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Reflections |
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Note:The “Reflections of Fidel” pages have moved. Please update your bookmarks as appropriate Past ReflectionsSeptember 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 October 2006 September 2006 May 2006 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005
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Truth and Diatribes — June 22, 2008 We know that people living in industrialized and wealthy countries spend, on average, 25 percent of their income on food. Those who live in nations which were condemned to economic underdevelopment by the former devote up to 80 percent 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 thousand 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 migrated to Europe, whence now they can be brutally returned to their countries of origin if they fail to meet the requirements set down 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 drugs 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 The United States, Europe and Human Rights — June 20, 2008 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 with my state of health, one cannot be sure of the time one has left to live. Nevertheless, I want to express my contempt towards 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 in defense of the rights 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 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 The Elephant and the Ant — June 18, 2008 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: The 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 the 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 Young Communists League this past Saturday June 14th could understand. To describe the concrete development of the class struggle, Marx wrote The Class Struggle in France from 1848 to 1850 and the 18th 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: The 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 off 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 |
Fidel Castro Ruz is the President of Cuba. |
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