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September 2007 Reflections |
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Aznar's Silence During a Round Table program aired on Cuban television on April 25, 2003, I pointed out that the then Spanish President José María Aznar, an ally of the world's leader in genocides and massacres, had met with President William Clinton on April 13, 1999, at an uncertain juncture of the war in Yugoslavia, and had told him, verbatim: "If we’re at war, let’s make it an all-out war, in order to win, to achieve more than a partial victory. Even if the war must last a month, three months, let's wage it. I don't understand why we have not yet bombed Serbian radio and television". Aznar and US government spokespeople have kept silence about this. The text that follows has never before been published. I will use other materials, both public and confidential, in reflections to come. "Aznar: I will speak frankly. As I've already told President Clinton, the one thing that cannot happen is for NATO to be defeated now. Not only NATO's credibility, but its very existence as well, is now at stake. Had this conflict taken place 30 years ago, we would not have intervened. Europe has always been plagued by ethnic cleansings, confrontations between minorities and majorities, religious conflicts. Today, this is no longer tolerable. From the political point of view, we will never be in favor of Kosovo's independence, because of what we said before". Referring to Chirac, the French president, he said:
I ask Mr. Aznar to tell us whether it is true or not that, on April 13, 1999, he advised President Clinton to bomb Serbian radio and television. Fidel Castro Ruz September 29, 2007 One more argument for the UN While working on the already famous Greenspan book, I read an article published by El País, a Spanish newspaper with a circulation of more than 500,000, according to reports; I would like to pass this on to the readers. It is signed by Ernesto Ekaizer, and it literally reads:
Fidel Castro Ruz September 27, 2007 Deliberate Lies, Strange Deaths and Agression to the World Economy In one of my reflections I made reference to gold bars deposited in the basements of the Twin Towers. This time the subject is quite a bit more complicated and hard to believe. Almost four decades ago scientists living in the United States discovered the Internet, the same way that Albert Einstein, born in Germany, discovered in his own time the formula to measure atomic energy. Einstein was a great scientist and humanist. He contradicted Newton's laws of physics, held sacred until then. However, apples continued to fall due to the laws of gravity that had been defined by Newton. These were two different ways of observing and interpreting nature, with very little information on this in Newton's day. I remember what I read more than 50 years ago about the famous theory of relativity elaborated by Einstein: energy is equal to mass times the speed of light, called C, squared: E=MC2. The United States money existed and the resources necessary for such expensive research. The political climate resulting from the generalized hatred against the brutalities of Nazism in the richest and most productive nation in the world destroyed by the war, transformed that fabulous energy into bombs that were dropped over the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and a similar number of people who were exposed to radiation and subsequently died in the following years. A clear example of the use of science and technology with the same hegemonic goals is described in an article written by the former official of United States National Security, Gus W. Weiss; it originally appeared in the magazine Studies in Intelligence, in 1996, even though it was more widely distributed in 2002 under the title of Deceiving the Soviets. There, Weiss claims the idea of sending the USSR software that they needed for their industries, but already contaminated, with the aim of making that country's economy collapse. According to notes taken from Chapter 17 of the book At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War, by Thomas C. Reed, former Secretary of the United States Air Force, Leonid Brezhnev told a group of senior Party officials in 1972: "We Communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their credits, their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs, and by the mid-1980s we will be in a position to return to an aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper hand with the West." This information was confirmed by the Defense Department in hearings before the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1974. In the early '70s the Nixon's government advanced the idea of détente. Henry Kissinger hoped that "over time, trade and investment may leaven the autarkic tendencies of the Soviet system", he considered that détente might "invite gradual association of the Soviet economy with the world economy, and foster a degree of interdependence that adds an element of stability to the political relations". Reagan tended to ignore Kissinger's theories about détente and to take President Brezhnev's word, but all doubts were removed on July 19, 1981 when the new U.S. President met with President Francois Mitterand, of France, at the economic G-7 summit in Ottawa. In a conversation off to the side, Mitterand informed Reagan about the success his intelligence services had in recruiting a KGB agent. The man belonged to a section that was evaluating the achievements of Soviet efforts to acquire western technology. Reagan expressed great interest in Mitterand's delicate revelations and also thanked him for his offer to have the material sent to the United States government. The dossier, under the name of Farewell, reached the CIA in August 1981. It made it quite clear that the Soviets had been spending years carrying out their research and development activities. Given the enormous transfer of technology by radar, computers, machine-tools and semi-conductors from the United States to the Soviet Union, one could say that the Pentagon was in an arms race with itself. The Farewell Dossier also identified hundreds of case officials, agents at their posts and other suppliers of information through the West and Japan. During the first years of détente, the United States and the Soviet Union had established working groups in agriculture, civil aviation, nuclear energy, oceanography, computers and the environment. The aim was to begin to construct "bridges of peace" between the superpowers. The members of the working groups had to exchange visits to their centers. Besides identifying agents, the most useful information brought by the Dossier consisted of the "shopping list" and its aims in terms of acquisition of technology in the coming years. When the Farewell Dossier reached Washington, Reagan asked Bill Casey, the CIA Director, to come up with a secret operative use for the material. The production and transportation of oil and gas was one of the Soviet priorities. A new trans-Siberian gas pipeline was to carry natural gas from the gas fields of Urengoi in Siberia, through Kazakhstan, Russia and Eastern Europe towards the western dollar markets. In order to automate the operation of valves, compressors and storage installations of such an immense enterprise, the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems. They bought some of the first computers on the open market, but when the authorities of the gas pipeline took off for the United States to buy the necessary software, they were turned down. Undaunted, the Soviets searched elsewhere; a KGB operative was sent to penetrate a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to acquire the necessary codes. The United States intelligence, warned by the agent in the Farewell Dossier, answered and manipulated the software before sending it. Once, in the Soviet Union, computers and software worked in unison and they made the gas pipeline work splendidly. But this tranquility was misleading. Inside the software that was operating the gas pipeline, there was a Trojan horse, a term used to describe software lines hidden in the normal operative system which make that system lose control in the future, or whenever it would receive an order from abroad. In order to affect the dollar profits coming in from the West and the domestic Russian economy, the software for the gas pipeline which was to operate the pumps, turbines and valves had been programmed to breakdown after a prudent interval and reset -that's how it was described- the speeds of the pumps and the valve adjustments so that they would work at pressures much higher than those that were suitable for the pipeline's gaskets and welding seams. "The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was the detonation of a small nuclear device…They (the satellites) had detected no electromagnetic pulse, characteristic of nuclear detonations. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry", affirmed Thomas C. Reed in his book. The campaign of countermeasures based on Farewell Dossier was an economic war. Even though there were no casualties in terms of lives lost because of the gas pipeline explosion, significant damage was made to the Soviet economy. As a grand finale, between 1984 and 1985, the United States and its NATO allies put an end to this operation which ended with efficacy the capacity of the USSR to capture technology at a time when Moscow was caught between a defective economy, on one side, and a US President determined to prevail and end the cold war on the other. In the above cited article by Weiss, it is stated that:
Gus W. Weiss is the one who claimed, as already said, the evil plan to have the defective software taken to the USSR, when the United States had the Farewell Dossier in its possession. He died on November 25, 2003 at the age of 72. The Washington Post did not report his death until December 7, that is, 12 days later. They said that Weiss "had fallen" from his apartment building, the Watergate, in Washington, and that a forensic doctor from the US capital had declared his death a "suicide". His hometown newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean, published the death notice a week after the Washington Post and advised that at that time all they were able to say was that "the circumstances surrounding his death have not yet been confirmed." Before dying, he left some unpublished notes titled "The Farewell Dossier": the strategic deception and the economic war in the Cold War. Weiss had graduated from Vanderbilt University. He had postgraduate degrees from Harvard and New York University. His work for the government concentrated on matters of National Security, intelligence organizations and concerns dealing with the transfer of technology to Communist countries. He worked with the CIA, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board and with the Signals Intelligence Committee of the Intelligence Board of the United States. He was decorated with the CIA Medal of Merit and the "Cipher" Medal from the National Security Council. The French gave him the "Légion d'Honneur" in 1975. He had no surviving relatives. Weiss had declared himself to be against the war in Iraq a short while before his "suicide". It is interesting to note that 18 days before Weiss' death, another Bush government analyst also committed suicide -John J. Kokal (58 years old) on November 7, 2003. This man leapt to his death from an office in the State Department where he worked. Kokal was an intelligence analyst for the Department of State in matters dealing with Iraq. It is recorded in already published documents that Mikhail Gorbachev became furious when arrests and deportations of Soviet agents began in various countries, since he was unaware that the contents of the Farewell Dossier were in the hands of the main heads of NATO governments. In a meeting of the Politburo on October 22, 1986, called to inform colleagues about the Reykjavik Summit, he alleged that the Americans were "acting very discourteously and behaving like bandits". Even though he showed a complacent face to the public, privately Gorbachev would refer to Reagan as "a liar". During the final days of the Soviet Union, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR had to work blind. Gorbachev had no idea about what was happening in the laboratories and high technology industries in the United States; he was totally unaware that Soviet laboratories and industries had been compromised and to what point. The White House pragmatists were also blind about these occurrences. President Ronald Reagan played his trump card: Star Wars The Strategic Defense Initiative. He knew that the Soviets could not compete in that league, because they couldn't suspect that their electronics industry was infected with virus and Trojan horses placed there by the United States intelligence community. The former British Prime Minister, in her memoirs, published by an important English publisher in 1993 under the title of Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, states that the whole Reagan plan related to Star Wars and the intent to make the Soviet Union collapse economically was the most brilliant plan of that administration, and it lead definitively to the collapse of socialism in Europe. In Chapter XVI of her book, she explains the participation of her government in the Strategic Defense Initiative. To carry that out, in Thatcher's opinion, was Reagan's "most important decision", and it "was to prove central to the West's victory in the Cold War". It "imposed more economic tension and greater austerity" on Soviet society, and finally, its "technological and financial implications for the USSR were devastating". Under the subtitle of "Reassessing the Soviet Union", she describes a series of concepts whose essence is contained in the paragraphs taken literally from that long passage, where she records the brutal plot.
Later on, under the subtitle of "Visit to Washington: February 1985", Margaret Thatcher states:
But Reagan suffered a strange amnesia about the triggering of the brutal military competition that had been forced on the USSR, with its extraordinary economic cost. His famous diary doesn't say one word about the Farewell Dossier. In his daily notes which were published this year, Ronald Reagan speaks of his sojourn in Montebello, Canada:
The final result of the great conspiracy against the Soviet Union and the crazy expensive arms race that was imposed, when it was mortally wounded in an economic sense is described in the introduction of the book by Thomas C. Reed, written by George H. W. Bush, the first President in the Bush Dynasty, who participated in a very real way in World War II. Literally, he writes:
It is recorded in an article published in The New York Times that the operation used almost all of the weapons within the CIA's reach --psychological warfare, sabotage, economic warfare, strategic deception, counterintelligence, cybernetic warfare-- all collaborating with the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the FBI. It destroyed the burgeoning Soviet espionage machinery, it damaged the economy and destabilized the State in that country. It was a complete success. If the opposite had happened (the Soviets doing it to the Americans), it would have been viewed as an act of terrorism. There is another book which deals with this topic; it is called Legacy of Ashes and it has just been published. On the book's dust cover we can read that: Tim Weiner is a reporter for The New York Times. He has written on American intelligence for twenty years, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the secret national security programs. He has traveled to Afghanistan and other nations to investigate CIA covert operations firsthand. This is his third book. Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50 thousand documents basically coming from the very archives of the CIA, and hundreds of interviews with veterans of that agency, including ten directors. He reveals to us a panorama of the CIA from the days of its creation after World War II, going through its battles during the Cold War and the war against terrorism begun on September 11, 2001. The article by Jeremy Allison, published in Rebelión in June 2006, and the articles by Rosa Miriam Elizalde which were published this year on the September 3 and 10, denounce these events emphasizing the idea of one of the founders of free software who pointed out that: "as technologies grow more complex, it will be more difficult to detect actions of this kind". Rosa Miriam published two straightforward opinion articles, each one only 5 pages in length. If she wants to, she could write a book with many pages. I remember her well from that day when, a young journalist, she nervously asked me, in the middle oSf a press conference 15 years ago no less, whether I thought we could survive the Special Period that had befallen us with the demise of the Socialist bloc. The USSR collapsed with a crash. Since then we have graduated hundreds of thousands of young people from the higher levels of education. What better ideological weapon do we have than the higher level of conscience! We had it when we were a largely illiterate and semi-illiterate people. If you really want to see wild animals, then let instincts prevail in the human being. We could say a lot on this subject. In the present day, the world is threatened by a devastating economical crisis. The United States government is using unimaginable economic means to defend a right that violates the sovereignty of all the other countries: to keep on buying raw materials, energy, advanced technology industries, the most productive lands and the most modern buildings on the face of our planet with paper money. Fidel Castro Ruz September 18, 2007 The Empire and its Lies It was Reagan who created the Cuban American National Foundation, whose sinister involvement in the blockade and in terrorist actions against Cuba would be revealed years later, when the United States declassified secret documents, albeit full of information that had been shamefully crossed out. Had these documents come to light earlier, our conduct would not have been different. When, on March 30, 1981, we received news in Cuba that Reagan had been shot with a low-caliber weapon in an assassination attempt, we sent him a message condemning the act. The 22-caliber lead bullet lodged in one of his lungs was causing him pain and putting his life at risk. The message is contained in the conversation that, following precise instructions, our then minister of foreign affairs, Isidoro Malmierca, had with Wayne Smith, former head of the US Interests Section in Havana. What follow are excerpts, quoted verbatim, of the conversation between the two: “Isidoro Malmierca: We summoned you to this meeting on the express request of President Fidel Castro. He asked me to begin by expressing our appreciation for the information on the assassination attempt on President Reagan that you provided us with through director Joaquín Más. On behalf of President Fidel Castro, we also wish to express how deeply we regret this event and our sincere hope that President Reagan will recover from this attack as quickly as possible. — Wayne Smith: Thank you, very much. “Isidoro Malmierca: We have been receiving information about the medical attention the President is receiving. Initially, you had also received information that the consequences of the attack did not appear to be that severe, but it seems the situation is more complicated and he is undergoing surgery. No comments are needed. Malmierca's version, written immediately after the meeting, speaks for itself. Wayne Smith is today a staunch opponent of the blockade and aggressions against Cuba. But this is not the only example of our conduct towards the President of a country which, since the days of Eisenhower, has hatched hundreds of plots to physically eliminate me. A highly confidential report submitted in the summer of 1984 to an agent responsible for the security of Cuban representatives in the UN warned of a possible assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan by a far-right group in North Carolina. Upon receiving it, we immediately informed US authorities. Our official suggested that we deliver the information via Robert C. Muller, head of security of the US mission to the United Nations, with whom we maintained contact to ensure the protection of Cuban delegations visiting the international organization. The assassination was planned for an imminent date, for Reagan's visit to North Carolina, as part of his re-election campaign.
We had all of the information at our disposal. We had the names of those implicated in the plot; the day, time and place where the assassination was to take place; the types of weapons the terrorists had and where they were being kept. In addition to all this, we knew where the elements who were plotting this were meeting and had a brief account of what had been said at a meeting. The information was given Muller at a meeting in a building located in 37 and 3rd Avenue, two blocks away from the Cuban mission. We provided him with all the information, making sure the most important details, such as the names of those involved, the place, time and type of weapons to be used, were clear. At the end of the conversation, our official informed Muller he had received instructions from the Cuban government to report the matter urgently and that we had selected him because we knew he was an expert on security matters. Muller read out what he had written down to ensure he had not changed anything and that all of the important information was there. He asked about the source and was told it was reliable. He said that the Secret Service would need to meet with the Cuban officials. He was told this would not be a problem. At around four thirty in the afternoon that day, Secret Service agents met with the Cuban representatives. The meeting was held in apartment 34-F, in the 34th floor of the Ruppert Towers building located in 92, between Third and Second Avenue, in uptown Manhattan. The agents were two young, white men with brush haircuts wearing suits. Their chief aim was to verify what Muller had reported, as evidenced by the copy of the cable he had sent them they brought with them. When the contents of the cable were read, they were told no information was missing. The Secret Service agents wanted to know who had provided the information and how it had come into our possession. They were told what Muller was told. They were also interested in knowing if we could elaborate on the information, and they were told that, if any new information were to arrive, they would be immediately informed. They left their cards and asked to be contacted directly if any additional information was received, saying there was no need to use Muller as an intermediary. The following Monday, we received news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had detained a group of people in North Carolina, against whom a number of charges had been brought, none, as is logical to assume, related to the plan to assassinate President Reagan, who traveled to that State shortly afterwards as part of his presidential re-election campaign. Four or five days following the arrests, at the end of the week, Muller phoned the Cuban mission to invite the Cuban official to lunch. They had lunch at the UN delegates' lounge. The first thing Muller did was ask that the official convey the United States' gratitude to the Cuban government for the information provided, confirming that an operation against those involved had been carried out. A Cuban anti-terrorist activist had saved the life of a US President! Some US press reports mention an intimate diary, over 700 pages long, kept by Reagan — from the time he entered office to the day he handed the presidency over to Bush Sr. — which tries to suggest that his G¡government was not that aggressive towards Cuba. However, according to some accounts, in his memoirs, Robert McFarlane, then Undersecretary of State under Alexander Haig, wrote that, of all the governments that had had dealings with Fidel Castro since 1959, Reagan's seemed the least indicated to hold talks with Cuba's communist regime. Perhaps Reagan was grateful for our concern, when he was nearly assassinated in 1981, and for the warning that saved his life from imminent danger, and he expressed this gratitude through Robert C. Muller. Reagan signed the first migratory accord with Cuba, but he could not rise above his milieu, for there were others, further to the right than he was, who would have physically eliminated him, as they did Kennedy after he faced the terrible risk of a thermonuclear war. To be sure, Reagan did change his policy towards Cuba in an electoral year, did not honor the accord he signed which guaranteed the granting of up to 20 thousand visas a year for safe trips by granting less than a thousand, and kept in effect the Cuban Adjustment Act, which has cost Cuba many lives. On September 11, 2001, true chaos reigned in this neighboring country. For long, planes were forbidden to land at airports. A countless number of passenger planes were mid-flight somewhere. These were the news spread by the media in the United States. There were reports of thousands of victims in New York, including Twin Tower staff, firefighters and visitors. There were also reports of people on a passenger plane which was flown into the Pentagon. We offered to supply the United States with clean blood from regular donors if it was needed for any eventuality. Blood donations have long constituted a tradition of the Revolution. These events happened to coincide with the day in which we had convened nearly 15,000 higher education students and university graduates for a 6:00 pm gathering, on the occasion of the re-opening of the Salvador Allende School, where 3,599 young people would begin higher studies and avail themselves of new and tried methods to become primary school teachers. That painful incident occurred six years ago today. Today, we know that the public was deliberately misinformed. I don't recall any talk, that day, of the fact that, in the basements of those towers, whose higher floors housed the banks of multinational corporations and other offices, lay nearly 200 tons in gold bars. An order to shoot to death anyone who attempted to get to the gold had been issued. The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists, information, demolition experts and others. What is most shocking is the claim that we may never know what actually happened. It is known, however, that a number of people en route to San Francisco from New Jersey, had conversations with their relatives when the air vessels were already under the control of individuals who were not members of the crew. An analysis of the impact of planes similar to those against the towers, following accidental plane crashes in densely-populated cities, concludes that no plane crashed against the Pentagon and that only a projectile could have created the geometrically round hole that the alleged plane created. No passenger that perished there has turned up, either. No one in the world questioned the news about the attack on the Pentagon building. We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet's inhabitants. When I spoke at the Ciudad Deportiva sports complex that September 11th, I spoke of the tragedy that had hit the United States. In the interests of conciseness, I am reproducing the following excerpts from that speech: (...) We did not even consider postponing the ceremony. It could not be postponed, despite the international tension created by such events. I would imagine that almost everyone knows about them, but to briefly summarize, at approximately 9:00 this morning, a Boeing airplane, a really big one, crashed straight into one of the two New York famous towers which make up one of the highest buildings in the world. Naturally, the tower caught on fire because of all the fuel from such a big airplane, and some horrific scenes began. And then, 18 minutes later, another plane, also from an U.S. airline, crashed straight into the second tower. Obviously, the country had fallen victim to a violent surprise attack, unexpected, unimaginable, something truly unheard of. And the scenes that ensued were appalling, especially when the two towers were burning, and foremost when they both collapsed, all 100 floors, spilling over onto neighboring buildings, when it was known that there were tens of thousands of people working there, in offices representing many companies from various countries. It was only logical that this would be a shock for the United States and the rest of the world. The stock markets started to collapse, and because of the political, economic and technological importance and the power of the United States, the whole world was shaken up today by those events. So, we had to follow the events throughout the day, but at the same time, we also had to continue thinking about the conditions and circumstances in which this ceremony would take place. Therefore, there were two issues: the school and the extremely important course it will offer, and the political and human catastrophe that had taken place over there, especially in New York. (...) Today is a day of tragedy for the United States. You know very well that hatred against the American people has never been sown here. Perhaps, precisely because of its culture, its lack of prejudice, its sense of full freedom –- with a homeland and without a master -- Cuba is the country where Americans are treated with the greatest respect. We have never preached any kind of national hatred, or anything similar to fanaticism, and that is the reason for our strength, because our conduct is based on principles and ideas. We treat all Americans who visit us with great respect, and they have noticed this and said so themselves. Furthermore, we cannot forget the American people who put an end to the Vietnam War with their overwhelming opposition to that genocidal war. We cannot forget the American people who – in numbers that exceeded 80% of the population - supported the return of Elián González to his homeland. We cannot forget their idealism, although it is often undermined by deception, because –as we have said often times– in order to mislead Americans to support an unjust cause, or an unjust war, they must first be deceived. The classic method used by that huge country in international politics is that of deceiving the people first, to count on their support later. When it is the other way around, and the people realize that something is unjust, then based on their traditional idealism they oppose what they have been supporting. Often these are extremely unjust causes, which they had supported convinced that they were doing the right thing. Therefore, although unaware of the exact number of victims but seeing those moving scenes of suffering, we have felt profound grief and sadness for the American people. We do not go around flattering any government, or asking for forgiveness or favors. We neither harbor in our hearts a single atom of fear. The history of our Revolution has proven its capacity to stand up to challenges, its capacity to fight and its capacity to resist whatever it has to; that is what has turned us into an invincible people. These are our principles. Our Revolution is based on ideas and persuasion, and not on the use of force. (...)That has been our reaction, and we wanted our people to see the scenes and watch the tragedy. We have not hesitated to express our sentiments publicly, and right here I have a statement, which was drafted as soon as the facts were known and handed out to the international media around 3:00 p.m. In the meantime, our television networks were broadcasting news of the events. This statement was scheduled to be read to the Cuban public tonight during the evening TV newscast. I am going to move the time up a few minutes by reading to you here and now the Official Statement from the Government of Cuba on the events that took place in the United States: "The Government of the Republic of Cuba has learned with grief and sadness of the violent surprise attacks carried out this morning against civilian and official facilities in the cities of New York and Washington, which have caused numerous deaths. (...)“It is not possible to forget that for over four decades our country has been the target of such actions fostered from within the United States territory. That is a country with great scientific and medical development and resources, but at some point in time it could need blood of a specific type or plasma –any other product that we could donate, we would be most willing to give-- or medical support or paramedics. We know many hospitals are short of specific technicians and professionals. In other words, we want to express our disposition and readiness to be helpful in relation to these tragic events.
Nothing troubles us. Nothing intimidates us. It would be very difficult to concoct a slanderous accusation against Cuba; not even its inventor and the patent holder would believe it. It would be very difficult. And Cuba means something in the world today. It has a very high moral position, and a very sound political position in the world. The days to come will be tense inside the United States. A number of people will start putting forward opinions.
I reiterate that none of the world's problems, not even terrorism, can be solved with the use of force, and every act of force, every imprudent action that entails the use of force anywhere, is going to seriously aggravate the world problems. The way is neither the use of force nor the war. I say this with the full authority of someone who has always talked honestly, of someone with sound convictions and the experience of surviving the years of struggle that Cuba has lived through. Only reason, and the intelligent policy of seeking strength through consensus and international public opinion, can definitely eradicate this problem. I think this unexpected episode should be used to undertake an international effort against terrorism. However, this international struggle against terrorism cannot be won by eliminating a terrorist here and another one there, by killing people here and there, using similar methods to theirs and sacrificing innocent lives. It can only be won, among other ways, by putting an end to State terrorism and other repulsive forms of killing, by putting an end to genocide, and by seriously pursuing a policy of peace and respect for moral and legal standards. The world cannot be saved unless a path of international peace and cooperation is pursued. (...) We have proven that we can survive, live and make progress, and everything seen here today is an expression of unprecedented progress in all of human history. Progress is not achieved only through the manufacturing of automobiles; developing people’s minds, providing knowledge, promoting culture, and looking after human beings the way they should be looked after makes progress. That is the secret of the tremendous strength of our Revolution. The world cannot be saved in any other way, and by that I mean the situations of violence. Let us seek peace everywhere and protect all the people from that plague of terrorism. There is another horrible plague today, which is called AIDS, for instance. There is another plague, which kills tens of millions of children, teenagers and adults in the world, that is, hunger, disease and a lack of health care and medicines. In the political arena, there are absolutist ideas, and attempts to impose a single way of thinking on the world; this fosters rebellious attitudes and irritation everywhere. This world cannot be saved –and this does not have anything to do with terrorism-- if this unfair economic and social order continues to be developed and applied; an order that is leading the world to disaster, along a path from which there is no escape for the 6.2 billion people living today and the future inhabitants of this planet, suffering ever greater destruction and plunged further into poverty, unemployment, hunger and despair. This has been proven by the masses in places that have already gone down in history, like Seattle, Quebec, Washington and Genoa. The world's most powerful economic and political leaders now find it almost impossible to meet; everywhere we can see that people are less and less afraid, and are rising up. I was recently in Durban, a province in South Africa, and there I saw thousands and thousands of people members of non-governmental organizations; discontent is spreading like wildfire around the globe (...). How enormously different is the conduct of the Cuban government from that of the government of the United States! The Revolution, based on truth, and the empire, based on lies! Fidel Castro Ruz
September 11, 2007 The super-revolutionaries Every day I carefully read the opinions about Cuba in the traditional press agency releases, including those from the peoples which were part of the USSR, those from the People’s Republic of China and others. News reaches me from the Latin America press, from Spain and the rest of Europe. The picture is increasingly uncertain as we face the fear of a prolonged recession like that of the 1930s. On July 22, 1944, the United States government received the privileges granted in Bretton Woods to the most powerful military power, that of minting the dollar as the international exchange currency. After the war, in 1945, with its economy intact, that country had at its disposal almost 70 percent of the world’s gold reserves. On August 15, 1971, Nixon unilaterally decided to suspend the gold backing for each dollar minted. With this he financed the slaughter in Vietnam, in a war that cost more than 20 times the real value of its remaining gold reserves. Since then, the United States economy is sustained by natural resources and the savings of the rest of the world. The theory of continuous growth from investment and consumption, applied by the most developed to the countries where the vast majority is poor, surrounded by luxuries and the wastefulness of a tiny minority of wealthy individuals, is not only humiliating but destructive, too. That pillage, and its disastrous consequences, is the cause of people’s growing rebelliousness, even though very few are aware of the history behind the events. The most gifted and cultivated intellects are included on the list of natural resources and they have their price tags on the world market of goods and services. What is happening with the super-revolutionaries of the so-called far left? Some simply lack realism while others enjoy the pleasure of dreaming sweet dreams. Others still are far from being dreamers and are experts in the subject; they know what they are saying and why they are saying it. It is a well conceived trap that should be avoided. They recognize our breakthroughs as if it were a favor to us. Are they really short of information? That is not how it is. I can assure you that they are absolutely well informed. In certain cases, the alleged friendship with Cuba allows them to attend numerous international meetings and chat with as many people from abroad or from the country as they want, without any objection from our imperial neighbor just 90 miles away from the Cuban shores. What is their advice to the Revolution? It’s pure poison; the most typical of the neoliberal formulae. The blockade does not exist; it would appear to be a Cuban invention. They underestimate the Revolution’s most colossal achievement, its work in education, the massive cultivation of people’s talents. They sustain that some must live doing simple and rough work. They underestimate the results and exaggerate the costs of scientific investments. Even worse: they overlook the value of the healthcare services that Cuba provides to the world; actually, with modest resources the Revolution is stripping bare the system imposed by imperialism which is lacking the human personnel to carry it out. They advise investments which are ruinous, and the services they provide, such as rent, are practically free. If foreign investments in housing had not been stopped in time, they would have constructed tens of thousands without any more resources than the prior sales of that same housing to foreign residents in Cuba or abroad. Furthermore, they were joint enterprises governed by a legislation intended for productive companies. There were no limits for the authority of the buyers as owners. The country would supply services to those residents or clients, without the need of being knowledgeable in science or computers. Many of the dwellings could be acquired by the enemy intelligence agencies or their allies. We need some of the joint enterprises since they control very necessary markets. But you can hardly flood the country with money and not sell our sovereignty. The super-revolutionaries who prescribe such medication deliberately ignore other resources which are truly decisive for the economy, such as the growing production of gas which, when purified, becomes an invaluable source of electricity without affecting the environment and brings with it hundreds of millions of dollars each year. About the Energy Revolution promoted by Cuba, of vital and decisive importance for the world, not one word is spoken. They go even further: they see an energy advantage for the island in the production of sugarcane — a crop that was grown in Cuba with semi-slave labor — to counter the high cost of diesel being guzzled by the automobiles of the United States, Western Europe and other developed countries. The egotistical instinct is being fostered in human beings while the price of food is doubling and tripling. Nobody has been more critical of our own revolutionary work than I have, but they shall never see me hoping for favors or apologies from the worst of the empires. Fidel Castro Ruz September 3, 2007
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Fidel Castro Ruz is the President of Cuba. |
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