Reflections of Fidel

Dear Hugo Chávez,

Congratulations to you and your people for a victory which, because of its magnitude, is impossible to measure.

Fidel Castro Ruz

February 15, 2009

Oh, I’m so scared! I just about died when I read the statements made by the U.D.I (Independent Democratic Union).

How fortunate for Chile that it is no longer living under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. Reading Chapter 12 of Max Marambio’s book “Las armas de Ayer” (Yesterday’s Weapons), made me recall those dismal days during which the tyrant ordered the bombing of the president’s residence in Tomas Moro.

I swear that if I had the money, I would pay for a mass edition of that book.

Maybe the text is on the Internet. I would be very sorry if it isn’t.

How much I enjoy seeing the rage of the most conservative sector within the oligarchy! Some of its leaders who visited Cuba some years ago did not hesitate to meet with me and show me how competent and wise they were. Not even them did I treat with arrogance.

The last day of Allende’s life was extremely sad.

When he left his home to go to La Moneda after 7:00 a.m., he didn’t wake up his wife, Tencha, who was asleep on the second floor along with their daughters Isabel and Beatriz, known as “Tati”. He thought that the Tomas Moro residence would be the safest place for them. He could not even imagine that it would be bombed by the coup perpetrators.

Max Marambio, head of the elite, well-trained revolutionary youths making up the G.A.P. (Presidential Support Group), wrote: “For the first time in the history of the institution and the country, Chilean fighter planes took off to attack the president elected by the people…and the Hawker Hunters did so with the expertise acquired in training missions, without fearing the real risk of retaliation from the target. And then the image of the smoking ruins of La Moneda circled the globe.”

“…Beatriz, “Tati”, who was carrying in her bulging womb the grandchild that Allende would never get to know”, wrote.

“‘The bombing starts at eleven on the dot! And who knows what will happen there. After the bombing we will attack it with the BUIN and the Infantry School troops’. Then he decided that the tanks will start the attack, and they shot more than fifty rounds against the building’s façade.”

“…Pinochet kept his offer of getting Allende out of the country. However, with his soul stripped bare, he added a sordid comment: ‘And then the plane falls, buddy’. Admiral Carvajal, his interlocutor, was enjoying Pinochet’s remarks.”

I shall be spending the 15th following the news about the Popular Referendum, which should say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the right of the Bolivarian leader, Hugo Chavez Frias, to run again for President of our sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

I, for one, have no doubt whatsoever about his victory.

Fidel Castro Ruz
February 14, 2009
5:11 p.m.

It was 2006. I was really very ill but very much aware of what was happening. During those days around the middle of September, the XIV NAM Summit where Cuba was elected to the Presidency was ending. I could barely sit up and take my place at a table. That’s how I received some important heads of state or government. The Prime Minister of India was among them. The highest ranking visitor I received in that emergency room in the Presidential Palace was the Ghanaian Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, who a few days later would be ending his mandate.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of Algeria, one of the personalities with whom I met, looked me straight in the eye and said: “If you need my blood Fidel, you have it”.

I appreciated it greatly. He had been foreign minister in the government of our friend Houari Boumediene.

Bouteflika as well had just gone through a health crisis that had him teetering on the edge of death. One might say that his recovery was astounding.

His words constituted a noble and selfless support for our cause, which was not expected, by our internationalist spirit that was never exercised in exchange for anything.

His noble gesture took place years after a despicable traitor to the history of his self-sacrificing and combative people coincided, in the city of Monterrey Mexico, with the demands of the head of the empire that I be thrown out of a Summit taking place there, after speaking to the people gathered there, with the exception of Bush who hadn’t touched Mexican soil while I was setting foot on the same land.

Just before the minute I left, Hugo Chavez urgently visited me and, indignant about such high-handed behaviour by the head of state of the host country, he exclaimed: “Fidel, tell me how much oil Cuba needs to defeat the Yankee blockade”.

The dialogue seemed unreal. It isn’t easy to remember, through the mist of emotions, what the exact words of my response were. Doubtlessly, they were words negating my acceptance.

Be that as it may, Cuba’s destiny followed its course. The fate of our people was bound to the legendary memory of Che and the thinking of Marti and Bolivar.

Our future cannot be separated from the events happening next Sunday when the day for approving the Constitutional Amendment begins. There is no other alternative but victory.

The destinies of the peoples of “Our America” will depend substantially on that victory and it will be an event which will have influence on the rest of the planet.

However, what is missing is an acknowledgement to Hugo Chavez for his contribution to Spanish literature. His latest article published yesterday on February 12th under the title of “Chavez’ Lines”, is an inspired document of exceptional quality, of the kind only great writers can pull together. It is pure Chavez, body and soul, reflected in print, the way very few can achieve.

Yesterday’s enthusiastic throng is a spectacle which can only be accessed by television for an incalculable number of people in the world.

The unmasking of the staged self-provocation in the Jewish synagogue is the antithesis of those moving images that in 1945 Soviet troops showed to the world after they stormed and took the Auschwitz concentration camp; they showed the world what had happened to millions of Jews and people from other occupied countries including children, old people and women, imprisoned by the Nazis. It wasn’t Eisenhower’s soldiers making the effort and spilling their blood to liberate them.

The monstrous world of injustices that imperialism has imposed on the planet marks the inexorable end of a system and an era which cannot have long to survive. This too shall run out. We thank our Venezuelan compatriot for his clarion call.

Fidel Castro Ruz
February 13, 2009
11:30 p.m.

The Chilean oligarchs tore their cloths at the visit of President Michelle Bachelet to Cuba.

Alberto Van Klaveren, the Chilean Under Secretary of Foreign Relations, declared that in the February 12th Reflection, the ideas emitted were strictly personal in nature. That is very true since they don’t intend to be anything else.

I welcomed the Chilean head of state with all due respect. I used not one word that might offend the illustrious visitor. That would not have had any common sense. I understood that it was an elemental obligation even though it implied an additional effort for me since it meant hours dedicated to conversation and then to writing about the meeting.

I selected several photos taken by a collaborator from the days when I was head of state and I put them in her hands so that she might decide what to do with them. I made no use of them on my own account.

What is the reason for such an oligarchic brouhaha in regards to the meeting?

Why do they state that my words constitute “a historical interpretation on subjects that are far back in history”, as the ANSA agency tells us?

I have no commitment other than with the historical truth, and history records that Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of America, upon proclaiming Bolivia’s independence, designated a broad strip of the Pacific coast of South America between the 22nd and 23rd parallels. It also records that the Atacama Desert was included in the territory of the newly-born Bolivia when victory was won over the Spanish empire.

Guano, nitrate, copper and other valuable minerals that were later discovered were included in that territory. I was rather moderate in my statement that it was not known whether those minerals were Chilean or Bolivian; it was a diplomatic way of expressing realities, thinking that in the long run Bolivar was conceiving a United Latin America, greater for its conception than for its wealth.

Be that as it may, nobody can take away any of the brilliance or importance from the historical moment that the approval or rejection of the Venezuelan Constitutional Amendment will signify the day after tomorrow.

As for me, I shall always remain faithful to the historic people who sacrificed so many lives starting on September 11, 1973, defending the immortal ideas of President Salvador Allende and I will condemn the wily policies of Augusto Pinochet until my last breath. Can the Chilean oligarchy and the bureaucrats who are attempting to clean it of all responsibility say as much?

Fidel Castro Ruz
February 13, 2009
6:17 p.m.

It doesn’t matter what I say about the friendly meeting, some news agencies and papers will take the information and will print that the old man, convalescing after a serious illness or some other description directed towards reducing the modest value of whatever I expressed to my prestigious interlocutor.

Michelle has the merit of having been elected president of Chile by the majority vote which was bestowed upon the Socialist Party that nominated her. For the first time in recent years in Latin America, a leftist organization had won such a victory, without the backing of money, weapons and the Yankee publicity apparatus.

And especially since this honour had to do with the Socialist Party of Salvador Allende, who died under the deceitful direct air attack on La Moneda where he was occupying his position as the constitutional president of Chile. He neither asked for nor granted any truce. He was determined to die at his post, just as he had promised.

There were no precedents for the sinister treason committed by the head of the Chilean army who pretended and duped everyone right up to the end.

Even the house, at Tomas Moro, where Salvador Allende’s family resided, was also attacked and destroyed.

During very difficult moments in that period, after thousands of people had been tortured, murdered and disappeared, a very young woman named Gladys Marin was leading the Communist Party of Chile, built up throughout decades of effort and sacrifice by the Chilean working class that had taken her to that responsibility.

Gladys Marin and her party made no mistake; they gave all their support to Michelle Bachelet, thus determining the end of the influence of Augusto Pinochet. It was inadmissible that the tyrant who had been designed and led to power by the empire would once again rule the destiny of Chile.

World opinion loathed his conduct.

In spite of that, it has not been nor is it still, easy to undo the legal intricacies that the vengeful and fascist oligarchy, with Yankee help, bound up the Chilean nation, deserving of a better fate.

More than one hundred years ago, in a war begun in 1879, that same oligarchy robbed Bolivia of the maritime coastline that gave it ample access to the Pacific Ocean.

Bolivia suffered an extraordinary historical humiliation in that struggle. Not only was its maritime coastline and access to the ocean stolen away from them, but extensive territories were taken away from that country, authentically American in origin, especially the Aymara and Quechua peoples; territories rich in copper that constituted the greatest reserves in the world, which had been exploited for 130 years and today, its production is up to 5,364 million tons per year, bringing approximately 18,452 million dollars per year to the Chilean economy. One cannot conceive of modern society without the copper metal whose prices have had a tendency to rise.

Other extremely valuable minerals and natural products, some of them already exhausted and other new ones commanding very high prices, have appeared. One doesn’t know which of them were Chilean and which were Bolivian.

The president of Bolivia today, Evo Morales, holds no grudge because of that; on the contrary, he offered his territory for a wide, modern highway over which the products of the efficient Chilean industries, at the top of their form in their growth and with their laborious and productive workers, could be sent to many world markets.

Chile is also particularly efficient in the production of nutritional food and high quality woods, in its agricultural lands, its mountains and its exceptional climate.

There is no other country that surpasses it in the efficiency of its ocean produce and high-demand products like salmon and the other cultivated and natural species that abound in its rich maritime and inland waters.

Today we are very close to February 15th, the day for the referendum on the constitutional amendment in our sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Jose Martí was Cuba’s most profound revolutionary thinker and our national hero. Before the granite effigy of that thinker, Michelle Bachelet laid a floral tribute on behalf of her people, and we are very grateful.

He said about Bolivar, 115 years ago: “What he hasn’t accomplished, is still unaccomplished today; because Bolivar still has things to do in America.”

“Bolivar awakens every one hundred years”, proclaimed the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

At the point of celebrating the second century of his rebellion against the Spanish metropolis Bolivar awakens once again in Chavez’ revolutionary action. If the new leader who is leading his combative people will not attain his goal, it is difficult to imagine that any other leader would be able to achieve it. The media resources of the oligarchy and the empire would not be able to be surpassed.

What should we do then so that this planet does not become like Dante’s inferno, where the sign at its entranceway exhorts us to abandon all hope?

Nevertheless, I harbour the certainty that the Revolution will be victorious in Venezuela, and that in Chile the ideal of socialism for which Salvador Allende struggled and gave his life will finally triumph.

I spoke about those matters with Michelle Bachelet who did me the honor of listening to me with interest, chatting warmly and extensively expressing her ideas.

I shall always be satisfied with her friendly visit.

Fidel Castro Ruz
February 12, 2009
5:12 p.m.

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.

Where does it come from? I wondered. Over and over, the name came to mind of the brilliant German thinker, Immanuel Kant, who together with Aristotle and Plato, formed a trio of philosophers that have most influenced human thinking. Doubtless he was not very far, as I discovered later, from the philosophy of the man closest to the current president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Another recent possibility led me to reflect on the strange surname, the book of Germán Sánchez, the Cuban ambassador in Bolivarian Venezuela: The transparence of Enmanuel, this time without the “I” with which the German philosopher’s name begins.

Enmanuel is the name of the child conceived and born in the dense guerrilla jungle, where his extremely honorable mother, Colombian vice presidential candidate Clara Rojas González, was taken prisoner on February 23, 2002, together with Ingrid Betancourt, who was a presidential candidate in that sister country’s elections that year.

I read with much interest the abovementioned book by Germán Sánchez, our ambassador in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela who, in 2008, had the privilege of participating in the liberation of Clara Rojas and Consuelo González, former National Assembly deputy, from the FARC, the revolutionary army of Colombia, which had taken them prisoner.

Clara had remained in the hands of the guerrilla forces out of solidarity with Ingrid and was with her throughout six years of difficult captivity.

Germán’s book is titled The Transparency of Enmanuel, almost exactly the same name as the German philosopher. It didn’t seem strange to me; in thinking about how his mother was a brilliant and very cultured lawyer; maybe that was the reason she gave her child that name. It simply led me to remember the years of isolation in prison that I experienced after my almost-successful attempt to take over Cuba’s second-largest military fortress on July 26, 1953 and to seize thousands of weapons with a select group of 120 combatants willing to fight against the Batista dictatorship imposed on Cuba by the United States.

Of course, it was not the only objective or the only inspiring idea, but what is certain is that after the triumph of the revolution in our homeland on January 1, 1959, I still recalled some of the German philosopher’s aphorisms:

“A wise man can change his mind. A stubborn one, never.”

“Do not use others as a means to your end.”

“Only through education can a man finally be a man.”

This great idea was one of the principles proclaimed from the initial days following the revolutionary triumph, on January 1, 1959. Obama and his advisor had not been born or even conceived. Rahm Emanuel was born in Chicago on November 29, 1959, the son of a Russian immigrant. His mother was a human rights advocate named Martha Smulevitz; she was sent to prison three times for her activities.

Rahm Emanuel joined the Israeli army in 1991 as a civilian volunteer during the first Gulf War waged by Bush Sr., which used missiles containing uranium that caused serious illnesses in the U.S. soldiers who participated in the offensive against the Iraqi Republican Guard in retreat, and in a countless number of civilians.

Since that war, the peoples of the Near and Middle East have consumed a fabulous amount of weapons, which the U.S. military-industrial complex launches onto the market.

The racists of the extreme right might be able to satisfy their thirst for ethnic superiority and assassinate Obama like they did Martin Luther King, the great human rights leader which, while theoretically possible, does not appear probable at this time, given the protection surrounding the president after his election, every minute, day and night.

Obama, Emanuel and all of the brilliant politicians and economists who have come together would not suffice to solve the growing problems of U.S. capitalist society.

Even if Kant, Plato and Aristotle were to resuscitate together the late and brilliant economist John Kenneth Galbraight, neither would they be capable of solving the increasingly more frequent and profound antagonistic contradictions of the system. They would have been happy in the times of Abraham Lincoln —so admired, and rightfully so, by the new president — an era left far behind.

All of the other peoples will have to pay for the colossal waste and guarantee, above anything else on this increasingly more contaminated planet, U.S. jobs and the profits of that country’s large transnationals.

Fidel Castro Ruz
Febrero 8, 2009
5:16 p.m.

The response came barely a few hours later. Rahm Emmanuel, the White House chief of staff, spoke. It is of no importance that he failed to mention my modest Reflection. What is important is the response.

He told journalists that what interests President Obama is the Cuban-American community. It was the first time that he mentioned the subject since the inauguration. Those Cubans qualified to do so had voted 3 to 1 for the Democratic candidate in the state of Florida. The almost 12 million Cubans inhabiting the island do not interest him (Obama).

When they asked him to specify his candidate in Cuba, the man closest to the president did not wish to go into the subject in depth: “I think that the less said on Cuba, the better.”

“He will authorize Cuban-Americans to travel to Cuba and send remittances.”

Regarding the right of U.S. citizens to travel, he didn’t even mention it.

For him, the Cuban Adjustment Act and the blockade were not worthy of any reference whatsoever.

Thus, sooner rather than later, Obama’s politics are losing their virginity.

Fidel Castro Ruz
February 5, 2009
7:12 p.m.

The other day I noted some of Obama’s ideas that point to his role within a system that is the negation of every just principle.

Some throw up their hands in horror at the expression of any critical opinion of this important figure, even when it is done decently and respectfully. This is usually accompanied by subtle and not so subtle darts from those who possess the means to circulate and transform such opinions into elements of media terrorism, imposed on the peoples in order to sustain the unsustainable.

Every criticism I make is construed as an ‘attack,’ an accusation or other similar nouns that reflect a lack of consideration and courtesy toward the person to whom they are directed.

This time I’d rather ask some questions of the many that could be raised and that the new President of the United States should answer.

For example, the following:

Will he renounce or not his prerogative as president of the United States — and as exercised by many in the same office with very few exceptions as a per se right — of the power to order the assassination of foreign political adversaries, who always tend to be from underdeveloped countries?

Maybe one of his many assistants has informed him at some point of the sinister actions against Cuba undertaken by presidents, from Eisenhower and those who followed him, in the years 1960, ‘61, ‘62, ‘63, ‘64, ‘65, ‘66 and ‘67, including the mercenary Bay of Pigs invasion, campaigns of terror, the smuggling of vast quantities of weapons and explosives into our territory and other similar actions?

I do not wish to cast any blame on Barack Obama, the current president of the United States, for acts that his presidential predecessors carried out before he was born or when he was just a child of six, born in Hawaii to a Muslim, black Kenyan father and a white American Christian mother. On the contrary, in the society of the United States, that constitutes an exceptional merit, which I am one of the first to recognize.

Does President Obama know that for entire decades our country was the victim of deliberately introduced viruses and bacteria carrying diseases and plagues that affected humans, animals and plants, some of which — like hemorrhagic dengue fever — subsequently led to epidemics that cost the lives of thousands of children in Latin America, and plagues that affected the economy of the nations of the Caribbean and the rest of the continent, as collateral damage that it has not been possible to eliminate?

Was he aware that a number of politically subordinated Latin American countries — today ashamed of the damage that they caused — participated in these acts of terrorism?

Why has a disruptive Cuban Adjustment Act been imposed on our people, the only such case in the world, engendering the trafficking of humans and acts that have cost people’s lives, fundamentally women and children,?

Was it just to implement an economic blockade against our people that has lasted for close to 50 years?

Was it correct to arbitrarily demand of the world the extraterritorial extension of that blockade, which can only generate hunger and scarcity for any nation?

The United States cannot satisfy its vital needs without the extraction of vast mineral resources from a large number of countries which, in many cases, are restricted to exporting these without intermediary refining processes, an activity that, in general, if it suits the empire’s interests, is marketed by the large transnational corporations of yanqui capital.

Will that country renounce such privileges?

Is such a renunciation compatible with the developed capitalist system?

When Mr. Obama promises to invest considerable sums in order to become self-sufficient in oil, in spite of his county currently constituting the largest market in the world, what will happen to those nations whose basic income is derived from exporting that energy, many of them without any other significant source of income?

When, as after any crisis, the competing and battling for markets and sources of employment are once again unleashed among those who best and most efficiently monopolize technologies with sophisticated means of production, what possibilities are left to the underdeveloped countries that dream of industrialization?

However efficient the new vehicles that the automobile industry attains might be, will those procedures perhaps be what ecology requires for protecting humanity from the growing deterioration of the climate?

Can the blind philosophy of the market replace what only rationality can promote?

Obama is promising to print vast quantities of money in search of technologies that will multiply the production of energy, without which modern societies would be paralyzed.

The energy sources that he has promised to rapidly develop include nuclear plants, which already have a high number of opponents, given the large risk of accidents with disastrous effects on life, the atmosphere and human alimentation. It is absolutely impossible to guarantee that such accidents will not take place.

Modern industry has already contaminated all the seas on the planet with the release of toxins, even without such accidental disasters.

Is it correct to promise the conciliation of such contradictory and antagonistic interests without transgressing ethics?

In order to please the trade unions that supported their campaign, the U.S. House of Representatives, dominated by Democrats, has launched the extremely protectionist slogan “Buy U.S. products,” which casts aside a basic principle of the World Trade Organization, given that all the nations of the world, large or small, base their dreams of development on the exchange of goods and services for which, however, only the largest and those rich in natural resources have the privilege to survive to realize such dreams.

Republicans in the United States, hit hard by the discredit brought upon them by the blunders of the Bush government, have been neither slow nor tardy in forestalling Obama’s indulgencies to his trade union allies. Hence, the credit that voters granted the new president of the United States is being squandered.

As an old politician and fighter, I am committing no sin by modestly expounding these ideas.

Questions without easy answers could be formulated every day in line with the publication of hundreds of news items from the political, scientific and technological spheres that are reaching every country in the world.

Fidel Castro Ruz
February 4, 2009
5:14 p.m.