While on May 1st, Workers Day, our people are joyfully celebrating this year, which marks half a century since the triumph of the Revolution and the 70th anniversary of the creation of the CTC, our sister republic of Bolivia, committed to the health, education and guaranteed security of its people, is just a few days or even hours away from suffering dramatic events.
As horrifying news arrives from all over the world about the scarcity and cost of food, the price of energy, climate change and inflation, problems that are being presented in unison for the first time as vital questions, imperialism is bent on breaking up Bolivia and subjecting it to alienating work and hunger.
In that country, four of the economically-strongest departments, with the Santa Cruz oligarchies in the vanguard, are aspiring to proclaim their independence, and have projected, with the help of the empire, a program of referendums, for which the mass media has prepared the ground and the opinions of voters with all kinds of illusions and deception.
The armed forces, by virtue of their historic role in a country that has been attacked and divested of access to the sea and other vital resources, do not want Bolivia’s disintegration, but the Yankee plan, perfidiously conceived, is to utilize certain anti-patriotic military groups to get rid of Evo in the interest of unity, something that would be a merely formal gesture once the transnational corporations take over basic productive industries. Imperialism’s dictate is to punish and get rid of Evo.
This is the moment for denunciation and truth.
For not having foreseen and reflected on the factors that have led to a profound international crisis, “every man for himself!” would seem to be the cry currently heard in many parts of the world.
For the peoples and governments of Latin America, it will be an acid test. For our doctors and educators, anything that happens in the country where they are carrying out their noble and peaceful work, it will be one as well. They, in situations of danger, they will not abandon their patients or students.
Fidel Castro Ruz
April 30, 2008