!
Our news agency, proposed by Che, had just been born and, among others, it contracted the services of a humble journalist of Colombian origin called Gabriel García Márquez. Neither Prensa Latina nor Gabo could have imagined that there would be a Nobel Prize winner in the middle; or maybe he did, with the "colossal" imagination of the son of a telegraphist in the post office of a small Colombian town, lost among the banana plantations of a Yankee enterprise. He shared his fate with loads of brothers and sisters, as was the custom, but despite that, his father, a Colombian who enjoyed the privilege of being employed thanks to the telegraph, was able to send him to school.
My experience was the inverse. The post office with its telegraph and the little public school in Birán were the only installations in that hamlet that were not the property of my father; all the other goods and services of economic value belonged to Don Angel, and, because of that, I was able to study. I never had the privilege of knowing Aracataca, the little town where Gabo was born, although he did Birán, from celebrating my 70th birthday with me there, at my invitation.
It was a similar stroke of fate that when a Latin American Students Congress was organized in Colombia on our initiative, the capital of that country was the venue of the meeting of Latin America states to create the OAS, following the guidelines of the United States, in 1948.
I had the honor of being introduced to Gaitán by Colombian university students. He supported us and gave us pamphlets of what was known as the Peace Oration, a speech given on the occasion of the March of Silence, the packed and impressive demonstration that wound its way through Bogotá to protest the rural massacres executed by the Colombian oligarchy. Gabo was on that march.
Germán Sánchez, our current ambassador to Venezuela, transcribes in his book Transparencia de Emmanuel textual paragraphs of what Gabo narrated about that episode.
Up to here, it was a matter of chance.
Our friendship was the fruit of a relationship cultivated for many years in which our conversations, always agreeable for me, amounted to hundreds. Talking with García Marquez and Mercedes every time they came to Cuba — and it used to be more than once a year —became an antidote to the heavy tensions under which a Cuban revolutionary leader lived, unconsciously but constantly,.
In Colombia itself, for the 4th Ibero-American Summit, the hosts organized a horse-drawn carriage excursion through the walled city of Cartagena, a kind of Old Havana, a protected historic relic. The Cuban State Security comrades had told me that it was not a good idea to take part in the programmed excursion. I thought that their concern was excessive, because given that there was too much compartmentalization, the people that informed me did not have concrete information. I always respected their professionalism and cooperated with them.
I called Gabo, who was nearby, and said to him jokingly, "Get in this car with us so they don’t shoot us!" and he did so. I added in the same tone to Mercedes, who stayed at the departure point, "You’re going to be the youngest widow. Don’t forget it!" The carriage left with the horse limping because of the heavy load. Its hooves slipped on the sidewalk.
Later I found out what happened there. Just like when I was in Santiago de Chile, where there was a television camera containing an automatic weapon that was pointed at me during a press interview, but the mercenary operating it didn’t dare shoot; they were in Cartagena with telescopic rifles and automatic weapons, concealed at one point of the walled city, but once again those who should have pulled the trigger lost their nerve. The pretext was that Gabo’s head got in the way, obstructing their view.
Yesterday, during our conversation, I remembered and asked him and Mercedes — the Olympic champion of information — about innumerable issues inside and outside of Cuba where we were present. The New Latin American Cinema Foundation, created by Cuba and headed by García Márquez and located in the old Santa Bárbara estate — historic for the positive and negative aspects of its antecedents in the first third of the last century — and the School of New Latin American Cinema, directed by the Foundation, located on the outskirts of San Antonio de los Baños, occupied a space in our meeting.
Birri, with his long black beard, now as white as snow, and many other Cuban and foreign figures, were part of that relation.
In my eyes, Gabo earned respect and admiration on account of his capacity for meticulously organizing the school without overlooking one single detail. Out of prejudice, I had imagined him as an intellectual full of marvelous fantasy; I didn’t know how much realism there was in his mind.
Dozens of events inside and outside of Cuba, at which we were both present, were mentioned. How many things take place over the years!
Two hours for conversing were not enough, as one can imagine. The meeting had begun at 11:35 a.m. I invited them to lunch, something that I have not done with any visitor at all in these close to two years. I grasped that I was really on vacation and told them so. I improvised. I was able to sort things out. They had their own lunch and, for my part, I kept to my diet in a disciplined way, without straying from it in the least, not to add years to my life, but productivity to my hours.
They had barely arrived when they gave me a little, pleasant gift wrapped in attractive and brightly-colored paper. It contained tiny volumes that were a little bigger but less elongated than a postage stamp. Each one had 40-60 pages, in tiny letters but legible. They are the speeches given in Stockholm by five Nobel Literature Prize winners out of those awarded in the last 60 years. "So that you have reading material," Mercedes told me on giving it to me.
I asked for more information on the present before they both left at five in the afternoon. "I have spent the most agreeable hours since I got sick nearly two years ago," I told them without hesitation. That is how I felt.
"There’ll be more," replied Gabo.
But my curiosity would not be stilled. A while later, as I was walking, I asked a comrade to bring me the gift. Aware of the rate at which the world has changed in the last few decades, I wondered, "What was the thinking of some of those brilliant writers who lived before this turbulent and uncertain epoch of humanity?"
In chronological order, the five Nobel Prize winners selected in the small collection of speeches that I hope our compatriots will be able to read one day, were:
William Faulkner (1949)
Pablo Neruda (1971)
Gabriel García Márquez (1982)
John Maxwell Cohetes (2003)
Doris Lessing (2007)
Gabo didn’t like making speeches. He spent months searching for data — I recall — anguishing over the words he would say on receiving the prize. The same thing happened with the brief speech that he was supposed to give at the dinner offered after the Prize. If that had been his occupation, Gabo certainly would have died of a heart attack.
It should be noted that the Nobel is awarded in the capital of a country that has not suffered the ravages of a war for more than 150 years, ruled by a constitutional monarchy and governed by a social democratic party, where a man as honorable as Olof Palme was assassinated because of his spirit of solidarity with the poor countries of the world. For Gabo, the mission was not easy to fulfill.
Without the slightest whiff of being pro-communist, the Swedish institution awarded the Nobel Prize to William Faulkner, an inspired and rebellious U.S. writer; to Pablo Neruda, a member of the Communist Party, who received it in the glorious days of Salvador Allende, when fascism tried to seize Chile; and to Gabriel García Márquez, the genius and prestigious writer of our era.
It is not necessary to say what Gabo thought. Suffice it to simply transcribe the last paragraphs of his speech, a jewel of prose, on receiving the Nobel Prize on December 10, 1982, while Cuba, dignified and heroic, was resisting the Yankee blockade.
"One day like today, my maestro William Faulkner said in this place, ‘I refuse to admit to the end of humankind,’" he affirmed.
"I would not feel worthy of occupying this place that was his if I was not fully conscious that, for the first time since the origins of humanity, the colossal disaster that he refused to admit to 32 years ago is now nothing less than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."
Fidel Castro Ruz
July 9, 2008
7:26 p.m.
Our news agency, proposed by Che, had just been born and, among others, it contracted the services of a humble journalist of Colombian origin called Gabriel García Márquez. Neither Prensa Latina nor Gabo could have imagined that there would be a Nobel Prize winner in the middle; or maybe he did, with the "colossal" imagination of the son of a telegraphist in the post office of a small Colombian town, lost among the banana plantations of a Yankee enterprise. He shared his fate with loads of brothers and sisters, as was the custom, but despite that, his father, a Colombian who enjoyed the privilege of being employed thanks to the telegraph, was able to send him to school.
My experience was the inverse. The post office with its telegraph and the little public school in Birán were the only installations in that hamlet that were not the property of my father; all the other goods and services of economic value belonged to Don Angel, and, because of that, I was able to study. I never had the privilege of knowing Aracataca, the little town where Gabo was born, although he did Birán, from celebrating my 70th birthday with me there, at my invitation.
It was a similar stroke of fate that when a Latin American Students Congress was organized in Colombia on our initiative, the capital of that country was the venue of the meeting of Latin America states to create the OAS, following the guidelines of the United States, in 1948.
I had the honor of being introduced to Gaitán by Colombian university students. He supported us and gave us pamphlets of what was known as the Peace Oration, a speech given on the occasion of the March of Silence, the packed and impressive demonstration that wound its way through Bogotá to protest the rural massacres executed by the Colombian oligarchy. Gabo was on that march.
Germán Sánchez, our current ambassador to Venezuela, transcribes in his book Transparencia de Emmanuel textual paragraphs of what Gabo narrated about that episode.
Up to here, it was a matter of chance.
Our friendship was the fruit of a relationship cultivated for many years in which our conversations, always agreeable for me, amounted to hundreds. Talking with García Marquez and Mercedes every time they came to Cuba — and it used to be more than once a year —became an antidote to the heavy tensions under which a Cuban revolutionary leader lived, unconsciously but constantly,.
In Colombia itself, for the 4th Ibero-American Summit, the hosts organized a horse-drawn carriage excursion through the walled city of Cartagena, a kind of Old Havana, a protected historic relic. The Cuban State Security comrades had told me that it was not a good idea to take part in the programmed excursion. I thought that their concern was excessive, because given that there was too much compartmentalization, the people that informed me did not have concrete information. I always respected their professionalism and cooperated with them.
I called Gabo, who was nearby, and said to him jokingly, "Get in this car with us so they don’t shoot us!" and he did so. I added in the same tone to Mercedes, who stayed at the departure point, "You’re going to be the youngest widow. Don’t forget it!" The carriage left with the horse limping because of the heavy load. Its hooves slipped on the sidewalk.
Later I found out what happened there. Just like when I was in Santiago de Chile, where there was a television camera containing an automatic weapon that was pointed at me during a press interview, but the mercenary operating it didn’t dare shoot; they were in Cartagena with telescopic rifles and automatic weapons, concealed at one point of the walled city, but once again those who should have pulled the trigger lost their nerve. The pretext was that Gabo’s head got in the way, obstructing their view.
Yesterday, during our conversation, I remembered and asked him and Mercedes — the Olympic champion of information — about innumerable issues inside and outside of Cuba where we were present. The New Latin American Cinema Foundation, created by Cuba and headed by García Márquez and located in the old Santa Bárbara estate — historic for the positive and negative aspects of its antecedents in the first third of the last century — and the School of New Latin American Cinema, directed by the Foundation, located on the outskirts of San Antonio de los Baños, occupied a space in our meeting.
Birri, with his long black beard, now as white as snow, and many other Cuban and foreign figures, were part of that relation.
In my eyes, Gabo earned respect and admiration on account of his capacity for meticulously organizing the school without overlooking one single detail. Out of prejudice, I had imagined him as an intellectual full of marvelous fantasy; I didn’t know how much realism there was in his mind.
Dozens of events inside and outside of Cuba, at which we were both present, were mentioned. How many things take place over the years!
Two hours for conversing were not enough, as one can imagine. The meeting had begun at 11:35 a.m. I invited them to lunch, something that I have not done with any visitor at all in these close to two years. I grasped that I was really on vacation and told them so. I improvised. I was able to sort things out. They had their own lunch and, for my part, I kept to my diet in a disciplined way, without straying from it in the least, not to add years to my life, but productivity to my hours.
They had barely arrived when they gave me a little, pleasant gift wrapped in attractive and brightly-colored paper. It contained tiny volumes that were a little bigger but less elongated than a postage stamp. Each one had 40-60 pages, in tiny letters but legible. They are the speeches given in Stockholm by five Nobel Literature Prize winners out of those awarded in the last 60 years. "So that you have reading material," Mercedes told me on giving it to me.
I asked for more information on the present before they both left at five in the afternoon. "I have spent the most agreeable hours since I got sick nearly two years ago," I told them without hesitation. That is how I felt.
"There’ll be more," replied Gabo.
But my curiosity would not be stilled. A while later, as I was walking, I asked a comrade to bring me the gift. Aware of the rate at which the world has changed in the last few decades, I wondered, "What was the thinking of some of those brilliant writers who lived before this turbulent and uncertain epoch of humanity?"
In chronological order, the five Nobel Prize winners selected in the small collection of speeches that I hope our compatriots will be able to read one day, were:
William Faulkner (1949)
Pablo Neruda (1971)
Gabriel García Márquez (1982)
John Maxwell Cohetes (2003)
Doris Lessing (2007)
Gabo didn’t like making speeches. He spent months searching for data — I recall — anguishing over the words he would say on receiving the prize. The same thing happened with the brief speech that he was supposed to give at the dinner offered after the Prize. If that had been his occupation, Gabo certainly would have died of a heart attack.
It should be noted that the Nobel is awarded in the capital of a country that has not suffered the ravages of a war for more than 150 years, ruled by a constitutional monarchy and governed by a social democratic party, where a man as honorable as Olof Palme was assassinated because of his spirit of solidarity with the poor countries of the world. For Gabo, the mission was not easy to fulfill.
Without the slightest whiff of being pro-communist, the Swedish institution awarded the Nobel Prize to William Faulkner, an inspired and rebellious U.S. writer; to Pablo Neruda, a member of the Communist Party, who received it in the glorious days of Salvador Allende, when fascism tried to seize Chile; and to Gabriel García Márquez, the genius and prestigious writer of our era.
It is not necessary to say what Gabo thought. Suffice it to simply transcribe the last paragraphs of his speech, a jewel of prose, on receiving the Nobel Prize on December 10, 1982, while Cuba, dignified and heroic, was resisting the Yankee blockade.
"One day like today, my maestro William Faulkner said in this place, ‘I refuse to admit to the end of humankind,’" he affirmed.
"I would not feel worthy of occupying this place that was his if I was not fully conscious that, for the first time since the origins of humanity, the colossal disaster that he refused to admit to 32 years ago is now nothing less than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."
Fidel Castro Ruz
July 9, 2008
7:26 p.m.
The true story and the challenge of the Cuban journalists
SEVEN days ago I wrote about one of the great men in history: Salvador Allende, a man the world remembered with deep emotion and respect on his first centennial. However, no one quivered or even recalled the date of October 24, 1891, when the Dominican despot Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was born, eighteen years before our admired Chilean brother.
Both countries, one in the Caribbean and the other in the extreme south of Latin America, suffered the consequences of the danger that Jose Marti foresaw and tried to avert. As he indicated in his celebrated posthumous letter to his Mexican friend who had fought with Juarez, --and this is an idea I never tire of repeating: "Now, I am everyday in danger of giving my life…to timely prevent with the independence of Cuba that the United States expand over the Antilles and that, with that additional force, they may come against our American lands. Everything I’ve done until today, and everything I’ll do, is for that purpose."
Our victorious Revolution was a friend of Allende, at the same time it hated Trujillo. This was an uncouth Pinochet begotten by the United States in the Caribbean. The despot had been the result of one of the Yankees’ military interventions in the island that country shares with Haiti, a country which was the first Spanish colony.
The American Navy infantry had invaded that sister republic to secure its country’s economic and strategic interests. Of course, there was not even a Platt Amendment there to cover up the action with a legal mantle.
In 1918, they recruited, among others, the adventurous and ambitious native Dominican, the son of a small merchant, who was then trained and admitted, as a 27-year old, to the National Army. In 1921, he went on to another training course with the Military Academy established by the country’s occupants. After he finished there, he was appointed unit chief and promoted to the rank of Captain for the services paid to the interventionist forces, although he was not previously a Lieutenant.
At the end of the Yankee occupation in 1924, Trujillo was ready to act as an instrument of the United States in high posts in the military, which he would use to deal the classic coup d’etat and the typical "democratic elections" leading him to the presidency of the republic in 1930. The beginning of his term coincided with the years of the Great Depression that hit the US economy so badly.
Cuba, the country most dependent and shackled by the trade agreements, stood to suffer the most severe consequences of that crisis. On the other hand, the Naval Base and the humiliating and unwarranted for Amendment would give them constitutional rights to intervene in our nation and to tear to pieces it glorious history.
In the neighboring country, with less direct economic dependence, the shrewd and ambitious Trujillo handled whimsically the properties of the Dominican middle class and the oligarchy. The major sugar mills and many other branches of industry became his private property. That cult to private appropriation did not offend the capitalist concepts of the empire. Many neon signs claimed everywhere "God and Trujillo." Many cities, avenues, roads and buildings were named after him or his relatives. The same year he became President, a hurricane hit hard on Santo Domingo, the country’s capital. After the city recovered from the damages, he renamed it Trujillo City. Never before had the world known such a personality cult.
In the year 1937, he carried out along the border a huge massacre of Haitian workers. This was his reserve labor force in agriculture and construction.
He was a steady US ally. He was involved in the inception of both the United Nations and the OAS in 1948. On December 15, 1952, he traveled to Washington in his other capacity as plenipotentiary ambassador to the Organization of American States and stayed in that country for three and a half months. On July 2, 1954, he traveled to Spain on board a transatlantic ship which took him to Vigo. Franco, who was already an ally of the empire, welcomed him at the Madrid North Station accompanied by all members of the diplomatic corp.
My relationship with the Dominican Republic dates back to my days at the University. I had been honored with an appointment to President of the Committee for Dominican Democracy. It did not sound as a very important position, but since I was kind of rebellious, I took it seriously. The time to do something came up unexpectedly. The Dominican exiled fostered in Cuba the creation of an expeditionary force. I enlisted with it when I had not yet completed my sophomore. I was 21 years old.
I have told the story before of what happened then. After the frustrated Cayo Confites expedition, I was not among the over one thousand prisoners taken to the Columbia military camp, where Juan Bosch went on a hunger strike. These men had been incarcerated by the Head of the Army in Cuba, General Perez Dameras, who had received money from Trujillo to intercept the expedition. The General did this when the expeditionary were close to the Wind Passage.
A Cuban Navy frigate, aiming with its bow cannons at our leading boat, ordered us to return and to dock at the Antilla’s port. I then jump into the water of the Nipe Bay together with three other expeditionary. We were four armed men.
I had met Juan Bosch, an outstanding Dominican leader, in Cayo Confites, where we trained, and we talked at length. He was not the chief of the expedition but he was certainly the most prestigious personality among the Dominicans, even if he was ignored by some of the main leaders of that movement and by the Cuban chieftains who had rather important and well paid official relations. I was then very far from even imagining this that I’m writing today!
Eleven years later, when our fight on the Sierra Maestra Mountains was about to successfully conclude, Trujillo granted a credit to Batista to buy weapons and ammunitions, which were brought by plane in the second quarter of 1958. He also volunteered to airborne three thousand Dominican troops, and later another force that would land in Oriente.
Batista’s tyranny was defeated on January 1st, 1959, thanks to the hard blows dealt by the Rebel Army and the revolutionary general strike. The repressive state came crumbling down all throughout the island and Batista left for the Dominican Republic. He traveled there in the company of other sinister characters of that regime such as the well known thug Lutgardo Martin Perez, his 25-year old son Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez, and a group of the top military chiefs of his defeated army.
Trujillo offered Batista a warm welcome and accommodated him at an official residence for distinguished guest, although he later sent him to a luxurious hotel. He was concerned over the example of the Cuban Revolution, therefore, he counted on the top chiefs of Batista’s former army and the likely support of the tens of thousands of members of the three army branches and the police, to organize a counterrevolution and support it with the Caribbean Legion, which might have had about 25 thousand soldiers from the Dominican Army.
The US Administration, being aware of these plans, sent a CIA officer to Santo Domingo to talk with Trujillo and assess his plans against Cuba. By midst February 1959, this man met with John Abbes Garcia, head of the Dominican Intelligence services to whom he recommended to send agents to recruit hostile elements in the ranks of the victorious Revolution. He did not say that the US government already had William Alexander Morgan Ruderth, an American citizen and CIA agent, who had infiltrated the Second Front in the Escambray, a man they had promoted to the rank of Commander and who was one of the main chiefs there.
The development of these events, which make for a fascinating story, can be found in the books of senior Cuban Intelligence and Security officers, in the testimonies of leaders of military units of the Rebel Army who were directly involved, in autobiographies, official statements made in those days and reports by national and foreign journalists, all of whom it would be impossible to mention in this Reflection.
There is another book in the process of publication written by a comrade who joined the Militias when he was 17, and who for his good conduct and sharp mind was then transferred to the Prime Minister’s and Commander in Chief’s security detail where he studied to become a stenographer, then took notes of the conversations and collected the testimony of hundreds of participants in the events he narrates. This chapter of the history of our Revolution has yet to be recounted.
As is understood, the top revolutionary leaders were constantly informed of the news about the enemy’s plans. We then conceived the idea of dealing the Yankee’s, Batista’s and Trujillo’s counterrevolution a hard blow.
When the weapons sent by sea from Florida to carry out the first actions and the chiefs and plotters were all under strict control, we simulated a successful counterrevolution in the mountainous Escambray zone, and in Trinidad, which had an airstrip. We then proceeded to isolate the municipality of that small and friendly town where revolutionary political work was intensified.
Trujillo was full of enthusiasm. A company of our soldiers disguised as peasants shouted at the airstrip: "Long live Trujillo! Down with Fidel!" which was reported to headquarters in the Dominican Republic. They had dropped plenty of ammunitions from planes. Everything was unfolding according to plan.
On August 13th, a plane came in with a special envoy from Trujillo. It was Luis del Pozo Jimenez, the son of a former mayor and Batista follower in the capital and a prominent figure with the regime. He pointed out on a map the positions that would be bombed by the Dominican Air Force and inquired about the number of legionnaires necessary in the first stage.
Another notable envoy came with him. It was Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez who, as we have already indicated, had traveled with his father and Batista as they escaped to the Dominican Republic that January 1st. He was accompanied by several mercenary leaders who would stay behind. The plane had to go back. Its crew was the same that had carried Batista when he ran away.
I was in the proximity of the airstrip with Camilo Cienfuegos and other military chiefs. The head of the Cuban military personnel who had to unload the weapons and communication equipment had understood that they should arrest the aircraft crew. At this point, a copilot realized that something was wrong shot on them and a shootout ensued. Trujillo’s envoys and the other mercenary chiefs were then arrested. There were casualties.
That same night I visited the wounded from both sides. We couldn’t go ahead with the plan. Up until then, communications between Trujillo and the counterrevolution in the Escambray had taken place through short wave. Trujillos’s official radio station broadcast triumphant military reports similar to those we would hear from Radio Swan and Miami in the days of Giron. We never used Cuba’s public stations to spread false official reports.
It would have been possible to continue with the game even after the plane had been seized and Luis del Pozo Jimenez and Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez were arrested. We could have faked a mechanic failure of the plane that should have returned there, but that would have misled and confused our people, which were by then restless over the news about the alleged counterrevolutionary victories in Escambray publicly spread from Trujillo City.
That August 13, 1959 was my 33rd birthday. I was in my prime, physically and mentally strong.
It was a major revolutionary victory, but at the same time a signal about the times that would come and a sad gift from Rafael Leonidas Trujillo on my anniversary. Twenty months later we would be fighting at Giron; there would be violence and bloodshed in the Escambray, by the sea shore, in towns and all over the country. It was the counterrevolution organized by the United States.
In that country they would have executed Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez and Luis del Pozo Jimenez, as mercenaries in the service of an enemy power. The Revolutionary Courts sentenced them to prison, and they were not mistreated. What was the final destiny of Martin Perez? He migrated to the United States, legally, and he is today a standard bearer of the Cuban American terrorist Mafia which supports Republican candidate McCain.
A distinguished Canadian journalist and researcher, Jean-Guy Allard, describes the terrorist life of Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez as follows:
"…in fact, since early in his life, ‘Macho’ (his nickname) Martin Perez joined the Batista police and, for his special merits, that is, his beating of the prisoners in the last months of the bloody regime, he earned the rank of Sergeant.
"Both, the father and son were so close to Batista that, on January 1st, 1959, instead of running away to Miami, they followed the dictator to his sanctuary in the Dominican Republic.
"…released on May 29, 1987…in 1989 he joined the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) established by the CIA under Ronald Reagan.
"He would very soon be leading the paramilitary committee created by this organization which ensures the financing, among others, of the terrorist group Alpha 66 and other extremist groups acting against Cuba.
"…Martin Perez Rodriguez took part in the arrangement of a series of failed attempts on the life the President of Cuba during various Ibero American Summits.
"In 1994, on the occasion of Fidel’s attendance to the 4th Summit, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia… he purchased a 50 mm Barret gun and explosives which were transferred to Colombia from Miami…by plane!
"…he plotted with Jimenez Escobedo and Eugenio LLameras with a view to the 5th Ibero American Summit in 1995. That year, he revived the same plan for the Non Aligned Movement Summit, also in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
"In 1997, at Margarita Island, Venezuela, on the occasion of the 7th Ibero American Summit of Heads of Sate and Government, Posada mounted another conspiracy with direct support from Martin Perez Rodriguez and other leaders of CANF…"
"…he signed the Declaration of support for terrorism against Cuba published by the Foundation on August 11th…Roberto Martin Perez, Feliciano Foyo and Horacio Garcia are some of the people Posada publicly named as the ‘financiers’ of his terrorist actions during his interview with the New York Times in 1997.
"…he sponsored in Miami an exhibition of paintings by [Orlando] Bosch and Posada [Carriles], the two masterminds of the sabotage against the Cuban civilian plane, in 1976, where 73 people were killed.
"In 1998, the great advocate of the ‘political prisoner’ carried out one of his dirtiest deeds: with other Miami Mafia ringleaders…he led the new FBI chief, the very corruptible Hector Pesquera, to the arrest of five Cubans who had infiltrated the ranks of the terrorist organizations.
"…his unfailing friendship with Guillermo Novo Sampol, the murderer of Chilean leader Orlando Letelier is well known…
"The Republican candidate should know that his 73-year-old protégé was the first to assert that on the day of his longed for victory over the Cuban Revolution he would drive a bulldozer from the Cabo San Antonio to the Punta de Maisi crushing the island population guilty of any links with the Revolution.
"…on another occasion, asked about the risk of killing innocents in an attempt on Cuban leaders he said that he didn’t care if ‘the Pope died’."
The historical truth tells us that John McCain’s father commandeered the amphibious attack, the invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965 against the nationalist forces led by Francisco Caamaño, another great hero of that nation whom I knew very well and who always had confidence in Cuba.
I dedicate this Reflection on historical events to our dear journalists, since it coincides with the 8th Congress of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC, by its Spanish acronym), whom I consider like family. How I would have liked to study the techniques of their trade!
The UPEC has been very generous in publishing a book under the title Fidel, the journalist, which will be presented tomorrow afternoon. They sent me a copy with several articles published in clandestine or legal newspapers over five decades ago, with a prologue by Guillermo Cabrera Alvarez and the selection, introduction and notes by Ana Nuñez Machin.
I gave Guillermo Cabrera the nickname of "the genius" since I first met him. It was the impression I received from that great man who unfortunately passed away last year. He had had a heart surgery some time ago at the prestigious Cardiovascular Center established by our Revolution in Santa Clara City.
I reread some of the articles published in Alerta, Bohemia and La Calle, and I relived those years.
I wrote those articles when I felt the need to convey certain ideas. I did it out of pure revolutionary instinct. I always applied the principle that words should be simple and the concepts understandable to the masses. Today I have more experience, but I’m not as strong; it’s harder for me to do it. Our people’s educational level is higher with the Revolution, thus the task is more difficult.
From the revolutionary point of view, discrepancies are not important; it is the honesty of the opinion that counts. And, it is from the contradictions that the truth will emerge. Perhaps, it would be worthwhile some other time to make an effort to make some observations on this issue.
Yesterday, an important event took place, which will be an issue the following days. This is the release of Ingrid Betancourt and a group of people held by the FARC, that is, the Revolutionary Armed Forces from Colombia.
On January 10th this year, our ambassador to Venezuela, German Sanchez, following a request of the Venezuelan and Colombian governments, took part in the release of Clara Rojas to the International Red Cross. She had been a candidate to vice President of Colombia when Ingrid Betancourt was running for President and was kidnapped on February 23, 2002. Consuelo Gonzalez, a member of the House of Representatives, kidnapped on September 10, 2001, was released with her.
An era of peace was opening for Colombia. This is a process Cuba has been supporting for over two decades, as it is most convenient for the unity and peace of the peoples of our America, using new ways in the special and complex circumstances prevailing after the demise of the USSR in the early 1990s --which I wont try to analyze here-- very different from those existing in Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s of the 20th century.
The bombing of a camp in Ecuadorian soil in the early hours of March 1st, --while Colombian guerrillas and young visitors from different nationalities were sleeping-- using Yankee technology; the occupation of the territory, the coup de grace on the wounded and the kidnapping of corpses as part of the terrorist plan from the United States government was repudiated the world over.
A Rio Group meeting was then held in the Dominican Republic on March 7th. There the events were strongly condemned while the US administration applauded.
Manuel Marulanda, a peasant and communist militant, the main leader of that guerrilla founded almost half a century ago was still alive. He passed away on the 26th of that same month.
Ingrid Betancourt, feeble and sick, as well as other captives with a serious health condition could hardly resist any longer.
Out of a basically humanist sentiment, we rejoiced at the news that Ingrid Betancourt, three American citizens and other captives had been released. The civilians should have never been kidnapped neither should the militaries have been kept prisoners in the conditions of the jungle. These were objectively cruel actions. No revolutionary purpose could justify it. The time will come when the subjective factors should be analyzed in depth.
We won our revolutionary war in Cuba by immediately releasing every prisoner absolutely unconditionally. The soldiers and officers captured in battle were released to the International Red Cross; we only kept their weapons. No soldier will ever surrender if he thinks he will be killed or subjected to cruel treatment.
We are watching with concern how the imperialists try to capitalize on what happened in Colombia in order to hide and justify their heinous crimes of genocide against other peoples. They want to deflect international attention from their interventionist plans in Venezuela and Bolivia and from the presence of the 4th Fleet in support of the political line that intends to obliterate the independence of the countries located south of the United States while taking possession of their natural resources.
These should be illustrative examples for all of our journalists. In our times, truth is navigating rough seas, where the mass media are in the hands of those threatening human survival with their immense economic, technologic and military resources. That’s the challenge faced by the Cuban journalists!
Fidel Castro Ruz
July 3, 2008
4:26 p.m.
Both countries, one in the Caribbean and the other in the extreme south of Latin America, suffered the consequences of the danger that Jose Marti foresaw and tried to avert. As he indicated in his celebrated posthumous letter to his Mexican friend who had fought with Juarez, --and this is an idea I never tire of repeating: "Now, I am everyday in danger of giving my life…to timely prevent with the independence of Cuba that the United States expand over the Antilles and that, with that additional force, they may come against our American lands. Everything I’ve done until today, and everything I’ll do, is for that purpose."
Our victorious Revolution was a friend of Allende, at the same time it hated Trujillo. This was an uncouth Pinochet begotten by the United States in the Caribbean. The despot had been the result of one of the Yankees’ military interventions in the island that country shares with Haiti, a country which was the first Spanish colony.
The American Navy infantry had invaded that sister republic to secure its country’s economic and strategic interests. Of course, there was not even a Platt Amendment there to cover up the action with a legal mantle.
In 1918, they recruited, among others, the adventurous and ambitious native Dominican, the son of a small merchant, who was then trained and admitted, as a 27-year old, to the National Army. In 1921, he went on to another training course with the Military Academy established by the country’s occupants. After he finished there, he was appointed unit chief and promoted to the rank of Captain for the services paid to the interventionist forces, although he was not previously a Lieutenant.
At the end of the Yankee occupation in 1924, Trujillo was ready to act as an instrument of the United States in high posts in the military, which he would use to deal the classic coup d’etat and the typical "democratic elections" leading him to the presidency of the republic in 1930. The beginning of his term coincided with the years of the Great Depression that hit the US economy so badly.
Cuba, the country most dependent and shackled by the trade agreements, stood to suffer the most severe consequences of that crisis. On the other hand, the Naval Base and the humiliating and unwarranted for Amendment would give them constitutional rights to intervene in our nation and to tear to pieces it glorious history.
In the neighboring country, with less direct economic dependence, the shrewd and ambitious Trujillo handled whimsically the properties of the Dominican middle class and the oligarchy. The major sugar mills and many other branches of industry became his private property. That cult to private appropriation did not offend the capitalist concepts of the empire. Many neon signs claimed everywhere "God and Trujillo." Many cities, avenues, roads and buildings were named after him or his relatives. The same year he became President, a hurricane hit hard on Santo Domingo, the country’s capital. After the city recovered from the damages, he renamed it Trujillo City. Never before had the world known such a personality cult.
In the year 1937, he carried out along the border a huge massacre of Haitian workers. This was his reserve labor force in agriculture and construction.
He was a steady US ally. He was involved in the inception of both the United Nations and the OAS in 1948. On December 15, 1952, he traveled to Washington in his other capacity as plenipotentiary ambassador to the Organization of American States and stayed in that country for three and a half months. On July 2, 1954, he traveled to Spain on board a transatlantic ship which took him to Vigo. Franco, who was already an ally of the empire, welcomed him at the Madrid North Station accompanied by all members of the diplomatic corp.
My relationship with the Dominican Republic dates back to my days at the University. I had been honored with an appointment to President of the Committee for Dominican Democracy. It did not sound as a very important position, but since I was kind of rebellious, I took it seriously. The time to do something came up unexpectedly. The Dominican exiled fostered in Cuba the creation of an expeditionary force. I enlisted with it when I had not yet completed my sophomore. I was 21 years old.
I have told the story before of what happened then. After the frustrated Cayo Confites expedition, I was not among the over one thousand prisoners taken to the Columbia military camp, where Juan Bosch went on a hunger strike. These men had been incarcerated by the Head of the Army in Cuba, General Perez Dameras, who had received money from Trujillo to intercept the expedition. The General did this when the expeditionary were close to the Wind Passage.
A Cuban Navy frigate, aiming with its bow cannons at our leading boat, ordered us to return and to dock at the Antilla’s port. I then jump into the water of the Nipe Bay together with three other expeditionary. We were four armed men.
I had met Juan Bosch, an outstanding Dominican leader, in Cayo Confites, where we trained, and we talked at length. He was not the chief of the expedition but he was certainly the most prestigious personality among the Dominicans, even if he was ignored by some of the main leaders of that movement and by the Cuban chieftains who had rather important and well paid official relations. I was then very far from even imagining this that I’m writing today!
Eleven years later, when our fight on the Sierra Maestra Mountains was about to successfully conclude, Trujillo granted a credit to Batista to buy weapons and ammunitions, which were brought by plane in the second quarter of 1958. He also volunteered to airborne three thousand Dominican troops, and later another force that would land in Oriente.
Batista’s tyranny was defeated on January 1st, 1959, thanks to the hard blows dealt by the Rebel Army and the revolutionary general strike. The repressive state came crumbling down all throughout the island and Batista left for the Dominican Republic. He traveled there in the company of other sinister characters of that regime such as the well known thug Lutgardo Martin Perez, his 25-year old son Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez, and a group of the top military chiefs of his defeated army.
Trujillo offered Batista a warm welcome and accommodated him at an official residence for distinguished guest, although he later sent him to a luxurious hotel. He was concerned over the example of the Cuban Revolution, therefore, he counted on the top chiefs of Batista’s former army and the likely support of the tens of thousands of members of the three army branches and the police, to organize a counterrevolution and support it with the Caribbean Legion, which might have had about 25 thousand soldiers from the Dominican Army.
The US Administration, being aware of these plans, sent a CIA officer to Santo Domingo to talk with Trujillo and assess his plans against Cuba. By midst February 1959, this man met with John Abbes Garcia, head of the Dominican Intelligence services to whom he recommended to send agents to recruit hostile elements in the ranks of the victorious Revolution. He did not say that the US government already had William Alexander Morgan Ruderth, an American citizen and CIA agent, who had infiltrated the Second Front in the Escambray, a man they had promoted to the rank of Commander and who was one of the main chiefs there.
The development of these events, which make for a fascinating story, can be found in the books of senior Cuban Intelligence and Security officers, in the testimonies of leaders of military units of the Rebel Army who were directly involved, in autobiographies, official statements made in those days and reports by national and foreign journalists, all of whom it would be impossible to mention in this Reflection.
There is another book in the process of publication written by a comrade who joined the Militias when he was 17, and who for his good conduct and sharp mind was then transferred to the Prime Minister’s and Commander in Chief’s security detail where he studied to become a stenographer, then took notes of the conversations and collected the testimony of hundreds of participants in the events he narrates. This chapter of the history of our Revolution has yet to be recounted.
As is understood, the top revolutionary leaders were constantly informed of the news about the enemy’s plans. We then conceived the idea of dealing the Yankee’s, Batista’s and Trujillo’s counterrevolution a hard blow.
When the weapons sent by sea from Florida to carry out the first actions and the chiefs and plotters were all under strict control, we simulated a successful counterrevolution in the mountainous Escambray zone, and in Trinidad, which had an airstrip. We then proceeded to isolate the municipality of that small and friendly town where revolutionary political work was intensified.
Trujillo was full of enthusiasm. A company of our soldiers disguised as peasants shouted at the airstrip: "Long live Trujillo! Down with Fidel!" which was reported to headquarters in the Dominican Republic. They had dropped plenty of ammunitions from planes. Everything was unfolding according to plan.
On August 13th, a plane came in with a special envoy from Trujillo. It was Luis del Pozo Jimenez, the son of a former mayor and Batista follower in the capital and a prominent figure with the regime. He pointed out on a map the positions that would be bombed by the Dominican Air Force and inquired about the number of legionnaires necessary in the first stage.
Another notable envoy came with him. It was Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez who, as we have already indicated, had traveled with his father and Batista as they escaped to the Dominican Republic that January 1st. He was accompanied by several mercenary leaders who would stay behind. The plane had to go back. Its crew was the same that had carried Batista when he ran away.
I was in the proximity of the airstrip with Camilo Cienfuegos and other military chiefs. The head of the Cuban military personnel who had to unload the weapons and communication equipment had understood that they should arrest the aircraft crew. At this point, a copilot realized that something was wrong shot on them and a shootout ensued. Trujillo’s envoys and the other mercenary chiefs were then arrested. There were casualties.
That same night I visited the wounded from both sides. We couldn’t go ahead with the plan. Up until then, communications between Trujillo and the counterrevolution in the Escambray had taken place through short wave. Trujillos’s official radio station broadcast triumphant military reports similar to those we would hear from Radio Swan and Miami in the days of Giron. We never used Cuba’s public stations to spread false official reports.
It would have been possible to continue with the game even after the plane had been seized and Luis del Pozo Jimenez and Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez were arrested. We could have faked a mechanic failure of the plane that should have returned there, but that would have misled and confused our people, which were by then restless over the news about the alleged counterrevolutionary victories in Escambray publicly spread from Trujillo City.
That August 13, 1959 was my 33rd birthday. I was in my prime, physically and mentally strong.
It was a major revolutionary victory, but at the same time a signal about the times that would come and a sad gift from Rafael Leonidas Trujillo on my anniversary. Twenty months later we would be fighting at Giron; there would be violence and bloodshed in the Escambray, by the sea shore, in towns and all over the country. It was the counterrevolution organized by the United States.
In that country they would have executed Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez and Luis del Pozo Jimenez, as mercenaries in the service of an enemy power. The Revolutionary Courts sentenced them to prison, and they were not mistreated. What was the final destiny of Martin Perez? He migrated to the United States, legally, and he is today a standard bearer of the Cuban American terrorist Mafia which supports Republican candidate McCain.
A distinguished Canadian journalist and researcher, Jean-Guy Allard, describes the terrorist life of Roberto Martin Perez Rodriguez as follows:
"…in fact, since early in his life, ‘Macho’ (his nickname) Martin Perez joined the Batista police and, for his special merits, that is, his beating of the prisoners in the last months of the bloody regime, he earned the rank of Sergeant.
"Both, the father and son were so close to Batista that, on January 1st, 1959, instead of running away to Miami, they followed the dictator to his sanctuary in the Dominican Republic.
"…released on May 29, 1987…in 1989 he joined the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) established by the CIA under Ronald Reagan.
"He would very soon be leading the paramilitary committee created by this organization which ensures the financing, among others, of the terrorist group Alpha 66 and other extremist groups acting against Cuba.
"…Martin Perez Rodriguez took part in the arrangement of a series of failed attempts on the life the President of Cuba during various Ibero American Summits.
"In 1994, on the occasion of Fidel’s attendance to the 4th Summit, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia… he purchased a 50 mm Barret gun and explosives which were transferred to Colombia from Miami…by plane!
"…he plotted with Jimenez Escobedo and Eugenio LLameras with a view to the 5th Ibero American Summit in 1995. That year, he revived the same plan for the Non Aligned Movement Summit, also in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
"In 1997, at Margarita Island, Venezuela, on the occasion of the 7th Ibero American Summit of Heads of Sate and Government, Posada mounted another conspiracy with direct support from Martin Perez Rodriguez and other leaders of CANF…"
"…he signed the Declaration of support for terrorism against Cuba published by the Foundation on August 11th…Roberto Martin Perez, Feliciano Foyo and Horacio Garcia are some of the people Posada publicly named as the ‘financiers’ of his terrorist actions during his interview with the New York Times in 1997.
"…he sponsored in Miami an exhibition of paintings by [Orlando] Bosch and Posada [Carriles], the two masterminds of the sabotage against the Cuban civilian plane, in 1976, where 73 people were killed.
"In 1998, the great advocate of the ‘political prisoner’ carried out one of his dirtiest deeds: with other Miami Mafia ringleaders…he led the new FBI chief, the very corruptible Hector Pesquera, to the arrest of five Cubans who had infiltrated the ranks of the terrorist organizations.
"…his unfailing friendship with Guillermo Novo Sampol, the murderer of Chilean leader Orlando Letelier is well known…
"The Republican candidate should know that his 73-year-old protégé was the first to assert that on the day of his longed for victory over the Cuban Revolution he would drive a bulldozer from the Cabo San Antonio to the Punta de Maisi crushing the island population guilty of any links with the Revolution.
"…on another occasion, asked about the risk of killing innocents in an attempt on Cuban leaders he said that he didn’t care if ‘the Pope died’."
The historical truth tells us that John McCain’s father commandeered the amphibious attack, the invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965 against the nationalist forces led by Francisco Caamaño, another great hero of that nation whom I knew very well and who always had confidence in Cuba.
I dedicate this Reflection on historical events to our dear journalists, since it coincides with the 8th Congress of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC, by its Spanish acronym), whom I consider like family. How I would have liked to study the techniques of their trade!
The UPEC has been very generous in publishing a book under the title Fidel, the journalist, which will be presented tomorrow afternoon. They sent me a copy with several articles published in clandestine or legal newspapers over five decades ago, with a prologue by Guillermo Cabrera Alvarez and the selection, introduction and notes by Ana Nuñez Machin.
I gave Guillermo Cabrera the nickname of "the genius" since I first met him. It was the impression I received from that great man who unfortunately passed away last year. He had had a heart surgery some time ago at the prestigious Cardiovascular Center established by our Revolution in Santa Clara City.
I reread some of the articles published in Alerta, Bohemia and La Calle, and I relived those years.
I wrote those articles when I felt the need to convey certain ideas. I did it out of pure revolutionary instinct. I always applied the principle that words should be simple and the concepts understandable to the masses. Today I have more experience, but I’m not as strong; it’s harder for me to do it. Our people’s educational level is higher with the Revolution, thus the task is more difficult.
From the revolutionary point of view, discrepancies are not important; it is the honesty of the opinion that counts. And, it is from the contradictions that the truth will emerge. Perhaps, it would be worthwhile some other time to make an effort to make some observations on this issue.
Yesterday, an important event took place, which will be an issue the following days. This is the release of Ingrid Betancourt and a group of people held by the FARC, that is, the Revolutionary Armed Forces from Colombia.
On January 10th this year, our ambassador to Venezuela, German Sanchez, following a request of the Venezuelan and Colombian governments, took part in the release of Clara Rojas to the International Red Cross. She had been a candidate to vice President of Colombia when Ingrid Betancourt was running for President and was kidnapped on February 23, 2002. Consuelo Gonzalez, a member of the House of Representatives, kidnapped on September 10, 2001, was released with her.
An era of peace was opening for Colombia. This is a process Cuba has been supporting for over two decades, as it is most convenient for the unity and peace of the peoples of our America, using new ways in the special and complex circumstances prevailing after the demise of the USSR in the early 1990s --which I wont try to analyze here-- very different from those existing in Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s of the 20th century.
The bombing of a camp in Ecuadorian soil in the early hours of March 1st, --while Colombian guerrillas and young visitors from different nationalities were sleeping-- using Yankee technology; the occupation of the territory, the coup de grace on the wounded and the kidnapping of corpses as part of the terrorist plan from the United States government was repudiated the world over.
A Rio Group meeting was then held in the Dominican Republic on March 7th. There the events were strongly condemned while the US administration applauded.
Manuel Marulanda, a peasant and communist militant, the main leader of that guerrilla founded almost half a century ago was still alive. He passed away on the 26th of that same month.
Ingrid Betancourt, feeble and sick, as well as other captives with a serious health condition could hardly resist any longer.
Out of a basically humanist sentiment, we rejoiced at the news that Ingrid Betancourt, three American citizens and other captives had been released. The civilians should have never been kidnapped neither should the militaries have been kept prisoners in the conditions of the jungle. These were objectively cruel actions. No revolutionary purpose could justify it. The time will come when the subjective factors should be analyzed in depth.
We won our revolutionary war in Cuba by immediately releasing every prisoner absolutely unconditionally. The soldiers and officers captured in battle were released to the International Red Cross; we only kept their weapons. No soldier will ever surrender if he thinks he will be killed or subjected to cruel treatment.
We are watching with concern how the imperialists try to capitalize on what happened in Colombia in order to hide and justify their heinous crimes of genocide against other peoples. They want to deflect international attention from their interventionist plans in Venezuela and Bolivia and from the presence of the 4th Fleet in support of the political line that intends to obliterate the independence of the countries located south of the United States while taking possession of their natural resources.
These should be illustrative examples for all of our journalists. In our times, truth is navigating rough seas, where the mass media are in the hands of those threatening human survival with their immense economic, technologic and military resources. That’s the challenge faced by the Cuban journalists!
Fidel Castro Ruz
July 3, 2008
4:26 p.m.
Salvador Allende: His Example Lives On
HE was born one hundred years ago in Valparaiso, in southern Chile, on June 26, 1908. His father, a middle-class lawyer and notary, was a member of Chile’s Radical Party. When I was born, Allende was already 18 years old. He was pursuing secondary studies in high school in his native city.
In his senior years, an old Italian anarchist, Juan Demarchi, introduced him to the works of Marx.
He graduated with top grades. He liked and practiced sports. He enlisted for military service voluntarily, joining the Cuirassiers of Viña del Mar Regiment. He asked to be transferred to the Lancers Regiment of Tacna, a Chilean enclave in the dry and semi-deserted north, a region later returned to Peru. He completed his service as an Army reserve officer. By then, he was already a man of socialist and Marxist ideas. He was not a weak or characterless young man. It was as though he sensed that he would one day fight to the death in defense of the convictions that were already taking shape in his mind.
He decided to study for the noble profession of medicine at the University of Chile. He organized meetings with a group of students who met regularly to read and discuss Marxist literature. He founded the Avance Group in 1929. He was elected vice president of the Federation of Chilean Students in 1930 and actively participated in the struggle against the Carlos Ibáñez dictatorship.
The Great Depression had already unleashed in the United States, following the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In Cuba, the struggle against Machado's dictatorship was underway. Mella had been murdered. Cuban workers and students faced repression. Communists, led by Martínez Villena, organized a general strike. "We need a charge to do away with scoundrels, to complete the work of revolutions (...)", Villena had written in a vibrant poem. Guiteras, a man of profound anti-imperialist sentiments, attempted to overthrow the dictatorship through an armed insurrection. Machado, who was unable to contain the nationwide upheaval, was overthrown and there ensued a revolution which the United States managed to crush, in a matter of months, with kid gloves and iron fist, securing absolute control of the island until 1959.
In a country where imperialist domination was brutally exercised over its workers, culture and natural resources, Salvador Allende remained true to his ideals in a struggle where he showed an unwavering revolutionary conduct.
In 1933, he graduated as a medical doctor. He took part in the founding of Chile's Socialist Party. By 1935, he was already a leader at the Chilean Medical Association. He was imprisoned for nearly half a year. He impelled efforts to create a Popular Front and was elected sub-secretary general of the Socialist Party in 1936.
In September 1939, he was appointed head of the Department of Health of the Popular Front government. He published a book on social medicine. He organized the first Housing Fair. In 1941, he participated in the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in the United States. In 1942, he became Secretary General of Chile's Socialist Party. In 1947, he voted in the Senate against the Permanent Defense of Democracy Law, also known as the "Cursed Law", due to its repressive nature. In 1949, he was promoted to President of Chile's Medical School.
In 1952, the Popular Front put him forth as presidential candidate. He was then 44 years old. He was not elected. He presented the Senate with a draft law for the nationalization of the copper industry. In 1954, he traveled to France, Italy, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
Four years later, in 1958, he was proclaimed candidate to the presidency of the republic by the Popular Action Front, made up of the Popular Socialist Union Party, Chile's Socialist Party and the Communist Party. He lost the election to the conservative Jorge Alessandri.
In 1959, he attended the inauguration ceremony of Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt, who until then had been considered a leftist revolutionary figure.
That same year, he traveled to Havana and met with Che and me. In 1960, he gave his support to Chile’s coal miners, who went on strike for more than three months.
In 1961, he and Che denounced the demagogic nature of the Alliance for Progress at an OAS meeting held in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Appointed candidate to the presidency once again, he was defeated in 1964 by Eduardo Frei Montalva, a Christian Democrat who enjoyed the full support of the dominant classes and who, according to declassified US Senate documents, received campaign money from the CIA. During his time in office, imperialism attempted to craft what came to be known as the "Revolution in Liberty", an ideological response to the Cuban revolution. What it engendered were the foundations of the fascist dictatorship. At that election, however, Allende had secured more than one million votes.
In 1966, he headed the delegation that attended the Tri-Continental Conference of Havana. He visited the Soviet Union for the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution. The following year, in 1968, he visited the Democratic Republic of Korea and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, where he had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with that country’s extraordinary leader, Ho Chi Min. His itinerary included Cambodia and Laos, at a time when revolutionary sentiments were at their most effervescent.
Following Che’s death, he personally accompanied three Cuban members of the Bolivia guerrilla to Tahiti, men who had survived the Heroic Guerrilla and were already in Chilean territory.
The Popular Unity Party, --a political coalition made up of communists, socialists, radicals, the MAPU, PADENA and Independent Popular Action parties-- proclaimed him its candidate on January 22, 1970. On September 4 of that year, he won the elections.
Allende is a truly classical example of the peaceful struggle for the establishment of socialism.
The US administration, headed by Richard Nixon, went immediately into action following this electoral triumph. The Chilean Army’s Commander in Chief, General René Schneider, was the victim of an assassination plot on October 22 and died three days later. He had not kowtow to the imperialist demand that he lead a coup d’état. The attempt to keep the Popular Unity Party out of office had failed.
Allende legally took office on November 3, 1970 in a wholly dignified manner. From office, he began his heroic battle for change, and against fascism. He was already 62 years old. I had the honor of having fought next to him against imperialism for 14 years, from the time of the triumph of the Cuban revolution.
At the municipal elections of March 1971, the Popular Unity Party secured an absolute majority of votes (50.86 percent). On July 11, President Allende promulgated the Copper Nationalization Law, an idea he had presented before the Senate 19 years before. It was unanimously passed by Congress. No-one dared oppose it.
In 1972, before the UN General Assembly, Allende denounced the international aggression of which his country was victim. He received a standing ovation which lasted several minutes. That same year, he visited the Soviet Union, Mexico, Colombia and Cuba.
In 1973, at the March parliamentary elections, the Popular Unity Party obtained 45 percent of the vote and expanded its parliamentary representation.
The measures impelled by the Yankees in the two Houses to have the president dismissed met with failure. Imperialism and the Right intensified their all-out war against the Popular Unity government and unleashed acts of terrorism around the country.
I wrote Allende six confidential letters —I handwrote them in small print using a fine-point pen—between 1971 and 1973. In them, I took up issues of interest with the utmost discretion.
In May 21, I wrote him:
“(…) We’re amazed at your extraordinary efforts and the limitless energies you've poured into maintaining and consolidating your victory.
“Here, we can appreciate that the people are gaining ground, in spite of the difficult and complex mission they shoulder.
“The April 4 elections were a splendid and encouraging victory.
“Your courage and resolve, your mental and physical energy and ability to carry the revolutionary process forward, have been of the essence.
"Great and different challenges are surely in store for you, and you must face these in conditions which are not precisely ideal, but a just policy, with the support of the people and applied with determination, cannot be defeated (...)"
On September 11, 1971, I wrote:
“The carrier will travel to discuss the details of the visit with you.
“Initially, considering that a direct flight in a Cubana airliner is possible, we deemed it convenient to travel to Arica and to begin the tour at the north. Two things then come up: the interest you and Velazco Alvarado have expressed in a potential contact during my trip there; the possibility of using a Soviet IL-62 plane with greater capacity. If we opted for this, this would allow us to travel directly to Santiago by air.
“I am including an itinerary for the tour and activities. You may add, remove or introduce whatever modifications you deem appropriate.
“I have focused exclusively on what might prove of political interest and have not concerned myself much about the pace or intensity of the work, but we await your opinions and considerations on absolutely everything.
“We were very pleased with the extraordinary success you had in your trip to Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. When will we, in Cuba, have the opportunity to share in the heartfelt emotion and the warmth with which Ecuadorians, Colombians and Peruvians welcomed you?"
During that trip, whose itinerary I had conveyed to President Allende, my life was miraculously spared. I walked dozens of miles before an immense crowd, standing by the side of the road. The Central Intelligence Agency had organized three actions to ensure my assassination during the trip. At an interview for the press which had been previously coordinated, Cuban mercenaries, who had entered Chile with Venezuelan passports had a camera, supplied by a Venezuelan television broadcaster, equipped with automatic weapons. Ultimately, they were not brave enough, they who had only to pull the trigger at any point during the lengthy interview, while the cameras were on me. They did not want to risk death. What's more, they had chased me down all around Chile, where they had not been able to have me as close and vulnerable as at that moment. I was to learn of the details of the cowardly action only years later. US Special Services had gone further than what we had imagined.
On February 4, 1972, I wrote Salvador:
“The greatest care was put into receiving the military delegation here. The Revolutionary Armed Forces devoted practically all of their time during those days to look after it. The gatherings were cordial and fraternal. The program was intense and varied. My impression is that the trip has been positive and useful, that it is possible and convenient to continue organizing such exchanges.
“I spoke with Ariel about the idea of your trip. I can understand perfectly well that the intense work ahead of you and the tone of the political struggle in recent weeks have not allowed you to schedule the trip for the approximate date we mentioned on that occasion. It is clear we had not taken these eventualities into account. That day, on the eve of my return to Cuba, when we dined in your house in the early morning hours, having little time and in the haste of the moment, it was reassuring for me to think that we would again meet in Cuba, where we would have the opportunity to converse at length. Nevertheless, I still harbor the hope that you can consider scheduling your visit for some time before May. I mention this month because, mid-May, at the latest, I must make a trip, which can no longer be postponed, to Algiers, Guinea, Bulgaria, other countries and the Soviet Union. This long tour will demand considerable time.
“I am immensely thankful for your impressions on the situation there. Here, more familiarized with, interested in and very much moved by the process Chile is experiencing each day, we are following the news that reach us very attentively. Today, we can better understand the affection and passion that the Cuban revolution must have inspired in others at the beginning. You could say we are re-living our own experience, from the outside.
“In your letter, I can appreciate the magnificent state of mind, serenity and courage with which you are determined to confront the challenges ahead. And that is of the essence in any revolutionary process, particularly one undertaken in the highly complex and difficult conditions of a country like Chile. I took away with me a very strong impression of the moral, cultural and human virtues of the Chilean people and of its notable patriotic and revolutionary sentiment. You have the singular privilege of being its guide at this decisive point in the history of Chile and America, the culmination of an entire life devoted to the struggle, as you said at the stadium, devoted to the cause of the revolution and socialism. There are no obstacles that cannot be surmounted. Someone once said that, in a revolution, one moves forward 'with audacity, audacity and more audacity’. I am convinced of the profound truth of that axiom."
I wrote President Allende again on September 6, 1972:
“I sent you a message on different matters with Beatriz. After she left and, in response to the news that reached us all last week, we decided to send comrade Osmany to reiterate our willingness to help in any way, and so that you can convey to us, through him, your impression of the situation and your ideas about the scheduled trip to this and other countries. The pretext for Osmany's trip will be the inspection of the Cuban embassy, but this will not be publicly announced. We want his stay there to be as brief and discrete as possible.
“Work is already underway with respect to the points you made through Beatriz (...)
“Though we are conscious of the current difficulties faced by Chile’s revolutionary process, we are confident you will find the way to overcome these.
“You can rely on our full cooperation. A fraternal and revolutionary salute from all of us goes out to you."
On June 30, 1973, we sent President Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity parties an official invitation to participate at the ceremonies organized to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Garrison.
In another letter, I wrote him:
“Salvador:
“The above is the official, formal invitation to the ceremonies in commemoration of the 20th anniversary. It would be formidable if you could hop over to Cuba on that date. You can imagine what this would mean in terms of joy, satisfaction and honor for Cubans. I know that this depends, more than anything, on your work and the situation there. We leave it, then, to your consideration.
“We are still under the impact of the great revolutionary victory of the 29th and your brilliant, personal role in the events. It is natural for many difficulties and obstacles to subsist, but I am certain that this first trial, where you have come out successful, will encourage you and consolidate the people's confidence in you. These events have been attached special importance internationally and are considered a great triumph.
“With actions like those of the 29th, the Chilean revolution shall come out victorious of any test, no matter how hard. Again, Cuba is at your side and you can rely on your faithful friends of always."
On July 29, 1973, I wrote him my last letter:
“Dear Salvador:
“With the pretext of discussing matters concerning the meeting of Non-Aligned Countries with you, Carlos and Piñeiro will travel to Chile. The real objective is for you to inform them on the situation and to offer you, as always, the assurance of our willingness to help you face whatever difficulties and dangers stand in the way of the revolutionary process. Their stay will be very brief, as they have much pending work here and, not without sacrificing part of their time, we decided they should make the trip.
“I see that you are now facing the delicate question of a dialogue with the Christian Democrats, in the midst of serious developments, such as the brutal murder of your naval aide-de-camp and the new truck-drivers strike. I can therefore imagine the great tension and your interest in winning time, improving the balance of forces in case the struggle should break out and, if possible, find a path that will allow you to carry the revolutionary process forward without a civil war, as well as assuming your historical responsibility for what could happen. Those are commendable aims. But, should the other side, whose real intentions we are not in a position to assess from here, pursue a treacherous and irresponsible policy and demand a price that the Popular Unity Party and the revolution cannot pay, something which, in fact, is quite likely, do not for a minute forget the formidable strength of Chile's working class and the vigorous support they've shown you at all difficult moments. They can, at your call, defend the revolution in a moment of danger, paralyze the coup officers, impose their conditions on them and decide, once and for all, if it were necessary, Chile's fate. The enemy must be conscious of this fact; they must be on guard and ready to go into action. Its strength and combativeness can tilt the balance of forces in your favor, even when other conditions are not as favorable.
“Your decision to defend the process steadily and honor, at the cost of your own life, which everyone knows you are willing to sacrifice, shall bring all forces capable of fighting and all men and women of honor in Chile to your side. Your courage, serenity and audacity at this historical time for your country and, above all, your firm, resolved and heroic leadership, are crucial in this situation.
“Let Carlos and Manuel know how your loyal Cuban friends can help.
“Let me remind you of Cuba’s affection and unqualified confidence in you.”
I wrote this a month and a half before the coup. The emissaries were Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and Manuel Piñeiro.
Pinochet had talked with Carlos Rafael. He had feigned the kind of loyalty and firmness sworn by Carlos Prats, Army Commander in Chief for a time under the Popular Unity government, a dignified military man, who the oligarchy and imperialism brought to a total crisis, obliging him to resign, later murdered in Argentina by two DINA henchmen, following the fascist coup of 1973.
I had been mistrustful of Pinochet from the time I read the books on geopolitics he gave me as a gift during my visit to Chile and had the opportunity to observe his style up close, his declarations and the methods, as Army Chief, that he used when the provocations from the Right obliged President Allende to decree a state of siege in Santiago de Chile. I recalled what Marx had forewarned in the 18th Brumaire.
Many Army chiefs in the different regions and their general staffs wanted to converse with me wherever I was and showed considerable interest in issues related to our war of liberation and the experience of the Missile Crisis in 1962. The meetings, which lasted hours, would be held in the early morning, which was the only time I had available. I would agree to these to help Allende, to familiarize them with the idea that socialism was not an enemy of armed institutions. Pinochet, as a military leader, was not an exception. Allende considered those meetings useful.
On September 11, 1973, he died heroically, defending the Presidential Palace of La Moneda. He fought like a tiger until his last breath.
The revolutionaries who stood up to the fascist onslaught there would later recount incredible stories about those last moments. Their versions didn’t always agree, for they fought at different parts of the Palace. Also, some of their closest collaborators perished or were later assassinated during the intense and unequal battle.
The difference in the testimonies consisted in the fact that some affirmed he had fired his last shots at himself to avoid being taken prisoner and others that his death was brought about by enemy fire. The Palace was up in flames as a result of an attack perpetrated by tanks and planes which sought to consummate a coup they had considered an easy task that would meet with no resistance. There is no contradiction whatsoever between these two ways of answering the call of duty. In our wars of independence, there is more than one example of illustrious combatants who, when defeat was imminent, took their own lives to avoid falling prisoners.
Much remains to be said about what we were willing to do for Allende. Some have written about this, but it is not the aim of these lines.
Allende was born one hundred years ago today. His example shall live on.
Fidel Castro Ruz
June 26, 2008
6:34 p.m.
In his senior years, an old Italian anarchist, Juan Demarchi, introduced him to the works of Marx.
He graduated with top grades. He liked and practiced sports. He enlisted for military service voluntarily, joining the Cuirassiers of Viña del Mar Regiment. He asked to be transferred to the Lancers Regiment of Tacna, a Chilean enclave in the dry and semi-deserted north, a region later returned to Peru. He completed his service as an Army reserve officer. By then, he was already a man of socialist and Marxist ideas. He was not a weak or characterless young man. It was as though he sensed that he would one day fight to the death in defense of the convictions that were already taking shape in his mind.
He decided to study for the noble profession of medicine at the University of Chile. He organized meetings with a group of students who met regularly to read and discuss Marxist literature. He founded the Avance Group in 1929. He was elected vice president of the Federation of Chilean Students in 1930 and actively participated in the struggle against the Carlos Ibáñez dictatorship.
The Great Depression had already unleashed in the United States, following the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In Cuba, the struggle against Machado's dictatorship was underway. Mella had been murdered. Cuban workers and students faced repression. Communists, led by Martínez Villena, organized a general strike. "We need a charge to do away with scoundrels, to complete the work of revolutions (...)", Villena had written in a vibrant poem. Guiteras, a man of profound anti-imperialist sentiments, attempted to overthrow the dictatorship through an armed insurrection. Machado, who was unable to contain the nationwide upheaval, was overthrown and there ensued a revolution which the United States managed to crush, in a matter of months, with kid gloves and iron fist, securing absolute control of the island until 1959.
In a country where imperialist domination was brutally exercised over its workers, culture and natural resources, Salvador Allende remained true to his ideals in a struggle where he showed an unwavering revolutionary conduct.
In 1933, he graduated as a medical doctor. He took part in the founding of Chile's Socialist Party. By 1935, he was already a leader at the Chilean Medical Association. He was imprisoned for nearly half a year. He impelled efforts to create a Popular Front and was elected sub-secretary general of the Socialist Party in 1936.
In September 1939, he was appointed head of the Department of Health of the Popular Front government. He published a book on social medicine. He organized the first Housing Fair. In 1941, he participated in the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in the United States. In 1942, he became Secretary General of Chile's Socialist Party. In 1947, he voted in the Senate against the Permanent Defense of Democracy Law, also known as the "Cursed Law", due to its repressive nature. In 1949, he was promoted to President of Chile's Medical School.
In 1952, the Popular Front put him forth as presidential candidate. He was then 44 years old. He was not elected. He presented the Senate with a draft law for the nationalization of the copper industry. In 1954, he traveled to France, Italy, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
Four years later, in 1958, he was proclaimed candidate to the presidency of the republic by the Popular Action Front, made up of the Popular Socialist Union Party, Chile's Socialist Party and the Communist Party. He lost the election to the conservative Jorge Alessandri.
In 1959, he attended the inauguration ceremony of Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt, who until then had been considered a leftist revolutionary figure.
That same year, he traveled to Havana and met with Che and me. In 1960, he gave his support to Chile’s coal miners, who went on strike for more than three months.
In 1961, he and Che denounced the demagogic nature of the Alliance for Progress at an OAS meeting held in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Appointed candidate to the presidency once again, he was defeated in 1964 by Eduardo Frei Montalva, a Christian Democrat who enjoyed the full support of the dominant classes and who, according to declassified US Senate documents, received campaign money from the CIA. During his time in office, imperialism attempted to craft what came to be known as the "Revolution in Liberty", an ideological response to the Cuban revolution. What it engendered were the foundations of the fascist dictatorship. At that election, however, Allende had secured more than one million votes.
In 1966, he headed the delegation that attended the Tri-Continental Conference of Havana. He visited the Soviet Union for the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution. The following year, in 1968, he visited the Democratic Republic of Korea and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, where he had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with that country’s extraordinary leader, Ho Chi Min. His itinerary included Cambodia and Laos, at a time when revolutionary sentiments were at their most effervescent.
Following Che’s death, he personally accompanied three Cuban members of the Bolivia guerrilla to Tahiti, men who had survived the Heroic Guerrilla and were already in Chilean territory.
The Popular Unity Party, --a political coalition made up of communists, socialists, radicals, the MAPU, PADENA and Independent Popular Action parties-- proclaimed him its candidate on January 22, 1970. On September 4 of that year, he won the elections.
Allende is a truly classical example of the peaceful struggle for the establishment of socialism.
The US administration, headed by Richard Nixon, went immediately into action following this electoral triumph. The Chilean Army’s Commander in Chief, General René Schneider, was the victim of an assassination plot on October 22 and died three days later. He had not kowtow to the imperialist demand that he lead a coup d’état. The attempt to keep the Popular Unity Party out of office had failed.
Allende legally took office on November 3, 1970 in a wholly dignified manner. From office, he began his heroic battle for change, and against fascism. He was already 62 years old. I had the honor of having fought next to him against imperialism for 14 years, from the time of the triumph of the Cuban revolution.
At the municipal elections of March 1971, the Popular Unity Party secured an absolute majority of votes (50.86 percent). On July 11, President Allende promulgated the Copper Nationalization Law, an idea he had presented before the Senate 19 years before. It was unanimously passed by Congress. No-one dared oppose it.
In 1972, before the UN General Assembly, Allende denounced the international aggression of which his country was victim. He received a standing ovation which lasted several minutes. That same year, he visited the Soviet Union, Mexico, Colombia and Cuba.
In 1973, at the March parliamentary elections, the Popular Unity Party obtained 45 percent of the vote and expanded its parliamentary representation.
The measures impelled by the Yankees in the two Houses to have the president dismissed met with failure. Imperialism and the Right intensified their all-out war against the Popular Unity government and unleashed acts of terrorism around the country.
I wrote Allende six confidential letters —I handwrote them in small print using a fine-point pen—between 1971 and 1973. In them, I took up issues of interest with the utmost discretion.
In May 21, I wrote him:
“(…) We’re amazed at your extraordinary efforts and the limitless energies you've poured into maintaining and consolidating your victory.
“Here, we can appreciate that the people are gaining ground, in spite of the difficult and complex mission they shoulder.
“The April 4 elections were a splendid and encouraging victory.
“Your courage and resolve, your mental and physical energy and ability to carry the revolutionary process forward, have been of the essence.
"Great and different challenges are surely in store for you, and you must face these in conditions which are not precisely ideal, but a just policy, with the support of the people and applied with determination, cannot be defeated (...)"
On September 11, 1971, I wrote:
“The carrier will travel to discuss the details of the visit with you.
“Initially, considering that a direct flight in a Cubana airliner is possible, we deemed it convenient to travel to Arica and to begin the tour at the north. Two things then come up: the interest you and Velazco Alvarado have expressed in a potential contact during my trip there; the possibility of using a Soviet IL-62 plane with greater capacity. If we opted for this, this would allow us to travel directly to Santiago by air.
“I am including an itinerary for the tour and activities. You may add, remove or introduce whatever modifications you deem appropriate.
“I have focused exclusively on what might prove of political interest and have not concerned myself much about the pace or intensity of the work, but we await your opinions and considerations on absolutely everything.
“We were very pleased with the extraordinary success you had in your trip to Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. When will we, in Cuba, have the opportunity to share in the heartfelt emotion and the warmth with which Ecuadorians, Colombians and Peruvians welcomed you?"
During that trip, whose itinerary I had conveyed to President Allende, my life was miraculously spared. I walked dozens of miles before an immense crowd, standing by the side of the road. The Central Intelligence Agency had organized three actions to ensure my assassination during the trip. At an interview for the press which had been previously coordinated, Cuban mercenaries, who had entered Chile with Venezuelan passports had a camera, supplied by a Venezuelan television broadcaster, equipped with automatic weapons. Ultimately, they were not brave enough, they who had only to pull the trigger at any point during the lengthy interview, while the cameras were on me. They did not want to risk death. What's more, they had chased me down all around Chile, where they had not been able to have me as close and vulnerable as at that moment. I was to learn of the details of the cowardly action only years later. US Special Services had gone further than what we had imagined.
On February 4, 1972, I wrote Salvador:
“The greatest care was put into receiving the military delegation here. The Revolutionary Armed Forces devoted practically all of their time during those days to look after it. The gatherings were cordial and fraternal. The program was intense and varied. My impression is that the trip has been positive and useful, that it is possible and convenient to continue organizing such exchanges.
“I spoke with Ariel about the idea of your trip. I can understand perfectly well that the intense work ahead of you and the tone of the political struggle in recent weeks have not allowed you to schedule the trip for the approximate date we mentioned on that occasion. It is clear we had not taken these eventualities into account. That day, on the eve of my return to Cuba, when we dined in your house in the early morning hours, having little time and in the haste of the moment, it was reassuring for me to think that we would again meet in Cuba, where we would have the opportunity to converse at length. Nevertheless, I still harbor the hope that you can consider scheduling your visit for some time before May. I mention this month because, mid-May, at the latest, I must make a trip, which can no longer be postponed, to Algiers, Guinea, Bulgaria, other countries and the Soviet Union. This long tour will demand considerable time.
“I am immensely thankful for your impressions on the situation there. Here, more familiarized with, interested in and very much moved by the process Chile is experiencing each day, we are following the news that reach us very attentively. Today, we can better understand the affection and passion that the Cuban revolution must have inspired in others at the beginning. You could say we are re-living our own experience, from the outside.
“In your letter, I can appreciate the magnificent state of mind, serenity and courage with which you are determined to confront the challenges ahead. And that is of the essence in any revolutionary process, particularly one undertaken in the highly complex and difficult conditions of a country like Chile. I took away with me a very strong impression of the moral, cultural and human virtues of the Chilean people and of its notable patriotic and revolutionary sentiment. You have the singular privilege of being its guide at this decisive point in the history of Chile and America, the culmination of an entire life devoted to the struggle, as you said at the stadium, devoted to the cause of the revolution and socialism. There are no obstacles that cannot be surmounted. Someone once said that, in a revolution, one moves forward 'with audacity, audacity and more audacity’. I am convinced of the profound truth of that axiom."
I wrote President Allende again on September 6, 1972:
“I sent you a message on different matters with Beatriz. After she left and, in response to the news that reached us all last week, we decided to send comrade Osmany to reiterate our willingness to help in any way, and so that you can convey to us, through him, your impression of the situation and your ideas about the scheduled trip to this and other countries. The pretext for Osmany's trip will be the inspection of the Cuban embassy, but this will not be publicly announced. We want his stay there to be as brief and discrete as possible.
“Work is already underway with respect to the points you made through Beatriz (...)
“Though we are conscious of the current difficulties faced by Chile’s revolutionary process, we are confident you will find the way to overcome these.
“You can rely on our full cooperation. A fraternal and revolutionary salute from all of us goes out to you."
On June 30, 1973, we sent President Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity parties an official invitation to participate at the ceremonies organized to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Garrison.
In another letter, I wrote him:
“Salvador:
“The above is the official, formal invitation to the ceremonies in commemoration of the 20th anniversary. It would be formidable if you could hop over to Cuba on that date. You can imagine what this would mean in terms of joy, satisfaction and honor for Cubans. I know that this depends, more than anything, on your work and the situation there. We leave it, then, to your consideration.
“We are still under the impact of the great revolutionary victory of the 29th and your brilliant, personal role in the events. It is natural for many difficulties and obstacles to subsist, but I am certain that this first trial, where you have come out successful, will encourage you and consolidate the people's confidence in you. These events have been attached special importance internationally and are considered a great triumph.
“With actions like those of the 29th, the Chilean revolution shall come out victorious of any test, no matter how hard. Again, Cuba is at your side and you can rely on your faithful friends of always."
On July 29, 1973, I wrote him my last letter:
“Dear Salvador:
“With the pretext of discussing matters concerning the meeting of Non-Aligned Countries with you, Carlos and Piñeiro will travel to Chile. The real objective is for you to inform them on the situation and to offer you, as always, the assurance of our willingness to help you face whatever difficulties and dangers stand in the way of the revolutionary process. Their stay will be very brief, as they have much pending work here and, not without sacrificing part of their time, we decided they should make the trip.
“I see that you are now facing the delicate question of a dialogue with the Christian Democrats, in the midst of serious developments, such as the brutal murder of your naval aide-de-camp and the new truck-drivers strike. I can therefore imagine the great tension and your interest in winning time, improving the balance of forces in case the struggle should break out and, if possible, find a path that will allow you to carry the revolutionary process forward without a civil war, as well as assuming your historical responsibility for what could happen. Those are commendable aims. But, should the other side, whose real intentions we are not in a position to assess from here, pursue a treacherous and irresponsible policy and demand a price that the Popular Unity Party and the revolution cannot pay, something which, in fact, is quite likely, do not for a minute forget the formidable strength of Chile's working class and the vigorous support they've shown you at all difficult moments. They can, at your call, defend the revolution in a moment of danger, paralyze the coup officers, impose their conditions on them and decide, once and for all, if it were necessary, Chile's fate. The enemy must be conscious of this fact; they must be on guard and ready to go into action. Its strength and combativeness can tilt the balance of forces in your favor, even when other conditions are not as favorable.
“Your decision to defend the process steadily and honor, at the cost of your own life, which everyone knows you are willing to sacrifice, shall bring all forces capable of fighting and all men and women of honor in Chile to your side. Your courage, serenity and audacity at this historical time for your country and, above all, your firm, resolved and heroic leadership, are crucial in this situation.
“Let Carlos and Manuel know how your loyal Cuban friends can help.
“Let me remind you of Cuba’s affection and unqualified confidence in you.”
I wrote this a month and a half before the coup. The emissaries were Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and Manuel Piñeiro.
Pinochet had talked with Carlos Rafael. He had feigned the kind of loyalty and firmness sworn by Carlos Prats, Army Commander in Chief for a time under the Popular Unity government, a dignified military man, who the oligarchy and imperialism brought to a total crisis, obliging him to resign, later murdered in Argentina by two DINA henchmen, following the fascist coup of 1973.
I had been mistrustful of Pinochet from the time I read the books on geopolitics he gave me as a gift during my visit to Chile and had the opportunity to observe his style up close, his declarations and the methods, as Army Chief, that he used when the provocations from the Right obliged President Allende to decree a state of siege in Santiago de Chile. I recalled what Marx had forewarned in the 18th Brumaire.
Many Army chiefs in the different regions and their general staffs wanted to converse with me wherever I was and showed considerable interest in issues related to our war of liberation and the experience of the Missile Crisis in 1962. The meetings, which lasted hours, would be held in the early morning, which was the only time I had available. I would agree to these to help Allende, to familiarize them with the idea that socialism was not an enemy of armed institutions. Pinochet, as a military leader, was not an exception. Allende considered those meetings useful.
On September 11, 1973, he died heroically, defending the Presidential Palace of La Moneda. He fought like a tiger until his last breath.
The revolutionaries who stood up to the fascist onslaught there would later recount incredible stories about those last moments. Their versions didn’t always agree, for they fought at different parts of the Palace. Also, some of their closest collaborators perished or were later assassinated during the intense and unequal battle.
The difference in the testimonies consisted in the fact that some affirmed he had fired his last shots at himself to avoid being taken prisoner and others that his death was brought about by enemy fire. The Palace was up in flames as a result of an attack perpetrated by tanks and planes which sought to consummate a coup they had considered an easy task that would meet with no resistance. There is no contradiction whatsoever between these two ways of answering the call of duty. In our wars of independence, there is more than one example of illustrious combatants who, when defeat was imminent, took their own lives to avoid falling prisoners.
Much remains to be said about what we were willing to do for Allende. Some have written about this, but it is not the aim of these lines.
Allende was born one hundred years ago today. His example shall live on.
Fidel Castro Ruz
June 26, 2008
6:34 p.m.
The United States, Europe and Human Rights
The discredited way in which the European Union suspended its sanctions on Cuba on June 19 has been reported in 16 international press dispatches. It has absolutely no economic effect on our country. On the contrary, the United States' extraterritorial laws and, thus, its economic and financial blockade are still fully in effect.
At my age and given my state of health, one cannot be sure of the time one has left to live. Nevertheless, I want to express my contempt for the immense hypocrisy of that decision. Such hypocrisy is made all the more evident by the brutal European measure to expel illegal immigrants from Latin American countries, some of which have populations which, in their majority, are of European origin. Immigrants are also the fruit of colonial, semi-colonial and capitalist exploitation.
In the name of human rights, Cuba is asked to grant impunity to those who would bind the feet and hands of the homeland and its people and hand them over to imperialism.
Even Mexican authorities have to admit that the Miami-based mob, at the service of the U.S. government, used force to snatch from the hands of an important contingent of migratory agents, or bought, dozens of illegal immigrants who had been arrested in Quintana Roo, including innocent children transported by force across risk-laden seas and mothers obliged to emigrate. Traffickers of human beings, like drug traffickers, who take advantage of the largest and most coveted of the world’s markets, have undermined the authority and moral statute needed by any government to lead the State, spilling Latin American blood everywhere, to say nothing of those who die trying to emigrate by climbing over the humiliating border wall erected over what was once Mexican territory.
The food and energy crises, climate change and inflation are scourging the world's nations. As political helplessness prevails, ignorance and illusions tend to flourish. Not one of these governments, let alone those of the Czech Republic and Sweden, which were firmly opposed to the European Union’s decision, was able to give coherent answers to the questions that have been put on the table.
All the while, in Cuba, the mercenaries and traitors at the empire's service are at their wit’s end and throw up their hands in horror, defending the right to treachery and impunity.
I have many more things to say, but let this suffice for today. It is not my intention to trouble others with these words, but, as long as I am alive, I continue to think about these things.
I shall publish this reflection on the Internet only, today, June 20, 2008.
Fidel Castro
1:55 p.m.
At my age and given my state of health, one cannot be sure of the time one has left to live. Nevertheless, I want to express my contempt for the immense hypocrisy of that decision. Such hypocrisy is made all the more evident by the brutal European measure to expel illegal immigrants from Latin American countries, some of which have populations which, in their majority, are of European origin. Immigrants are also the fruit of colonial, semi-colonial and capitalist exploitation.
In the name of human rights, Cuba is asked to grant impunity to those who would bind the feet and hands of the homeland and its people and hand them over to imperialism.
Even Mexican authorities have to admit that the Miami-based mob, at the service of the U.S. government, used force to snatch from the hands of an important contingent of migratory agents, or bought, dozens of illegal immigrants who had been arrested in Quintana Roo, including innocent children transported by force across risk-laden seas and mothers obliged to emigrate. Traffickers of human beings, like drug traffickers, who take advantage of the largest and most coveted of the world’s markets, have undermined the authority and moral statute needed by any government to lead the State, spilling Latin American blood everywhere, to say nothing of those who die trying to emigrate by climbing over the humiliating border wall erected over what was once Mexican territory.
The food and energy crises, climate change and inflation are scourging the world's nations. As political helplessness prevails, ignorance and illusions tend to flourish. Not one of these governments, let alone those of the Czech Republic and Sweden, which were firmly opposed to the European Union’s decision, was able to give coherent answers to the questions that have been put on the table.
All the while, in Cuba, the mercenaries and traitors at the empire's service are at their wit’s end and throw up their hands in horror, defending the right to treachery and impunity.
I have many more things to say, but let this suffice for today. It is not my intention to trouble others with these words, but, as long as I am alive, I continue to think about these things.
I shall publish this reflection on the Internet only, today, June 20, 2008.
Fidel Castro
1:55 p.m.
Truth and Diatribes
We know that people living in industrialized and wealthy countries spend, on average, 25% of their income on food. Those who live in nations which were condemned to economic underdevelopment by the former devote up to 80% of their income to this end. Many go physically hungry and endure immense social disparities. Unemployment rates are usually two to three times higher; infant mortality rates are even higher, and life expectancy is as little as two-thirds that which is reported in rich countries. This system is simply genocidal.
In the reflection I wrote three days ago, I stated: "Our country has demonstrated that it can stand up to all pressures and help other peoples”. Could Europe affirm the same thing?
A UNESCO report published yesterday, June 20, states that a 2-year study conducted with over 200,000 children from 16 countries places Cuba as Latin America's number one country in terms of third grade mathematics and reading and sixth grade mathematics and science, with over 100 points above the regional average. This is the second time Cuba is thus recognized by UNESCO.
It is reasonable to assume that no country where human rights are systematically violated can reach such high educational levels.
Why has Cuba been blockaded for 50 years?
Why is it the object of slander?
Why is it barred from all access to technical and scientific information?
Why do they seek to take it back to an unsustainable economic and social system which offers no answers whatsoever to humanity's problems?
There is a reason millions of Bolivian, Ecuadorian, Uruguayan, Argentinean, Brazilian, Central American and other Latin American citizens have immigrated to Europe, from which they can now be brutally returned to their countries of origin if they fail to meet the requirements set by the new anti-immigrant laws.
What's worse: figures several times larger of Mexican, Central and South American citizens have emigrated to the United States, crossing borders, walls and seas, without any kind of documentation or any Adjustment Act that privileges them or encourages them to emigrate. Of them, 500 die each year. In addition to this, thousands perish every year in Mexico and Central America, victims of organized crime, in the struggle to control the drug market in the United States, where its highest authorities are unable and unwilling to combat drug use.
Assistant attorney José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos declared that human trafficking is the second most profitable illegal activity in the world. In the case of Cubans, profits are comparable to those of drug-trafficking: "They charge as much as 10,000 dollars per person.”
The money comes from the United States. I don't believe Mexico can become a haven for the trafficking of immigrants, as even US coast guards intercept and return those who are captured at sea.
Mexico is not obliged to accept having a version of the dry-foot wet-foot policy imposed on it.
There is no organized crime in Cuba or any kind of impunity for drug-trafficking. It has combated both efficiently, without resorting to a blood bath. Only hypocrisy explains why the United States hasn't acknowledged this fact.
I did not write an anti-Europe diatribe, I simply wrote the truth. It is not my fault if the truth proves offensive.
To keep yesterday's reflection short, I did not even mention weapons exports, military spending and NATO's military adventures, let alone the secret flights and Europe's complicity in the acts of torture perpetrated by the United States.
I have no knowledge of anyone having been arrested anywhere in the country for breaking the law. That has nothing to do with the reflection which I asked be published exclusively on Cubadebate. Any connection is totally arbitrary. I will make use of this Internet site as I deem appropriate. I shan't try anyone's patience. I don't make a cent doing this, I work for free.
I am not, nor will ever be, the leader of a faction or splinter group. No one has any reason to assume, therefore, that there are inner struggles in the Party. If I write, it is because I continue to struggle, in the name of the convictions I have defended all of my life.
Fidel Castro Ruz
June 21, 2008
1:34 p.m.
In the reflection I wrote three days ago, I stated: "Our country has demonstrated that it can stand up to all pressures and help other peoples”. Could Europe affirm the same thing?
A UNESCO report published yesterday, June 20, states that a 2-year study conducted with over 200,000 children from 16 countries places Cuba as Latin America's number one country in terms of third grade mathematics and reading and sixth grade mathematics and science, with over 100 points above the regional average. This is the second time Cuba is thus recognized by UNESCO.
It is reasonable to assume that no country where human rights are systematically violated can reach such high educational levels.
Why has Cuba been blockaded for 50 years?
Why is it the object of slander?
Why is it barred from all access to technical and scientific information?
Why do they seek to take it back to an unsustainable economic and social system which offers no answers whatsoever to humanity's problems?
There is a reason millions of Bolivian, Ecuadorian, Uruguayan, Argentinean, Brazilian, Central American and other Latin American citizens have immigrated to Europe, from which they can now be brutally returned to their countries of origin if they fail to meet the requirements set by the new anti-immigrant laws.
What's worse: figures several times larger of Mexican, Central and South American citizens have emigrated to the United States, crossing borders, walls and seas, without any kind of documentation or any Adjustment Act that privileges them or encourages them to emigrate. Of them, 500 die each year. In addition to this, thousands perish every year in Mexico and Central America, victims of organized crime, in the struggle to control the drug market in the United States, where its highest authorities are unable and unwilling to combat drug use.
Assistant attorney José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos declared that human trafficking is the second most profitable illegal activity in the world. In the case of Cubans, profits are comparable to those of drug-trafficking: "They charge as much as 10,000 dollars per person.”
The money comes from the United States. I don't believe Mexico can become a haven for the trafficking of immigrants, as even US coast guards intercept and return those who are captured at sea.
Mexico is not obliged to accept having a version of the dry-foot wet-foot policy imposed on it.
There is no organized crime in Cuba or any kind of impunity for drug-trafficking. It has combated both efficiently, without resorting to a blood bath. Only hypocrisy explains why the United States hasn't acknowledged this fact.
I did not write an anti-Europe diatribe, I simply wrote the truth. It is not my fault if the truth proves offensive.
To keep yesterday's reflection short, I did not even mention weapons exports, military spending and NATO's military adventures, let alone the secret flights and Europe's complicity in the acts of torture perpetrated by the United States.
I have no knowledge of anyone having been arrested anywhere in the country for breaking the law. That has nothing to do with the reflection which I asked be published exclusively on Cubadebate. Any connection is totally arbitrary. I will make use of this Internet site as I deem appropriate. I shan't try anyone's patience. I don't make a cent doing this, I work for free.
I am not, nor will ever be, the leader of a faction or splinter group. No one has any reason to assume, therefore, that there are inner struggles in the Party. If I write, it is because I continue to struggle, in the name of the convictions I have defended all of my life.
Fidel Castro Ruz
June 21, 2008
1:34 p.m.
The Elephant and The Ant
IT would seem there's no topic worthy of addressing that would not bore our patient readers, after the “Round Table” program of June 12, which dealt with the new edition of a book published in Bolivia 15 years ago, featuring now a prologue I wrote. During this program, an introduction was also read written at a later date by Evo Morales and a message from the prestigious Argentinean writer Stella Calloni, to be included in an upcoming edition. I had carefully chosen the information I used for that prologue.
A powerful internationalist spirit, which had its roots in the broad contingent of Cuban combatants who participated in the anti-fascist struggle of the Spanish people and made the best traditions of the world worker's movement its own, had developed in Cuba in the first years of the Revolution.
We are not in the habit of publicizing our cooperative efforts with other peoples, but it is at times impossible to prevent the press from mentioning it. Our cooperative efforts stem from profound feelings that have nothing to do with a desire for publicity.
Some ask themselves how it is possible for a small country with scarce resources to carry out tasks of such magnitude in fields as decisive as education and health, without which contemporary society is unthinkable.
Humanity developed the goods and services essential to its existence since establishing its first society, and the latter has in turn developed from the most elementary to the most sophisticated of forms over many thousands of years.
The exploitation of man by man was inseparable from this development, as we all know or ought to know.
The different ways in which this reality has been perceived have always depended on the place each of us occupies within society. For long, exploitation was seen as something natural and the immense majority was never aware of the above relation.
At the very height of capitalist development in England, which was a world leader, next to the United States and other countries in Europe, in a world that was already dominated by colonialism and expansionism, a great thinker and history and economics scholar, Karl Marx, on the basis of the ideas of the most prestigious German philosophers and economists of the time –including Hegel, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, with whom he disagreed– elaborated, wrote and published his ideas on capitalism’s relations of production and exchange in 1859 in a work titled Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In 1867, he continued to spread his ideas with the publication of the first volume of his most important work, a work that made him famous: Capital. Most of the long book, on the basis of Marx’s notes and comments, was edited by Engels, who shared Marx’s ideas and, like a prophet, spread his work after Marx’s death in 1883.
What Marx published constitutes the most serious analysis ever to be written about class society and the exploitation of man by man. Marxism had thus been born, as the foundation of revolutionary parties and movements that proclaimed socialism as their objective, including nearly all social-democratic parties that, when World War I broke out, betrayed the slogan proclaimed by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, first published in 1848: "Workers of the world, unite!”
One of the truths that this great thinker expressed in simple terms was that: “In social production during their lives, men establish certain necessary relations independent of their wills, relations of production which correspond to a given phase of development of their material productive forces. It is not man’s consciousness which determines its being, but on the contrary, it is its social being which determines its consciousness. On reaching a given phase of development, society's material productive forces come into contradiction with existing production relations...From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations become obstacles to the latter and an era of social revolution thus begins...No social formation disappears before its productive forces are fully developed and no new and more advanced production relations emerge before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the old society.”
I could not find better words to more clearly and precisely express these concepts elaborated by Marx, concepts whose essence, with a basic explanation from a teacher, even one of the young Cubans who joined the Union of Young Communists this past Saturday June 14th could understand.
To describe the concrete development of the class struggle, Marx wrote The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, two excellent historical analyses that delight any reader. He was a true genius.
Lenin, a profound continuator of dialectical thought and Marx’s research, wrote two key works: State and Revolution and Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Marx’s ideas, put into practice by Lenin through the October Revolution, were also developed by Mao Zedong and other Third World revolutionary leaders. Without them, the Cuban Revolution would not have taken place in the United States’ backyard.
Had Marxist thought simply limited itself to the idea that “no social formation disappears before its productive forces are fully developed,” the capitalist theoretician Francis Fukuyama would have been right in proclaiming that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of history and ideologies and that all resistance to the capitalist system of production should cease.
When the founder of scientific socialism published his ideas, society’s productive forces were far from fully developed. Technology had not yet yielded deadly weapons of mass destruction capable of exterminating the human species; the aerospatial domain did not yet exist, nor did the unlimited squandering of hydrocarbons and non-renewable fossil fuels; climate change had not yet been detected in a natural world whose potential seemed infinite to humanity, nor had the world food crisis, to be borne by innumerable combustion engines and a population six times larger than that which inhabited the planet on the year Marx was born (then of one billion), made itself known yet.
Cuba's socialist experience takes place at a time when imperial domination has expanded across the globe.
When I speak of consciousness I am not referring to a will capable of changing reality but, on the contrary, to knowledge of objective reality which can determine the path to follow.
Tens of million of people died in the war sparked in the mid-20th century by fascism, an ideology which was new at the time, born in the anti-Marxist bosom of the developed capitalist world Lenin had foretold.
In Cuba, as in other Third World countries, the struggle for national liberation, under the leadership of the middle classes and petite bourgeoisie, and the struggle for socialism that the most advanced sectors of the working class and farmers had been waging over the years, combined and strengthened one another. Ideological and class contradictions also flourished. Objective and subjective factors varied considerably from one process to another.
The United Nations and other international organizations, where many saw the beginning of a new, international consciousness, emerged from the last world war. Those hopes were betrayed.
Fascism, whose instrument Hitler called the National Socialist Party, was re-born, more powerful and threatening than ever.
The empire deploys and keeps aircraft carriers in all of the world's seas, ever ready for military intervention. What does it decide to do in order to compete with Cuba in our hemisphere? To deploy an enormous ship turned into a floating hospital that works ten days in each country. It can assist a number of people daily but it cannot solve a country’s problems. It does not compensate for the brain drain, and it cannot train the specialists who are needed so that real medical services may be offered on any day of the week and year. All of the world's aircraft carriers, which today are instruments of military intervention deployed across the world's oceans, working as hospitals, could not offer those services to the millions of people treated by Cuban doctors in remote corners of the planet, where women go into labor, children are born and there are sick people in urgent need of attention.
Our country has demonstrated that it can stand up to all pressures and help other peoples.
I was thinking about our cooperative efforts, not only in Bolivia, but in Haiti, the Caribbean, several countries in Central America, South America, Africa and even distant Oceania, 20 thousand kilometers away. I also recalled the missions undertaken by the Henry Reeve Brigade, which responded to serious emergencies, traveling in our planes, transporting personnel and other resources.
We are not far from reaching the figure of one million people annually operated on for sight problems, free of charge. Can the United States really compete with Cuba?
We will make use of computers, not to create weapons of mass destruction and exterminate people but to convey knowledge to other peoples. From the economic point of view, the development of the intelligence and conscience of our fellow citizens, made possible by the Revolution, allow us not only to aid those in most need at no cost to us, but also to export specialized services, including healthcare services, to countries that have more resources than our own. In this field, the United States will never be able to compete with Cuba.
Our small country shall continue to hold its ground.
In one phrase: The ant has proved mightier than the elephant!
Fidel Castro Ruz
June 18, 2008
7:35 p.m.
A powerful internationalist spirit, which had its roots in the broad contingent of Cuban combatants who participated in the anti-fascist struggle of the Spanish people and made the best traditions of the world worker's movement its own, had developed in Cuba in the first years of the Revolution.
We are not in the habit of publicizing our cooperative efforts with other peoples, but it is at times impossible to prevent the press from mentioning it. Our cooperative efforts stem from profound feelings that have nothing to do with a desire for publicity.
Some ask themselves how it is possible for a small country with scarce resources to carry out tasks of such magnitude in fields as decisive as education and health, without which contemporary society is unthinkable.
Humanity developed the goods and services essential to its existence since establishing its first society, and the latter has in turn developed from the most elementary to the most sophisticated of forms over many thousands of years.
The exploitation of man by man was inseparable from this development, as we all know or ought to know.
The different ways in which this reality has been perceived have always depended on the place each of us occupies within society. For long, exploitation was seen as something natural and the immense majority was never aware of the above relation.
At the very height of capitalist development in England, which was a world leader, next to the United States and other countries in Europe, in a world that was already dominated by colonialism and expansionism, a great thinker and history and economics scholar, Karl Marx, on the basis of the ideas of the most prestigious German philosophers and economists of the time –including Hegel, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, with whom he disagreed– elaborated, wrote and published his ideas on capitalism’s relations of production and exchange in 1859 in a work titled Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In 1867, he continued to spread his ideas with the publication of the first volume of his most important work, a work that made him famous: Capital. Most of the long book, on the basis of Marx’s notes and comments, was edited by Engels, who shared Marx’s ideas and, like a prophet, spread his work after Marx’s death in 1883.
What Marx published constitutes the most serious analysis ever to be written about class society and the exploitation of man by man. Marxism had thus been born, as the foundation of revolutionary parties and movements that proclaimed socialism as their objective, including nearly all social-democratic parties that, when World War I broke out, betrayed the slogan proclaimed by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, first published in 1848: "Workers of the world, unite!”
One of the truths that this great thinker expressed in simple terms was that: “In social production during their lives, men establish certain necessary relations independent of their wills, relations of production which correspond to a given phase of development of their material productive forces. It is not man’s consciousness which determines its being, but on the contrary, it is its social being which determines its consciousness. On reaching a given phase of development, society's material productive forces come into contradiction with existing production relations...From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations become obstacles to the latter and an era of social revolution thus begins...No social formation disappears before its productive forces are fully developed and no new and more advanced production relations emerge before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the old society.”
I could not find better words to more clearly and precisely express these concepts elaborated by Marx, concepts whose essence, with a basic explanation from a teacher, even one of the young Cubans who joined the Union of Young Communists this past Saturday June 14th could understand.
To describe the concrete development of the class struggle, Marx wrote The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, two excellent historical analyses that delight any reader. He was a true genius.
Lenin, a profound continuator of dialectical thought and Marx’s research, wrote two key works: State and Revolution and Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Marx’s ideas, put into practice by Lenin through the October Revolution, were also developed by Mao Zedong and other Third World revolutionary leaders. Without them, the Cuban Revolution would not have taken place in the United States’ backyard.
Had Marxist thought simply limited itself to the idea that “no social formation disappears before its productive forces are fully developed,” the capitalist theoretician Francis Fukuyama would have been right in proclaiming that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of history and ideologies and that all resistance to the capitalist system of production should cease.
When the founder of scientific socialism published his ideas, society’s productive forces were far from fully developed. Technology had not yet yielded deadly weapons of mass destruction capable of exterminating the human species; the aerospatial domain did not yet exist, nor did the unlimited squandering of hydrocarbons and non-renewable fossil fuels; climate change had not yet been detected in a natural world whose potential seemed infinite to humanity, nor had the world food crisis, to be borne by innumerable combustion engines and a population six times larger than that which inhabited the planet on the year Marx was born (then of one billion), made itself known yet.
Cuba's socialist experience takes place at a time when imperial domination has expanded across the globe.
When I speak of consciousness I am not referring to a will capable of changing reality but, on the contrary, to knowledge of objective reality which can determine the path to follow.
Tens of million of people died in the war sparked in the mid-20th century by fascism, an ideology which was new at the time, born in the anti-Marxist bosom of the developed capitalist world Lenin had foretold.
In Cuba, as in other Third World countries, the struggle for national liberation, under the leadership of the middle classes and petite bourgeoisie, and the struggle for socialism that the most advanced sectors of the working class and farmers had been waging over the years, combined and strengthened one another. Ideological and class contradictions also flourished. Objective and subjective factors varied considerably from one process to another.
The United Nations and other international organizations, where many saw the beginning of a new, international consciousness, emerged from the last world war. Those hopes were betrayed.
Fascism, whose instrument Hitler called the National Socialist Party, was re-born, more powerful and threatening than ever.
The empire deploys and keeps aircraft carriers in all of the world's seas, ever ready for military intervention. What does it decide to do in order to compete with Cuba in our hemisphere? To deploy an enormous ship turned into a floating hospital that works ten days in each country. It can assist a number of people daily but it cannot solve a country’s problems. It does not compensate for the brain drain, and it cannot train the specialists who are needed so that real medical services may be offered on any day of the week and year. All of the world's aircraft carriers, which today are instruments of military intervention deployed across the world's oceans, working as hospitals, could not offer those services to the millions of people treated by Cuban doctors in remote corners of the planet, where women go into labor, children are born and there are sick people in urgent need of attention.
Our country has demonstrated that it can stand up to all pressures and help other peoples.
I was thinking about our cooperative efforts, not only in Bolivia, but in Haiti, the Caribbean, several countries in Central America, South America, Africa and even distant Oceania, 20 thousand kilometers away. I also recalled the missions undertaken by the Henry Reeve Brigade, which responded to serious emergencies, traveling in our planes, transporting personnel and other resources.
We are not far from reaching the figure of one million people annually operated on for sight problems, free of charge. Can the United States really compete with Cuba?
We will make use of computers, not to create weapons of mass destruction and exterminate people but to convey knowledge to other peoples. From the economic point of view, the development of the intelligence and conscience of our fellow citizens, made possible by the Revolution, allow us not only to aid those in most need at no cost to us, but also to export specialized services, including healthcare services, to countries that have more resources than our own. In this field, the United States will never be able to compete with Cuba.
Our small country shall continue to hold its ground.
In one phrase: The ant has proved mightier than the elephant!
Fidel Castro Ruz
June 18, 2008
7:35 p.m.
The empire’s hypocritical politics
IT would be dishonest of me to remain silent after hearing the speech Obama delivered on the afternoon of May 23 at the Cuban American National Foundation created by Ronald Reagan. I listened to his speech, as I did McCain’s and Bush’s. I feel no resentment towards him, for he is not responsible for the crimes perpetrated against Cuba and humanity. Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries an enormous favor. I have therefore no reservations about criticizing him and about expressing my points of view on his words frankly.
What were Obama’s statements?
"Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy. (…) This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century – of elections that are anything but free or fair (…) I won't stand for this injustice, you won't stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba," he told annexationists, adding: "It's time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime. (…) I will maintain the embargo."
The content of these declarations by this strong candidate to the U.S. presidency spares me the work of having to explain the reason for this reflection.
José Hernandez, one of the Cuban American National Foundation directors whom Obama praises in his speech, was none other than the owner of the Caliber-50 automatic rifle, equipped with telescopic and infrared sights, which was confiscated, by chance, along with other deadly weapons while being transported by sea to Venezuela, where the Foundation had planned to assassinate the writer of these lines at an international meeting on Margarita, in the Venezuelan state of Nueva Esparta.
Pepe Hernández’ group wanted to return to the pact with Clinton, betrayed by Mas Canosa’s clan, who secured Bush’s electoral victory in 2000 through fraud, because the latter had promised to assassinate Castro, something they all happily embraced. These are the kinds of political tricks inherent to the United States’ decadent and contradictory system.
Presidential candidate Obama’s speech may be formulated as follows: hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable hand-outs and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life behind it.
How does he plan to address the extremely serious problem of the food crisis? The world’s grains must be distributed among human beings, pets and fish, the latter of which are getting smaller every year and more scarce in the seas that have been over-exploited by large trawlers which no international organization has been able to halt. Producing meat from gas and oil is no easy feat. Even Obama overestimates technology’s potential in the fight against climate change, though he is more conscious of the risks and the limited margin of time than Bush. He could seek the advice of Gore, who is also a democrat and is no longer a candidate, as he is aware of the accelerated pace at which global warming is advancing. His close political rival Bill Clinton, who is not running for the presidency, an expert on extra-territorial laws like the Helms-Burton and Torricelli Acts, can advise him on an issue like the blockade, which he promised to lift and never did.
What did he say in his speech in Miami, this man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency? "For two hundred years," he said, "the United States has made it clear that we won't stand for foreign intervention in our hemisphere. But every day, all across the Americas, there is a different kind of struggle --not against foreign armies, but against the deadly threat of hunger and thirst, disease and
despair. That is not a future that we have to accept --not for the child in
Port au Prince or the family in the highlands of Peru. We can do better. We
must do better. (…) We cannot ignore suffering to our south, nor stand for the globalization of the empty stomach." A magnificent description of imperialist globalization: the globalization of empty stomachs! We ought to thank him for it. But, 200 years ago, Bolivar fought for Latin American unity and, more than 100 years ago, Martí gave his life in the struggle against the annexation of Cuba by the United States. What is the difference between what Monroe proclaimed and what Obama proclaims and resuscitates in his speech two centuries later?
"I will reinstate a Special Envoy for the Americas in my White House who will work with my full support. But we'll also expand the Foreign Service, and open more consulates in the neglected regions of the Americas. We'll expand the Peace Corps, and ask more young Americans to go abroad to deepen the trust and the ties among our people," he said near the end, adding: "Together, we can choose the future over the past." A beautiful phrase, for it attests to the idea, or at least the fear, that history makes figures what they are and not all the way around.
Today, the United States has nothing of the spirit behind the Philadelphia declaration of principles formulated by the 13 colonies that rebelled against English colonialism. Today, they are a gigantic empire undreamed of by the country’s founders at the time. Nothing, however, was to change for the natives and the slaves. The former were exterminated as the nation expanded; the latter continued to be auctioned at the marketplace —men, women and children—for nearly a century, despite the fact that "all men are born free and equal", as the Declaration of Independence affirms. The world’s objective conditions favored the development of that system.
In his speech, Obama portrays the Cuban Revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the exact same argument which, almost without exception, U.S. administrations have used again and again to justify their crimes against our country. The blockade, in and of itself, is an act of genocide. I don’t want to see U.S. children inculcated with those shameful values.
An armed revolution in our country might not have been needed without the military interventions, Platt Amendment and economic colonialism visited upon Cuba.
The Revolution was the result of imperial domination. We cannot be accused of having imposed it upon the country. The true changes could have and ought to have been brought about in the United States. Its own workers, more than a century ago, voiced the demand for an eight-hour work shift, which stemmed from the development of productive forces.
The first thing the leaders of the Cuban Revolution learned from Martí was to believe in and act on behalf of an organization founded for the purposes of bringing about a revolution. We were always bound by previous forms of power and, following the institutionalization of this organization, we were elected by more than 90% of voters, as has become customary in Cuba, a process which does not in the least resemble the ridiculous levels of electoral participation which, many a time, as in the case of the United States, stay short of 50% of voters. No small and blockaded country like ours would have been able to hold its ground for so long on the basis of ambition, vanity, deceit or the abuse of power, the kind of power its neighbor has. To state otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of our heroic people.
I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. I feel sympathy for his wife and little girls, who accompany him and give him encouragement every Tuesday. It is indeed a touching human spectacle. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record.
Is it right for the president of the United States to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext may be?
Is it ethical for the president of the United States to order the torture of other human beings?
Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the United States as an instrument to bring about peace on the planet?
Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment to only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilize it, good and honorable, even when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? If it is good, why is this right not automatically granted to Haitians, Dominicans, and other peoples of the Caribbean, and why isn’t the same Act applied to Mexicans and people from Central and South America, who die like flies against the Mexican border wall or in the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific?
Can the United States do without immigrants, who grow vegetables, fruits, almonds and other delicacies for U.S. citizens? Who would sweep their streets, work as servants in their homes or do the worst and lowest-paid jobs?
Are crackdowns on illegal residents fair, even as they affect children born in the United States?
Are the brain-drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable?
You state, as I pointed out at the beginning of this reflection, that your country had long ago warned European powers that it would not tolerate any intervention in the hemisphere, reiterating that this right be respected while demanding the right to intervene anywhere in the world with the aid of hundreds of military bases and naval, aerial and spatial forces distributed across the planet. I ask: is that the way in which the United States expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights?
Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks on sixty or more dark corners of the world, as Bush calls them, whatever the pretext may be?
Is it honorable and sane to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over?
Before judging our country, you should know that Cuba, with its education, health, sports, culture and sciences programs, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and the blood that has been shed in acts of solidarity towards other peoples, in spite of the economic and financial blockade and the aggression of your powerful country, is proof that much can be done with very little. Not even our closest ally, the Soviet Union, was able to achieve what we have.
The only form of cooperation the United States can offer other nations consist in the sending of military professionals to those countries. It cannot offer anything else, for it lacks a sufficient number of people willing to sacrifice themselves for others and offer substantial aid to a country in need (though Cuba has known and relied on the cooperation of excellent U.S. doctors). They are not to blame for this, for society does not inculcate such values in them on a massive scale.
We have never subordinated cooperation with other countries to ideological requirements. We offered the United States our help when Hurricane Katrina lashed the city of New Orleans. Our internationalist medical brigade bears the glorious name of Henry Reeve, a young man, born in the United States, who fought and died for Cuba’s sovereignty in our first war of independence.
Our Revolution can mobilize tens of thousands of doctors and health technicians. It can mobilize an equally vast number of teachers and citizens, who are willing to travel to any corner of the world to fulfill any noble purpose, not to usurp people’s rights or take possession of raw materials.
The good will and determination of people constitute limitless resources that cannot be kept and would not fit in the vault of a bank. They cannot spring from the hypocritical politics of an empire.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 25, 2008
10:35 p.m.
What were Obama’s statements?
"Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy. (…) This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century – of elections that are anything but free or fair (…) I won't stand for this injustice, you won't stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba," he told annexationists, adding: "It's time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime. (…) I will maintain the embargo."
The content of these declarations by this strong candidate to the U.S. presidency spares me the work of having to explain the reason for this reflection.
José Hernandez, one of the Cuban American National Foundation directors whom Obama praises in his speech, was none other than the owner of the Caliber-50 automatic rifle, equipped with telescopic and infrared sights, which was confiscated, by chance, along with other deadly weapons while being transported by sea to Venezuela, where the Foundation had planned to assassinate the writer of these lines at an international meeting on Margarita, in the Venezuelan state of Nueva Esparta.
Pepe Hernández’ group wanted to return to the pact with Clinton, betrayed by Mas Canosa’s clan, who secured Bush’s electoral victory in 2000 through fraud, because the latter had promised to assassinate Castro, something they all happily embraced. These are the kinds of political tricks inherent to the United States’ decadent and contradictory system.
Presidential candidate Obama’s speech may be formulated as follows: hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable hand-outs and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life behind it.
How does he plan to address the extremely serious problem of the food crisis? The world’s grains must be distributed among human beings, pets and fish, the latter of which are getting smaller every year and more scarce in the seas that have been over-exploited by large trawlers which no international organization has been able to halt. Producing meat from gas and oil is no easy feat. Even Obama overestimates technology’s potential in the fight against climate change, though he is more conscious of the risks and the limited margin of time than Bush. He could seek the advice of Gore, who is also a democrat and is no longer a candidate, as he is aware of the accelerated pace at which global warming is advancing. His close political rival Bill Clinton, who is not running for the presidency, an expert on extra-territorial laws like the Helms-Burton and Torricelli Acts, can advise him on an issue like the blockade, which he promised to lift and never did.
What did he say in his speech in Miami, this man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency? "For two hundred years," he said, "the United States has made it clear that we won't stand for foreign intervention in our hemisphere. But every day, all across the Americas, there is a different kind of struggle --not against foreign armies, but against the deadly threat of hunger and thirst, disease and
despair. That is not a future that we have to accept --not for the child in
Port au Prince or the family in the highlands of Peru. We can do better. We
must do better. (…) We cannot ignore suffering to our south, nor stand for the globalization of the empty stomach." A magnificent description of imperialist globalization: the globalization of empty stomachs! We ought to thank him for it. But, 200 years ago, Bolivar fought for Latin American unity and, more than 100 years ago, Martí gave his life in the struggle against the annexation of Cuba by the United States. What is the difference between what Monroe proclaimed and what Obama proclaims and resuscitates in his speech two centuries later?
"I will reinstate a Special Envoy for the Americas in my White House who will work with my full support. But we'll also expand the Foreign Service, and open more consulates in the neglected regions of the Americas. We'll expand the Peace Corps, and ask more young Americans to go abroad to deepen the trust and the ties among our people," he said near the end, adding: "Together, we can choose the future over the past." A beautiful phrase, for it attests to the idea, or at least the fear, that history makes figures what they are and not all the way around.
Today, the United States has nothing of the spirit behind the Philadelphia declaration of principles formulated by the 13 colonies that rebelled against English colonialism. Today, they are a gigantic empire undreamed of by the country’s founders at the time. Nothing, however, was to change for the natives and the slaves. The former were exterminated as the nation expanded; the latter continued to be auctioned at the marketplace —men, women and children—for nearly a century, despite the fact that "all men are born free and equal", as the Declaration of Independence affirms. The world’s objective conditions favored the development of that system.
In his speech, Obama portrays the Cuban Revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the exact same argument which, almost without exception, U.S. administrations have used again and again to justify their crimes against our country. The blockade, in and of itself, is an act of genocide. I don’t want to see U.S. children inculcated with those shameful values.
An armed revolution in our country might not have been needed without the military interventions, Platt Amendment and economic colonialism visited upon Cuba.
The Revolution was the result of imperial domination. We cannot be accused of having imposed it upon the country. The true changes could have and ought to have been brought about in the United States. Its own workers, more than a century ago, voiced the demand for an eight-hour work shift, which stemmed from the development of productive forces.
The first thing the leaders of the Cuban Revolution learned from Martí was to believe in and act on behalf of an organization founded for the purposes of bringing about a revolution. We were always bound by previous forms of power and, following the institutionalization of this organization, we were elected by more than 90% of voters, as has become customary in Cuba, a process which does not in the least resemble the ridiculous levels of electoral participation which, many a time, as in the case of the United States, stay short of 50% of voters. No small and blockaded country like ours would have been able to hold its ground for so long on the basis of ambition, vanity, deceit or the abuse of power, the kind of power its neighbor has. To state otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of our heroic people.
I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. I feel sympathy for his wife and little girls, who accompany him and give him encouragement every Tuesday. It is indeed a touching human spectacle. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record.
Is it right for the president of the United States to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext may be?
Is it ethical for the president of the United States to order the torture of other human beings?
Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the United States as an instrument to bring about peace on the planet?
Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment to only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilize it, good and honorable, even when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? If it is good, why is this right not automatically granted to Haitians, Dominicans, and other peoples of the Caribbean, and why isn’t the same Act applied to Mexicans and people from Central and South America, who die like flies against the Mexican border wall or in the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific?
Can the United States do without immigrants, who grow vegetables, fruits, almonds and other delicacies for U.S. citizens? Who would sweep their streets, work as servants in their homes or do the worst and lowest-paid jobs?
Are crackdowns on illegal residents fair, even as they affect children born in the United States?
Are the brain-drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable?
You state, as I pointed out at the beginning of this reflection, that your country had long ago warned European powers that it would not tolerate any intervention in the hemisphere, reiterating that this right be respected while demanding the right to intervene anywhere in the world with the aid of hundreds of military bases and naval, aerial and spatial forces distributed across the planet. I ask: is that the way in which the United States expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights?
Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks on sixty or more dark corners of the world, as Bush calls them, whatever the pretext may be?
Is it honorable and sane to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over?
Before judging our country, you should know that Cuba, with its education, health, sports, culture and sciences programs, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and the blood that has been shed in acts of solidarity towards other peoples, in spite of the economic and financial blockade and the aggression of your powerful country, is proof that much can be done with very little. Not even our closest ally, the Soviet Union, was able to achieve what we have.
The only form of cooperation the United States can offer other nations consist in the sending of military professionals to those countries. It cannot offer anything else, for it lacks a sufficient number of people willing to sacrifice themselves for others and offer substantial aid to a country in need (though Cuba has known and relied on the cooperation of excellent U.S. doctors). They are not to blame for this, for society does not inculcate such values in them on a massive scale.
We have never subordinated cooperation with other countries to ideological requirements. We offered the United States our help when Hurricane Katrina lashed the city of New Orleans. Our internationalist medical brigade bears the glorious name of Henry Reeve, a young man, born in the United States, who fought and died for Cuba’s sovereignty in our first war of independence.
Our Revolution can mobilize tens of thousands of doctors and health technicians. It can mobilize an equally vast number of teachers and citizens, who are willing to travel to any corner of the world to fulfill any noble purpose, not to usurp people’s rights or take possession of raw materials.
The good will and determination of people constitute limitless resources that cannot be kept and would not fit in the vault of a bank. They cannot spring from the hypocritical politics of an empire.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 25, 2008
10:35 p.m.
Martí’s inmortal ideas
JUST a few days ago, a friend of mine sent me the text of a report from Gallup, the well-known U.S. opinion pollster. I started to leaf through the material with the natural lack of confidence given the lying and hypocritical information usually used against our nation.
It was a survey on education in which Cuba was included, although it is usually ignored. It analyzed the situation in four regions of the world: Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America. A number of Caribbean nations were included in some aspects.
First question: Are children in your country treated with dignity and respect? Positive answer: Asia 73%, Europe 67%, Africa 60% and Latin America 41%. If the Caribbean countries are included, Gallup states that in Haiti, only 13% of those surveyed responded affirmatively to that question.
Second question: Do children in your country have the opportunity to learn and grow every day? In Asia 75% answered yes; in Europe, 74%; in Africa, 60%; in Latin America, 56%. Many of the countries of this region were under 50%.
Third question: Is this country’s education accessible to anyone who wishes to study independently of his or her economic situation? The answers reveal a painful situation in many Latin American nations and better answers from the English-speaking Caribbean.
I do not wish to offend any of the countries that I mention, but it would be meaningless to write these lines without noting the place occupied by Cuba – so many times slandered – in the survey. It was in first place among all the countries in the world. . Of those surveyed by Gallup, 93% answered yes to the first question; 96% to the second; and 98% to the third. As it is known, Cubans have the habit of answering any question with complete frankness.
Another particularly salient fact is that in Venezuela, 70% and 80% answered positively to the first and second question, respectively. This is a country that is developing a large-scale education program, eradicating illiteracy and promoting study at all levels, a process that began only a few years ago. On account of that, Venezuela occupied second place in the region.
The response to the third question was a yes from 82%, placing it third in Latin America and the Caribbean, exceeded by Trinidad and Tobago, in second place with 86%.
In important Latin American countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, 57%, 56%, 52% and 43%, respectively, answered yes to the question. Those that came out with the best results were the Dominican Republic, Panama, Uruguay, Belize and Bolivia, with 76%, 73%, 70%, 60% and 65%. Paraguay and Haiti are in the lowest places, with 17%.
Cuba is cooperating free of charge with these two countries and many other sister nations in the hemisphere, both in education and health, and giving special emphasis to the training of medical personnel. Thus Cuba is modestly fulfilling its duty as expressed by Martí: "Homeland is humanity!" as our national hero affirmed.
May 19th was the 113th anniversary of his death, which took place in Dos Ríos in 1895. As everybody knows, the U.S. military intervention frustrated the independence of our homeland. Innumerable patriots had died in the struggle that lasted nearly 30 years.
The great power to the north was always hostile to our struggle, given that for a long time it had assigned it the manifest destiny of forming part of its territory, at that time in full expansion.
The moment had arrived, the decadence of the Spanish empire, where the sun never set, gave the new imperial power the opportunity to snatch Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. It sought pretexts, it utilized deception and lies, recognizing that in fact and in law the Cuban people were free and independent, as a means of seeking the support of its valiant combatants to support the war of the interventionists.
In that final struggle the Spaniards displayed the habitual bravery of their soldiers and the stupidity of their government. The Cevera squadron was annihilated ship by ship at the exit of Santiago de Cuba Bay by the U.S. battleships, as we have explained on other occasions, almost without being able to fire off a single cannon round. The great fraud came afterwards when, with the people already disarmed, the United States imposed the Platt Amendment and leonine economic agreements on Cuba; the country, laid waste and bleeding, moved inexorably toward becoming the property of the United States.
That is the real history.
What has been happening recently? It (the United States) is being driven crazy by the unyielding resistance of our people and their modest advance toward a more just world, despite the disappearance of the Socialist camp and the USSR.
Radio Martí, TV Martí and other sophisticated forms of media aggression with which it is trying to humiliate the Cuban people and destroy their resistance, are insults to the name of the national independence hero.
A deluge of speeches and lies are being lined up against Cuba. McCain, Bush’s candidate to the presidency of the empire, is speaking; Bush himself is speaking. Against whom? Against Martí. In the name of whom? Of Martí.
They are referring to atrocious acts of torture, something that has never happened in our country, and even the least informed of Cubans knows that. And who are the ones talking of torture? McCain, the candidate, and George W. Bush, the President.
What is the candidate saying?
"I would like to thank my two dear friends in Congress, Lincoln and Mario Díaz-Balart, who are great defenders of the people of Cuba. They are men of honor and integrity. I respect and admire them very much. They are the best members of Congress who I have worked with and whom I have known…"
"My friends, today on Cuban Independence Day we have the opportunity to celebrate the cultural legacy and the deepest roots of the Cuban people…"
"The independence fighters who won Cuba’s independence more than 100 years ago could not have imagined that their descendants would be in a struggle for freedom and democracy one century later…"
"One day Cuba will be an important ally for securing democracy in our hemisphere…"
"The dictatorship will not continue until the end of time and, as President, I will not passively await the day when the Cuban people enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy. I will not wait…"
"My administration will force the Cuban regime to unconditionally free all the political prisoners and to plan elections under international supervision…"
"The embargo must be maintained until those crucial elements of democracy and social democracy emerge."
"Venezuela and Bolivia have to be prevented from following Cuba’s example."
In his book The Faith of My Fathers, McCain confessed that he was one of the five bottom students in his cohort at West Point. He is demonstrating that. At the end of his time in prison he was weak, and he acknowledges that as well. He launched innumerable bombs on the Vietnamese people. How many lives and how much money did that adventure cost? At that time gold was worth $35 and they squandered $500 billion in that war. The consequences are still being paid. A Troy ounce is now worth $1,000 and once again hundreds of billions are being squandered in wars. New and complex problems are compounding that.
Where are the solutions?
What did President George W. Bush say?
"One hundred and 13 years ago this week, Cuba lost its great poet and patriot, José Martí. And 106 years ago this week, Cuba achieved the independence for which Martí gave his life… Martí's warning proved truer than anyone could have imagined…"
"…the regime has not attempted even cosmetic changes. For example, political dissidents continue to be harassed, detained, and beaten…"
"The world is watching the Cuban regime. If it follows its recent public gestures by opening up access to information…, respecting political freedom and human rights, then it can credibly say it has delivered the beginnings of change... America refuses to be deceived, and so do the Cuban people. While the regime embarrasses and isolates itself, the Cuban people will continue to act with dignity and honor and courage…"
"This is the first Day of Solidarity with the Cuban People -- and the United States must keep observing such days until Cuba's freedom."
"We'll continue to support the Cubans who work to make their nation democratic and prosperous and just."
"…the United States has dramatically stepped up our efforts to promote freedom and democracy in Cuba. This includes our increased efforts to get uncensored information to the Cuban people, primarily through Radio and TV Marti."
"Today, I also repeat my offer to license U.S. NGOs and faith-based groups to provide computers and Internet to the Cuban people…"
"Through these measures, the United States is reaching out to the Cuban people. Yet we know that life will not fundamentally change for Cubans until their form of government changes. For those who've suffered for decades, such change may seem impossible. But the truth is, it is inevitable…"
"The day will come when all political prisoners are offered unconditional release. And these developments will bring another great day -- the day when Cubans choose their own leaders by voting in free and fair elections…"
"Today, 113 years after José Martí left us, a new poet-patriot expresses the hopes of the Cuban people… Willy (Chirino) will perform a song that is on the Cuban people's lips and in their hearts. And here are some of its lyrics: Nuestro día ya viene llegando.
As for the siege of hunger and blockade that has lasted for decades, not a word.
Martí was a profound thinker and upright anti-imperialist. In his epoch, nobody like him understood with so much precision the terrible consequences of the monetary agreements that the United States was trying to impose on the Latin American countries, the blueprint of those of free trade, which they have resurrected today, in conditions that are more unequal than ever.
"Whoever says economic union, says political union. The people that buys, commands. The people that sells, serves. Trade has to be balanced in order to ensure freedom… The people that wishes to be free, must be free in business." Those are the principles proclaimed by Martí.
In that period, payments were in silver or gold. Today they are made with paper.
In an unfinished letter to his friend Manuel Mercado written the day before his death, he noted:
"…I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty, for I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out – the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our lands of America. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose. I have had to work quietly and somewhat indirectly, because to achieve certain objectives, they must be kept under cover; to proclaim them for what they are would raise such difficulties that the objectives could not be realized."
It does not matter how many times these intimate and revealing words, so marvelously expressed, are repeated.
With those immortal phrases in his mind, a few hours later, he launched himself on his own account into the attack on the Spanish column. Nobody could have held him back. Riding in the front line, he received three fatal bullets in his impetuous advance.
On July 26, 2004, when Bush had already spent nearly three years bombarding, torturing and killing in his absurd anti-terrorist war, with the invasion of Iraq already underway, I analyzed his strange personality based on a study of the interesting book Bush on the Couch, by Dr. Justin A. Frank, which contains one of the most revealing and fundamental studies of the personality of George W. Bush:
"Conspiracy is a common phenomenon among consumers of alcohol, as is the perseverance evident in Bush’s tendency to repeat key words and phrases, as if the repetition helps him to stay calm and maintain his attention."
"…If, moreover, we assume that George W. Bush’s days of alcoholism have been left behind, the question remains as to the permanent damage that it could have caused before he stopped drinking, beyond the considerable impact on his personality that we can trace up to his abstinence without treatment. Any integral psychological or psychoanalytical study of President Bush will have to explore to what extent his brain and functions have changed in more than 20 years of alcoholism."
Neither of the two speakers on May 20 and 21st even mentioned the five Cuban anti-terrorist heroes, whose information made it possible to uncover the plots of Luis Posada Carriles and to prevent the sabotage of airplanes in full flight with foreign visitors on board, including U.S. citizens, in order to damage tourism. They pressured and bribed the president of Panama and helped to secure Posada’s release. Santiago Alvarez transported him to Florida. I publicly denounced that almost immediately. Everything has been proven. After that an enormous weapons arsenal was seized from Santiago Alvarez himself.
They want impunity for terrorists and mercenaries. How far they are from understanding Cuba and its people!
The gross lies of McCain and Bush constitute the only way of obtaining absolutely nothing from the heroic people who have known how to resist the power of the empire for almost half a century.
Our desire is to record for history: the immortal ideas of Martí that he water++
ed with his blood will never be betrayed!
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 22, 2008
11:12 p.m.
It was a survey on education in which Cuba was included, although it is usually ignored. It analyzed the situation in four regions of the world: Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America. A number of Caribbean nations were included in some aspects.
First question: Are children in your country treated with dignity and respect? Positive answer: Asia 73%, Europe 67%, Africa 60% and Latin America 41%. If the Caribbean countries are included, Gallup states that in Haiti, only 13% of those surveyed responded affirmatively to that question.
Second question: Do children in your country have the opportunity to learn and grow every day? In Asia 75% answered yes; in Europe, 74%; in Africa, 60%; in Latin America, 56%. Many of the countries of this region were under 50%.
Third question: Is this country’s education accessible to anyone who wishes to study independently of his or her economic situation? The answers reveal a painful situation in many Latin American nations and better answers from the English-speaking Caribbean.
I do not wish to offend any of the countries that I mention, but it would be meaningless to write these lines without noting the place occupied by Cuba – so many times slandered – in the survey. It was in first place among all the countries in the world. . Of those surveyed by Gallup, 93% answered yes to the first question; 96% to the second; and 98% to the third. As it is known, Cubans have the habit of answering any question with complete frankness.
Another particularly salient fact is that in Venezuela, 70% and 80% answered positively to the first and second question, respectively. This is a country that is developing a large-scale education program, eradicating illiteracy and promoting study at all levels, a process that began only a few years ago. On account of that, Venezuela occupied second place in the region.
The response to the third question was a yes from 82%, placing it third in Latin America and the Caribbean, exceeded by Trinidad and Tobago, in second place with 86%.
In important Latin American countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, 57%, 56%, 52% and 43%, respectively, answered yes to the question. Those that came out with the best results were the Dominican Republic, Panama, Uruguay, Belize and Bolivia, with 76%, 73%, 70%, 60% and 65%. Paraguay and Haiti are in the lowest places, with 17%.
Cuba is cooperating free of charge with these two countries and many other sister nations in the hemisphere, both in education and health, and giving special emphasis to the training of medical personnel. Thus Cuba is modestly fulfilling its duty as expressed by Martí: "Homeland is humanity!" as our national hero affirmed.
May 19th was the 113th anniversary of his death, which took place in Dos Ríos in 1895. As everybody knows, the U.S. military intervention frustrated the independence of our homeland. Innumerable patriots had died in the struggle that lasted nearly 30 years.
The great power to the north was always hostile to our struggle, given that for a long time it had assigned it the manifest destiny of forming part of its territory, at that time in full expansion.
The moment had arrived, the decadence of the Spanish empire, where the sun never set, gave the new imperial power the opportunity to snatch Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. It sought pretexts, it utilized deception and lies, recognizing that in fact and in law the Cuban people were free and independent, as a means of seeking the support of its valiant combatants to support the war of the interventionists.
In that final struggle the Spaniards displayed the habitual bravery of their soldiers and the stupidity of their government. The Cevera squadron was annihilated ship by ship at the exit of Santiago de Cuba Bay by the U.S. battleships, as we have explained on other occasions, almost without being able to fire off a single cannon round. The great fraud came afterwards when, with the people already disarmed, the United States imposed the Platt Amendment and leonine economic agreements on Cuba; the country, laid waste and bleeding, moved inexorably toward becoming the property of the United States.
That is the real history.
What has been happening recently? It (the United States) is being driven crazy by the unyielding resistance of our people and their modest advance toward a more just world, despite the disappearance of the Socialist camp and the USSR.
Radio Martí, TV Martí and other sophisticated forms of media aggression with which it is trying to humiliate the Cuban people and destroy their resistance, are insults to the name of the national independence hero.
A deluge of speeches and lies are being lined up against Cuba. McCain, Bush’s candidate to the presidency of the empire, is speaking; Bush himself is speaking. Against whom? Against Martí. In the name of whom? Of Martí.
They are referring to atrocious acts of torture, something that has never happened in our country, and even the least informed of Cubans knows that. And who are the ones talking of torture? McCain, the candidate, and George W. Bush, the President.
What is the candidate saying?
"I would like to thank my two dear friends in Congress, Lincoln and Mario Díaz-Balart, who are great defenders of the people of Cuba. They are men of honor and integrity. I respect and admire them very much. They are the best members of Congress who I have worked with and whom I have known…"
"My friends, today on Cuban Independence Day we have the opportunity to celebrate the cultural legacy and the deepest roots of the Cuban people…"
"The independence fighters who won Cuba’s independence more than 100 years ago could not have imagined that their descendants would be in a struggle for freedom and democracy one century later…"
"One day Cuba will be an important ally for securing democracy in our hemisphere…"
"The dictatorship will not continue until the end of time and, as President, I will not passively await the day when the Cuban people enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy. I will not wait…"
"My administration will force the Cuban regime to unconditionally free all the political prisoners and to plan elections under international supervision…"
"The embargo must be maintained until those crucial elements of democracy and social democracy emerge."
"Venezuela and Bolivia have to be prevented from following Cuba’s example."
In his book The Faith of My Fathers, McCain confessed that he was one of the five bottom students in his cohort at West Point. He is demonstrating that. At the end of his time in prison he was weak, and he acknowledges that as well. He launched innumerable bombs on the Vietnamese people. How many lives and how much money did that adventure cost? At that time gold was worth $35 and they squandered $500 billion in that war. The consequences are still being paid. A Troy ounce is now worth $1,000 and once again hundreds of billions are being squandered in wars. New and complex problems are compounding that.
Where are the solutions?
What did President George W. Bush say?
"One hundred and 13 years ago this week, Cuba lost its great poet and patriot, José Martí. And 106 years ago this week, Cuba achieved the independence for which Martí gave his life… Martí's warning proved truer than anyone could have imagined…"
"…the regime has not attempted even cosmetic changes. For example, political dissidents continue to be harassed, detained, and beaten…"
"The world is watching the Cuban regime. If it follows its recent public gestures by opening up access to information…, respecting political freedom and human rights, then it can credibly say it has delivered the beginnings of change... America refuses to be deceived, and so do the Cuban people. While the regime embarrasses and isolates itself, the Cuban people will continue to act with dignity and honor and courage…"
"This is the first Day of Solidarity with the Cuban People -- and the United States must keep observing such days until Cuba's freedom."
"We'll continue to support the Cubans who work to make their nation democratic and prosperous and just."
"…the United States has dramatically stepped up our efforts to promote freedom and democracy in Cuba. This includes our increased efforts to get uncensored information to the Cuban people, primarily through Radio and TV Marti."
"Today, I also repeat my offer to license U.S. NGOs and faith-based groups to provide computers and Internet to the Cuban people…"
"Through these measures, the United States is reaching out to the Cuban people. Yet we know that life will not fundamentally change for Cubans until their form of government changes. For those who've suffered for decades, such change may seem impossible. But the truth is, it is inevitable…"
"The day will come when all political prisoners are offered unconditional release. And these developments will bring another great day -- the day when Cubans choose their own leaders by voting in free and fair elections…"
"Today, 113 years after José Martí left us, a new poet-patriot expresses the hopes of the Cuban people… Willy (Chirino) will perform a song that is on the Cuban people's lips and in their hearts. And here are some of its lyrics: Nuestro día ya viene llegando.
As for the siege of hunger and blockade that has lasted for decades, not a word.
Martí was a profound thinker and upright anti-imperialist. In his epoch, nobody like him understood with so much precision the terrible consequences of the monetary agreements that the United States was trying to impose on the Latin American countries, the blueprint of those of free trade, which they have resurrected today, in conditions that are more unequal than ever.
"Whoever says economic union, says political union. The people that buys, commands. The people that sells, serves. Trade has to be balanced in order to ensure freedom… The people that wishes to be free, must be free in business." Those are the principles proclaimed by Martí.
In that period, payments were in silver or gold. Today they are made with paper.
In an unfinished letter to his friend Manuel Mercado written the day before his death, he noted:
"…I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty, for I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out – the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our lands of America. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose. I have had to work quietly and somewhat indirectly, because to achieve certain objectives, they must be kept under cover; to proclaim them for what they are would raise such difficulties that the objectives could not be realized."
It does not matter how many times these intimate and revealing words, so marvelously expressed, are repeated.
With those immortal phrases in his mind, a few hours later, he launched himself on his own account into the attack on the Spanish column. Nobody could have held him back. Riding in the front line, he received three fatal bullets in his impetuous advance.
On July 26, 2004, when Bush had already spent nearly three years bombarding, torturing and killing in his absurd anti-terrorist war, with the invasion of Iraq already underway, I analyzed his strange personality based on a study of the interesting book Bush on the Couch, by Dr. Justin A. Frank, which contains one of the most revealing and fundamental studies of the personality of George W. Bush:
"Conspiracy is a common phenomenon among consumers of alcohol, as is the perseverance evident in Bush’s tendency to repeat key words and phrases, as if the repetition helps him to stay calm and maintain his attention."
"…If, moreover, we assume that George W. Bush’s days of alcoholism have been left behind, the question remains as to the permanent damage that it could have caused before he stopped drinking, beyond the considerable impact on his personality that we can trace up to his abstinence without treatment. Any integral psychological or psychoanalytical study of President Bush will have to explore to what extent his brain and functions have changed in more than 20 years of alcoholism."
Neither of the two speakers on May 20 and 21st even mentioned the five Cuban anti-terrorist heroes, whose information made it possible to uncover the plots of Luis Posada Carriles and to prevent the sabotage of airplanes in full flight with foreign visitors on board, including U.S. citizens, in order to damage tourism. They pressured and bribed the president of Panama and helped to secure Posada’s release. Santiago Alvarez transported him to Florida. I publicly denounced that almost immediately. Everything has been proven. After that an enormous weapons arsenal was seized from Santiago Alvarez himself.
They want impunity for terrorists and mercenaries. How far they are from understanding Cuba and its people!
The gross lies of McCain and Bush constitute the only way of obtaining absolutely nothing from the heroic people who have known how to resist the power of the empire for almost half a century.
Our desire is to record for history: the immortal ideas of Martí that he water++
ed with his blood will never be betrayed!
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 22, 2008
11:12 p.m.
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