With more than 25,000 combat missions, NATO air forces backed up the monstrous crime.

They stated that the Libyan government had funds abroad exceeding 200 billion dollars. At this time, nobody knows where the money is nor what has been done with it.

A fraudulent electoral process ensured the overthrowing of the presidency of the most powerful country on the side of George W. Bush, an alcoholic without medical treatment nor the most basic ethical principles, who ordered West Point graduates to be ready to attack without warning 60 or more dark corners of the world.

Such a deranged person, with the use of a small black briefcase, could decide on the use of thousands of nuclear weapons; with a minimal percentage of these, he could put an end to human life on the planet.

It is sad to remember that on the opposite side of the Yankee super-power, another deranged person, with three bottles of vodka in his stomach, declared the disintegration of the USSR and the dismantling of more than 400 nuclear bases in whose range were all the military bases threatening that country.

Those events did not constitute any surprise. Throughout many years of struggle, experience garnered, contact with events, ideas and historical processes did not come as a surprise.

Today the Russian leaders are trying to rebuild this powerful State which had been created with so much effort and sacrifice.

When Pope John Paul II visited our country in 1998, more than once before his arrival I talked about several subjects with one or another of his envoys. I especially remember the occasion when we sat down to dinner in a small room in the Palace of the Revolution with Joaquín Navarro Valls, Papal spokesman, sitting in front of me. To the right was a pleasant and intelligent priest who had come with the spokesman and assisted Pope John Paul II at the Masses.

Curious about the details, I asked Navarro Valls whether he thought that the immense sky with its millions of stars had been made to please the inhabitants of the earth whenever we deigned to look upwards on any given night. “Absolutely” ―he replied. “It is the only inhabited planet in the universe”.

I then turned to the priest and said: what do you think of that, Father? He replied: “In my opinion, there is a 99.9 percent possibility of intelligent life existing on some other planet”. The answer did not violate any religious principle. Mentally I multiplied the figure, who knows how many times. It was the kind of answer that I deemed to be correct and serious.
Afterwards, that noble priest was always friendly with our country. Sharing a friendship does not mean you have to share beliefs.

Today, on Thursday, as it happens with increasing frequency, a European entity with well-known proficiency in the subject, textually states:

Simply reading these news items shows the possibility and the necessity we have of enriching our knowledge which today is fragmented and scattered.

Perhaps it takes us to more critical positions on the superficiality with which we deal with cultural and material problems. I have not the slightest doubt that our world is changing much more quickly than we are capable of imagining.

Fidel Castro Ruz
March 29, 2012
8:15 p.m.

There were so many commissions that, logically, I couldn’t listen to everyone who spoke.

They were meeting in five commissions to discuss a number of issues. Thereafter I, too, took advantage of the breaks to breathe calmly and eat some energy providing food. They surely had more of an appetite given their work and age.

I was impressed by this new generation’s education, with such a high level of cultural development, so different from those learning to read and write precisely in 1961 when the yankee bombers piloted by mercenaries attacked the homeland. The majority of the delegates were children then or had not been born.

I wasn’t so focused on what they said, but in the way that they said it. They were so well prepared and their vocabulary was so rich that I almost didn’t understand them. They discussed every word, and even the presence or absence of a comma in the paragraph under discussion.

Their task is even more difficult than the one assumed by our generation when socialism was proclaimed 90 miles from the United States.

In my opinion, therefore, the principal legacy which we can leave to them is our commitment to revolutionary principles. There is no margin for error at this moment in human history. No one is unaware of that reality.

The Party leadership must be composed of the best political talents among our people, capable of confronting the politics of the empire which are endangering the human species and creating gangsters like those in NATO, capable of launching more than 4,000 bombing missions against an African nation in only 29 days, since the shameful Odyssey Dawn.

It is the duty of the new generation of revolutionary men and women to be exemplary leaders, modest, studious and unwavering fighters for socialism.

Overcoming, in the barbarous stage of the consumer society, the system of capitalist production which promotes and foments the selfish instincts of human beings constitutes, no doubt, a difficult challenge.

The new generation is called upon to rectify and change without hesitation all that needs to be corrected and changed and continue demonstrating that socialism is also the art of doing the impossible: constructing and making a reality the Revolution of the poor, by the poor and for the poor and defending it for half a century against the most powerful state which has ever existed.

Fidel Castro Ruz
April 17, 2011
7:14 p.m.

Yesterday, several news agencies were reporting the information contained in a study published by Beloit College with regard to some facts never seen before in the history of the United States and the world, associated to the knowledge and habits of American university students who will graduate in 2014.

Granma newspaper reported the news using an eloquent language:

1. “They do not wear watches to check the time; instead they use their cell phones.
2. “They believe Beethoven is a dog they saw in a film.”
3. “They think Michael Angelo is a computer virus.”
4. “They believe e-mail is ‘too slow’, used as they are to texting through sophisticated mobile phones.”
5. “Very few of them can write cursive.”
6. “They believe Czechoslovakia never existed.”
7. “They think that American companies have always done business in Vietnam.”
8. “They think that Korean cars have always been running in their country.”
9. “They believe that the United States, Canada and Mexico have always been linked to each other by a Free Trade Agreement.”

I was stunned to realize to what extent education could be distorted and prostituted in a country with more than 8 000 nuclear weapons and the most powerful means of war in the whole world.

To think that there are still people in their right mind capable of believing that my warnings are exaggerated!

Fidel Castro Ruz

August 19, 2010
11:13 a.m.

Modificado el ( viernes, 20 de agosto de 2010 )

Some of his acts wounded the sensibility of world opinion, which viewed with sympathy the African-American candidate’s victory over that country’s extreme right-wing candidate. Basing himself on one of the worst economic crises that the world has ever seen, and the pain caused by young Americans who lost their lives or were injured or mutilated in his predecessor’s genocidal wars of conquest, he won the votes of the majority of the 50% of Americans who deign to go to the polls in that democratic country.

Out of an elemental sense of ethics, Obama should have abstained from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize when he had already decided to send 40,000 soldiers to an absurd war in the heart of Asia.

The current administration’s militarist policies, its plunder of natural resources and unequal exchange with the poor countries of the Third World are in no way different from those of its predecessors, almost all of them extremely right-wing, with some exceptions, throughout the past century.

The anti-democratic document imposed at the Copenhagen Summit on the international community – which had given credit to his promise to cooperate in the fight against climate change – was another act that disappointed many people in the world. The United States, the largest issuer of greenhouse gases, was not willing to make the necessary sacrifices, despite the sweet words of its president beforehand.

It would be interminable to list the contradictions between the ideas which the Cuban nation has defended at great sacrifice for half a century and the egotistic policies of that colossal empire.

In spite of that, we harbor no antagonism toward Obama, much less toward the U.S. people. We believe that the health reform has been an important battle, and a success of his government. It would seem, however, to be something truly unusual, 234 years after the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776, inspired by the ideas of the French encyclopedists, that the U.S. government has passed [a law for] medical attention for the vast majority of its citizens, something that Cuba achieved for its entire population half a century ago, despite the cruel and inhumane blockade imposed and still in effect by the most powerful country that ever existed. Before that, after almost half a century of independence and after a bloody war, Abraham Lincoln was able to attain legal freedom for slaves.

On the other hand, I cannot stop thinking about a world in which more than one-third of the population lacks the medical attention and medicines essential to ensuring its health, a situation that will be aggravated as climate change and water and food scarcity become increasingly greater in a globalized world where the population is growing, forests are disappearing, agricultural land is diminishing, the air is becoming unbreathable, and in which the human species that inhabits it – which emerged less than 200,000 years ago; in other words, 3.5 million years after the first forms of life emerged on the planet – is running a real risk of disappearing as a species.

Accepting that health reform signifies a success for the Obama government, the current U.S. president cannot ignore that climate change is a threat to health, and even worse, to the very existence of all the world’s nations, when the increase in temperatures – beyond the critical limits that are in sight – is melting the frozen waters of the glaciers, and the tens of millions of cubic kilometers stored in the enormous ice caps accumulated in the Antarctic, Greenland and Siberia will have melted within a few dozen years, leaving underwater all of the world’s port facilities and the lands where a large part of the global population now lives, feeds itself and works.

Obama, the leaders of the free countries and their allies, their scientists and their sophisticated research centers know this; it is impossible for them not to know it.

I understand the satisfaction in the presidential speech expressing and recognizing the contributions of the congress members and administration who made possible the miracle of health reform, which strengthens the government’s position vis-à-vis the lobbyists and political mercenaries who are limiting the administration’s faculties. It would be worse if those who engaged in torture, assassinations for hire, and genocide should reoccupy the U.S. government. As a person who is unquestionably intelligent and sufficiently well-informed, Obama knows that there is no exaggeration in my words. I hope that the silly remarks he sometimes makes about Cuba are not clouding his intelligence.

In the wake of the success in this battle for the right to health of all Americans, 12 million immigrants, in their immense majority Latin American, Haitian and from other Caribbean countries, are demanding the legalization of their presence in the United States, where they do the jobs that are the hardest and with which U.S. society could not do without, in a country in which they are arrested, separated from their families and sent back to their countries.

The vast majority of them immigrated to Northern America as a consequence of the dictatorships imposed on the countries of the region by the United States, and the brutal policy to which they have been subjected as a result of the plunder of their resources and unequal trade. Their family remittances constitute a large percentage of the GDP of their economies. They are now hoping for an act of elemental justice. When an Adjustment Act was imposed on the Cuban people, promoting brain drain and the dispossession of its educated young people, why are such brutal methods used against illegal immigrants of Latin American and Caribbean countries?

The devastating earthquake that lashed Haiti – the poorest country in Latin America, which has just suffered an unprecedented natural disaster that involved the death of more than 200,000 people – and the terrible economic damage that a similar phenomenon has caused in Chile, are eloquent evidence of the dangers that threaten so-called civilization, and the need for drastic measures that can give the human species hope for survival.

The Cold War did not bring any benefits to the world population. The immense economic, technological and scientific power of the United States would not be able to survive the tragedy that is hovering over the planet. President Obama should look for the pertinent data on his computer and converse with his most eminent scientists; he will see how far his country is from being the model for humanity he extols.

Because he is an African American, there he suffered the affronts of discrimination, as he relates in his book, The Dreams of My Father; there he knew about the poverty in which tens of millions of Americans live; there he was educated, but there he also enjoyed, as a successful professional, the privileges of the rich middle class, and he ended up idealizing the social system where the economic crisis, the uselessly sacrificed lives of Americans and his unquestionable political talent gave him the electoral victory.

Despite that, the most recalcitrant right-wing forces see Obama as an extremist, and are threatening him by continuing to do battle in the Senate to neutralize the effects of the health reform, and openly sabotaging him in various states of the Union, declaring the new law unconstitutional.

The problems of our era are far more serious still.

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international credit agencies, under the strict control of the United States, are allowing the large U.S. banks – the creators of fiscal paradises and responsible for the financial chaos on the planet – to be kept afloat by the government of that country in each one of the system’s frequent and growing crises.

The U.S. Federal Reserve issues at its whim the convertible currency that pays for the wars of conquest, the profits of the military industrial complex, the military bases distributed throughout the world and the large investments with which transnationals control the economy in many countries in the world. Nixon unilaterally suspended the conversion of the dollar into gold, while the vaults of the banks in New York hold seven thousand tons of gold, something more than 25% of the world’s reserves of this metal, a figure which at the end of World War II stood at more than 80%. It is argued that the [U.S.] public debt exceeds $10 trillion, more than 70% of its GDP, like a burden that will be passed on to the new generations. That is affirmed when, in reality, it is the world economy which is paying for that debt with the huge spending on goods and services that it provides to acquire U.S. dollars, with which the large transnationals of that country have taken over a considerable part of the world’s wealth, and which sustain that nation’s consumer society.

Anyone can understand that such a system is unsustainable and why the wealthiest sectors in the United States and its allies in the world defend a system sustained only on ignorance, lies and conditioned reflexes sown in world public opinion via a monopoly of the mass media, including the principal Internet networks.

Today, the structure is collapsing in the face of the accelerated advance of climate change and its disastrous consequences, which are placing humanity in an exceptional dilemma.

Wars among the powers no longer seem to be the possible solution to major contradictions, as they were until the second half of the 20th century; but, in their turn, they have impinged on the factors that make human survival possible to the extent that they could bring the existence of the current intelligent species inhabiting our planet to a premature end.

A few days ago, I expressed my conviction, in the light of dominant scientific knowledge today, that human beings have to solve their problems on planet Earth, given that they will never be able to cover the distance that separates the Sun from the closest star, located four light years distant, a speed that is equivalent to 300,000 kilometers per second – if there should be a planet similar to our beautiful Earth in the vicinity of that sun.

The United States is investing fabulous sums to discover if there is water on the planet Mars, and whether some elemental form of life existed or exists there. Nobody knows why, unless it is out of pure scientific curiosity. Millions of species are disappearing at an increasing rate on our planet and its fabulous volumes of water are constantly being poisoned.

The new laws of science – based on Einstein’s theories on energy and matter and the Big Boom theory as the origin of the millions of constellations and infinite stars or other hypotheses – have given way to profound changes in fundamental concepts such as space and time, which are occupying theologians’ attention and analyses. One of them, our Brazilian friend Frei Betto, approaches the issue in his book La obra del artista: una vision holística del Universe (The Artist’s Work: a Holistic View of the Universe), launched at the last International Book Fair in Havana.

Scientific advances in the last 100 years have impacted on traditional approaches that prevailed for thousands of years in the social sciences and even in philosophy and theology.

The interest that the most honest thinkers are taking in that new knowledge is notable, but we know absolutely nothing of President Obama’s thinking on the compatibility of consumer societies with science.

Meanwhile, it is worthwhile, now and then, to devote time to meditating on those issues. Certainly human beings will not cease to dream and take things with the due serenity and nerves of steel on that account. It is a duty – at least for those who chose the political profession and the noble and essential resolve of a human society of solidarity and justice.

Fidel Castro Ruz
March 24, 2010
6:40 p.m.

Then I added: “In the morning of this Friday 9, the world woke up to the news that “the good Obama” of the riddle -as explained by Bolivarian President Hugo Chavez Frias at the United Nations- had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I do not always agree with the positions of that institution but I must admit that, at this moment it was, in my view, a positive action. It compensates the setback sustained by Obama in Copenhagen when Rio de Janeiro, and not Chicago, was chosen as the venue of the 2016 Olympics, a choice that elicited heated attacks from his right-wing adversaries.

“Many will feel that he has yet to earn the right to receive such an award. Rather than a prize to the President of the United States, we choose to see that decision as a criticism of the genocidal policy pursued by more than a few presidents of that country who took that nation to the crossroads where it is today. That is, as a call for peace and for the pursuit of solutions conducive to the survival of the species.”

Obviously, I was carefully watching the black president, elected in a racist country afflicted by a deep economic crisis; however, I avoided prejudiced judgments based on his campaign statements and his position as leader of the Yankee executive.

Nearly one month later, in another Reflection entitled “A Science Fiction Story,” I wrote that:

“The American people are not the culprits but rather the victims of a system that is not only unsustainable but worse still: it is incompatible with the life of humanity.

“The smart and rebellious Obama who suffered humiliation and racism in his childhood and youth understands this, but the Obama educated by the system and committed to it and to the methods that took him to the US presidency cannot resist the temptation to pressure, to threaten and even to deceive others.”

And immediately added: “He is a workaholic. Perhaps no other American president would dare to engage in such an intense program as he intends to carry out in the next eight days.”

As it shows in that Reflection, I analyzed the complexity and contradictions of his long journey through Southeast Asia and I wondered: “What is our distinguished friend planning to discuss during his intense journey?” His advisors had claimed that he would be discussing every issue with China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and so on, and so forth.

It is clear now that Obama was paving the way for his remarks of December 1st, 2009, in West Point. That day he made a thorough analysis. He carefully chose and produced 169 phrases aimed at pressing the right “keys” that would win him the support of the American people for a certain war strategy. Cicero´s diatribes would pale beside his assumed postures. That day I had the impression to be listening to George W. Bush. His arguments were no different from the philosophy of his predecessor, except for a fig leaf: Obama was opposed to torture.

The main leader of the organization blamed for the terrorist act of 9/11 had been recruited and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency to fight the Soviet troops, even when he was not an Afghan.

Cuba´s condemnation of the terrorist action and other additional measures were made public that same day. We also warned that the way to fight terrorism was not through war.

The organization of the Taliban -a word meaning student- sprang up from the Afghan forces fighting the USSR; they were no enemies of the United States. An honest analysis would lead to the true story behind that war.

Today, it is not the Soviet troops but the US´s and NATO´s that are occupying that country with great violence. The policy that the new US Administration is offering the American people is the same as that of George W. Bush, who ordered the invasion of Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the attack on the Twin Towers.

The President of the United States is not saying a word of the hundreds of thousands of people, children and elders included, who have perished in Iraq and Afghanistan or of the millions of Iraqis and Afghans suffering from the consequences of the war, even when they had no responsibility whatsoever with the events of New York. Rather than a wish, the final phrase of his speech, “God bless America,” sounded like an order to heaven.

Why did Obama accept the Nobel Peace Prize if he had already decided to fight the war in Afghanistan to the very end? His cynical action was uncalled-for.

He later announced that he would be receiving the Prize in the Norwegian capital on December 11, and then travel to the Copenhagen Summit on the 18th.

Now, we should expect another dramatic speech in Oslo; a new textbook of phrases hiding the real existence of an imperial superpower with hundreds of military basis deployed all over the world; two-hundred years of military interventions in our hemisphere; and, over a century of genocidal actions in countries like Vietnam, Laos and others in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and elsewhere on Earth.

The problem with Obama and his wealthiest allies now is that the planet they dominate with an iron fist is just falling apart.

The crime against humanity committed by Bush is well known, as he ignored the Kyoto Protocol and failed to do for ten years what should have been done long before that. Obama is not an ignorant. He is aware –as Gore was– of the grave danger threatening us all, but he hesitates and shows weakness vis-à-vis that country´s blind and irresponsible oligarchy. He does not act like Lincoln did in 1861 to resolve the slavery issue and preserve national integrity, or like Roosevelt to cope with the economic crisis and with fascism. On Tuesday, he merely cast a timid stone in the troubled waters of international opinion. The manager of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, has stated that the threats to the American people´s health and wellbeing posed by global warming make it possible for Obama to take action without consulting Congress.

None of the wars known to history pose a greater danger.

The wealthiest nations will try to place on the poorest ones the bulk of the burden to save the human species. The wealthiest should be asked to make the greatest sacrifices, be most rational in the use of resources and bring a maximum of justice to human beings.

It is likely that in Copenhagen only a minimum of time will be bought to reach a binding agreement that can really help to find solutions. If that were the case, the Summit could at least be considered a modest step forward.

Let´s see what happens!

Fidel Castro Ruz
December 9, 2009
12:34 PM

For the first time, in both countries a member of their respective ethnic groups has won the presidency.

I had said several times that Obama is a smart and cultivated man in a social and political system he believes in. He wishes to bring healthcare to nearly 50 million Americans, to rescue the economy from its profound crisis and to improve the US image which has deteriorated as a result of genocidal wars and torture. He neither conceives nor wishes to change his country’s political and economic system; nor could he do it.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to three American presidents, one former president and one candidate to the presidency.

The first one was Theodore Roosevelt elected in 1901. He was one of the Rough Riders who landed in Cuba with his riders but with no horses in the wake of the US intervention in 1898 aimed at preventing the independence of our homeland.

The second was Thomas Woodrow Wilson who dragged the United States to the first war for the distribution of the world. The extremely severe conditions he imposed on a vanquished Germany, through the Versailles Treaty, set the foundations for the emergence of fascism and the breakout of World War II.

The third has been Barack Obama.

Carter was the ex-president who received the Nobel Prize a few years after leaving office. He was certainly one of the few presidents of that country who would not order the murder of an adversary, as others did. He returned the Panama Canal, opened the US Interests Section in Havana and prevented large budget deficits as well as the squandering of money to the benefit of the military-industrial complex, as Reagan did.

The candidate was Al Gore – when he already was vice president. He was the best informed American politician on the dreadful consequences of climate change. As a candidate to the presidency, he was the victim of an electoral fraud and stripped of his victory by W. Bush.

The views have been deeply divided with regards to the choice for this award. Many people question ethical concepts or perceive obvious contradictions in the unexpected decision.

They would have rather seen the Prize given for an accomplished task. The Nobel Peace Prize has not always been presented to people deserving that distinction. On occasions it has been received by resentful and arrogant persons, or even worse. Upon hearing the news, Lech Walesa scornfully said: “Who, Obama? It’s too soon. He has not had time to do anything.”

In our press and in CubaDebate, honest revolutionary comrades have expressed their criticism. One of them wrote: “The same week in which Obama was granted the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Senate passed the largest military budget in its history: 626 billion dollars.” Another journalist commented during the TV News: “What has Obama done to deserve that award?” And still another asked: “And what about the Afghan war and the increased number of bombings?” These views are based on reality.

In Rome, film maker Michael Moore made a scathing comment: “Congratulations, President Obama, for the Nobel Peace Prize; now, please, earn it.”

I am sure that Obama agrees with Moore’s phrase. He is clever enough to understand the circumstances around this case. He knows he has not earned that award yet. That day in the morning he said that he was under the impression that he did not deserve to be in the company of so many inspiring personalities who have been honored with that prize.

It is said that the celebrated committee that assigns the Nobel Peace Prize is made up of five persons who are all members of the Swedish Parliament. A spokesman said it was a unanimous vote. One wonders whether or not the prizewinner was consulted and if such a decision can be made without giving him previous notice.

The moral judgment would be different depending on whether or not he had previous knowledge of the Prize’s allocation. The same could be said of those who decided to present it to him.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile creating the Nobel Transparency Prize.

Bolivia is a country with large oil and gas depots as well as the largest known reserves of lithium, a mineral currently in great demand for the storage and use of energy.

Before his sixth birthday, Evo Morales, a very poor native peasant, walked through The Andes with his father tending the llama of his native community. He walked with them for 15 days to the market where they were sold in order to purchase food for the community. In response to a question I asked him about that peculiar experience Evo told me that “he took shelter under the one-thousand stars hotel,” a beautiful way of describing the clear skies on the mountains where telescopes are sometimes placed.

In those difficult days of his childhood, the only alternative of the peasants in his community was to cut sugarcane in the Argentinean province of Jujuy, where part of the Aymara community went to work during the harvesting season.

Not far from La Higuera, where after being wounded and disarmed Che [Guevara] was murdered on October 9, 1967, Evo – who had been born on the 26th of that same month in the year 1959 – was not yet 8 years old. He learned how to read and write in Spanish in a small public school he had to walk to, which was located 3.2 miles away from the one-room shack he shared with his parents and siblings.

During his hazardous childhood, Evo would go wherever there was a teacher. It was from his race that he learned three ethical principles: don’t lie, don’t steal, and don’t be weak.

At the age of 13, his father allowed him to move to San Pedro de Oruro to study his senior high school. One of his biographers has related that he did better in Geography, History and Philosophy than in Physics and Mathematics. The most important thing is that, in order to pay for school, Evo woke up a two in the morning to work as a baker, a construction worker or any other physical job. He attended school in the afternoon. His classmates admired him and helped him. From his early childhood he learned how to play wind instruments and even was a trumpet player in a prestigious band in Oruro.

As a teenager he organized and was the captain of his community’s soccer team.

But, access to the University was beyond reach for a poor Aymara native.

After completing his senior high school, he did military service and then returned to his community on the mountain tops. Later, poverty and natural disasters forced the family to migrate to the subtropical area known as El Chapare, where they managed to have a plot of ground. His father passed away in 1983, when Evo was 23 years old. He worked hard on the ground but he was a born fighter; he organized the workers and created trade unions thus filling up a space unattended by the government.

The conditions for a social revolution in Bolivia had been maturing in the past 50 years. The revolution broke out in that country with Victor Paz Estensoro’s Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR, by its Spanish acronym) on April 9, 1952, that is, before the start of our armed struggle. The revolutionary miners defeated the repressive forces and the MNR seized power.

The revolutionary objectives in Bolivia were not attained and in 1956, according to some well-informed people, the process started to decline. On January 1st, 1959, the Revolution triumphed in Cuba, and three years later, in January 1962, our homeland was expelled from the OAS. Bolivia abstained from voting. Later, every other government, except Mexico’s, severed relations with Cuba.

The divisions in the international revolutionary movement had an impact on Bolivia. Time would have to pass with over 40 years of blockade on Cuba; neoliberalism and its devastating consequences; the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the ALBA; and above all, Evo and his MAS in Bolivia.

It would be hard to try summing up his rich history in a few pages.

I shall only say that Evo has prevailed over the wicked and slanderous imperialist campaigns, its coups and interference in the internal affairs of that country and defended Bolivia’s sovereignty and the right of its thousand-year-old people to have their traditions respected. “Coca is not cocaine,” he blurted out to the largest marihuana producer and drug consumer in the world, whose market has sustained the organized crime that is taking thousands of lives in Mexico every year. Two of the countries where the Yankee troops and their military bases are stationed are the largest drug producers on the planet.

The deadly trap of drug-trafficking has failed to catch Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, revolutionary countries members of ALBA like Cuba which are aware of what they can and should do to bring healthcare, education and wellbeing to their peoples. They do not need foreign troops to combat drug-trafficking.

Bolivia is fostering a wonderful program under the leadership of an Aymara president with the support of his people. Illiteracy was eradicated in less than three years: 824,101 Bolivian learned how to read and write; 24,699 did so also in Aymara and 13,599 in Quechua. Bolivia is the third country free of illiteracy, following Cuba and Venezuela.

It provides free healthcare to millions of people who had never had it before. It is one of the seven countries in the world with the largest reduction of infant mortality rate in the last five years and with a real possibility to meet the Millennium Goals before the year 2015, with a similar accomplishment regarding maternal deaths. It has conducted eye surgery on 454,161 persons, 75,974 of them Brazilians, Argentineans, Peruvians and Paraguayans.

Bolivia has set forth an ambitious social program: every child attending school from first to eighth grade is receiving an annual grant to pay for the school material. This benefits nearly two million students.

More than 700,000 persons over 60 years of age are receiving a bonus equivalent to some 342 dollars annually.

Every pregnant woman and child under two years of age is receiving an additional benefit of approximately 257 dollars.

Bolivia, one of the three poorest nations in the hemisphere, has brought under state control the country’s most important energy and mineral resources while respecting and compensating every single affected interest. It is advancing carefully because it does not want to take a step backward. Its hard currency reserves have been growing, and now they are no less than three times higher than they were at the beginning of Evo’s mandate. It is one of the countries making a better use of external cooperation and it is a strong advocate of the environment.

In a very short time, Bolivia has been able to establish the Biometric Electoral Register and approximately 4.7 million voters have registered, that is, nearly a million more than in the last electoral roll that in January 2009 included 3.8 million.

There will be elections on December 6. Surely, the people’s support for their President will increase. Nothing has stopped his growing prestige and popularity.

Why is he not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

I understand his great disadvantage: he is not the President of the United States of America.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 15, 2009
4:25 PM

He describes the meaning of each one of the measures brought to the people by socialism.

He knows how much a human being suffers when he, his wife, his children, his parents, his neighbors, have nothing, and when a precious few have everything.

He shows the selfishness of the rich who subordinate everything to the blind and inexorable laws of the market, opposed to all rationality in the use of the productive forces. He is constantly proving it with the work being carried out in Venezuela. Chávez flooded Venezuela with books. First he encouraged all citizens to learn to read and write. He opened schools for all children; secondary and technical schools for all the teenagers and youth, the possibility of higher education for them all.

The crème de la crème of oligarchic and counterrevolutionary thinking gets together in Caracas to declare in all the media that Venezuela doesn’t have freedom of the press. Chávez challenged them to take part in the “Hello President” program which is celebrating its tenth birthday to discuss the subject with Venezuelan intellectuals; he would take a seat in the audience, willing to listen to the debate. As I write this Reflection, they haven’t answered a single word.

At 6:40, he again began “Hello”. Chávez’ impassioned words are heard once more on the second day of the celebration. They begin with the presence of the ALBA Ministers of Culture who are participating in an international meeting of the ministers in this field.

During the activity, brilliant speeches are being made, enriching political thinking.

Chávez reiterated his challenge. Again he invited the whiz kids of international oligarchy to have a discussion and they haven’t answered; it is now past 7 p.m.

I shall now concentrate on the brilliant and heartfelt speeches that are being given.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 29, 2009
7:23 p.m.

The case of Hugo Chavez is an exceptional one in the history of politics. Others have achieved fame and celebrity through the written press, on the radio or on television, but never has a revolutionary idea made such efficient use of a communications media. In the Bolivarian Revolution’s epic struggle, if it hadn’t been for this program, imperialism and the oligarchy would have destroyed the Revolution in Venezuela with its almost absolute control of the mass media.

I have made a conservative calculation that in those ten years, President Chavez of Venezuela has dedicated 1,536 hours, the equivalent of 64 full days, to a program for informing and educating the nation.

In that unending exchange, he has been teaching and learning, educating and being educated by the people. He has read, acquired and transmitted knowledge. He has been studying and recommending books, remembering the rich history of his country, the struggles and prophetic dreams of Bolivar, many of whose speeches he knew by heart.

“Hello President” became a program for Venezuela and for those of us on this planet who want to know what is happening and what may happen. As part of my weekly agenda, I dedicate some time to “Hello.”

It is most heartening that the support of the humble and spirited people of Venezuela for Chavez keeps growing. The number of workers and youths who join the revolutionary ranks is growing. He is winning the battle of ideas.

Close family tell me that his health is very good and that they have never seen him more enthusiastic and dynamic; he runs for 40 minutes every day and has lost some extra weight in one month. We are glad. He has been a great friend in the difficult days for the Revolution. We have resisted and we shall steadfastly continue to resist. Today we have more reasons than ever to do so.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 27, 2009
8:37 p.m.

I stopped what I was doing to observe the bright, colorful uniforms of the era and other details of the commemoration event.

So many emotional recollections related to the heroic battle that was decisive for Ecuador’s independence! The ideals and dreams of the epoch were present at that event. Together with Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, were the guests of honor Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales – who are reliving today the yearning for independence and justice for which the Latin Americans patriots fought and died. Sucre was the main protagonist of that immortal deed, impelled by the dreams of Bolívar.

That struggle has not ended. It is arising once again under very different conditions; conditions that perhaps were not dreamed of at that time.

What came to mind was a speech by Dick Cheney that I read on Saturday; it was about national security and had been delivered at 11:20 on the previous Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute and was broadcast by CNN in Spanish and English. It was a response to the speech given by U.S. President Barack Obama on the same issue at 10:27 that same day, and to which he was adding an explanation on the closure of the Guantánamo prison. I had heard him when he spoke that day.

Mention of this piece of forcibly-occupied national territory struck me, in addition to my logical interest in the subject. I didn’t even know that Cheney would be speaking right after that. That is unusual.

Initially, I thought that it could be an open challenge to the new president, but when I read the official version I understood that the rapid response had been put together beforehand.

The former vice president had written his speech with great care, in a respectful and, at times, sugarcoated tone.

But what characterized Cheney’s speech was his defense of torture as a method of obtaining information under certain circumstances.

Our northern neighbor is a center of planetary power; it is the richest and most powerful nation, possessing a number of nuclear warheads that ranges from 5,000-10,000 that can be made to explode on any place in the planet with utmost accuracy. One would have to add the rest of its military equipment: chemical, biological and electromagnetic weapons as well as a huge arsenal of equipment for ground, naval and air combat. Those weapons are in the hands of those who claim they have the right to use torture.

Our country has sufficient political culture to analyze such arguments. Many people around the world likewise understand the meaning of Cheney’s words. I shall make a brief synthesis selecting his own paragraphs, accompanied by brief commentaries and opinions.

He began by criticizing Obama’s speech: “It is obvious that the president would be sanctioned in a House of Representatives because in the House we have the rule of a few minutes,” he said jokingly, even though he for one spoke at considerable length; the translated official version runs for 31 pages, 22 lines per page.

“Being the first vice president who had also served as secretary of defense, naturally my duties tended toward national security. I focused on those challenges day to day…Today, I’m an even freer man…no elections to win or lose, and no favor to seek.

“And though I’m not here to speak for George W. Bush, I am certain that no one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do.”

“Today I want to set forth the strategic thinking behind our policies. I do so as one who was there every day of the Bush Administration –who supported the policies when they were made, and without hesitation would do so again in the same circumstances.

“When President Obama makes wise decisions, as I believe he has done in some respects on Afghanistan, and in reversing his plan to release incendiary photos, he deserves our support. And when he faults or mischaracterizes the national security decisions we made in the Bush years, he deserves an answer.

“Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after September 11th, 2001 was a fading memory.”

He then gives an account of terrorist attacks on the United States over the past 16 years, both inside and outside its borders, listing half a dozen of them.

Cheney’s problem was to broach the thorny issue of torture, so frequently condemned by official U.S. policy.

“Nine-eleven made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat – what the Congress called “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”… We were determined to prevent attacks in the first place,” he stated.

He mentioned the number of people who lost their lives on September 11. He compares it to the attack on Pearl Harbor. He does not explain why the complex action was relatively easy to organize, what previous intelligence reports Bush possessed, or what he could have done to avoid it. Bush had been president for almost eight months. It is well-known that he worked very little and rested a lot. He was constantly going off to his ranch in Texas.

“al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear technology, and A. Q. Khan was selling nuclear technology on the black market. We had the anthrax attack from an unknown source. We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.

“As you might recall, I was in my office in that first hour, when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles an hour. That was Flight 77, the one that ended up hitting the Pentagon. With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave, now. A few moments later I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below.”

Cheney’s version makes it clear that nobody had foreseen that situation and he pays lip service to U.S. pride in assuming that someone holed up in a cave some 15,000 or 20,000 kilometers away could force the president of the United States to occupy his command post in the White House basement.

“In the years since,” Cheney goes on, “I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.

“But since wars cannot be won on the defensive, we moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and sanctuaries.

“We did all of these things, and with bipartisan support.

“We didn’t invent that authority. It is drawn from Article Two of the Constitution.

“And it was given specificity by the Congress after 9/11, in a Joint Resolution authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force” to protect the American people.

“…through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and persons inside the United States.

“The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of The New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times had spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of everyone killed by al-Qaeda on 9/11.

“It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people.

“In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information… that could be gained only through tough interrogations.

“I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.

“The interrogations were used… after other efforts failed.

“They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.

“Our successors in office have their own views on all of these matters.

“By presidential decision, last month we saw the selective release of documents relating to enhanced interrogations. This is held up as a bold exercise in open government, honoring the public’s right to know.

“…the public was given less than half the truth.

“It’s hard to imagine a worse precedent… than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors.

“One person who by all accounts objected to the release of the interrogation memos was the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta.”

Reaching this point however, Cheney had to explain what happened at the Abu Ghraib prison, which filled the world with horror.

“At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency.

“We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance…[we] were not trying to … simply avenge the dead of 9/11.

“From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought…information on terrorist plans.

“For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice.

Apart from the thousands of young Americans killed, maimed and wounded in the Iraq War and the huge funds invested there, hundreds of thousands of children, young and old people, men and women who were not to blame for the attack on the Twin Towers have lost their lives in that country after the invasion ordered by Bush. That enormous mass of innocent victims did not even receive a mention in Cheney’s speech.

He skips that and goes on:

“If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the President is on the path of sensible compromise.

“But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.

“When just a single clue goes unpursued that can bring on catastrophe.

“On his second day in office, President Obama announced that he was closing the detention facility at Guantanamo. This step came with little deliberation and no plan.

“The administration has found that it’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it’s tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America’s national security.

“In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we’ve captured as, quote, “abducted.”

“…and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims…

“The enhanced interrogations…and the terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country safer.

“When they talk about interrogations, he and his administration speak as if they have resolved some great moral dilemma in how to extract critical information from terrorists.

“Instead they have put the decision off, while assigning a presumption of moral superiority…

“Releasing the interrogation memos was flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States.

“The harm done only begins with top secret information now in the hands of the terrorists…

“Across the world, governments that have helped us capture terrorists will fear that sensitive joint operations will be compromised.

“President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogations…

“President Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair, has put it this way: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”

“Admiral Blair put that conclusion in writing, only to see it mysteriously deleted in a later version released by the administration…

“…the missing 26 words that tell an inconvenient truth. But they couldn’t change the words of George Tenet, the CIA Director under Presidents Clinton and Bush, who bluntly said: “I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.

“If Americans do get the chance to learn what our country was spared, it’ll do more than clarify the urgency and the rightness of enhanced interrogations in the years after 9/11.

“We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them.

“It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed. Along the way there were some hard calls. No decision of national security was ever made lightly, and certainly never made in haste.

“As in all warfare, there have been costs – none higher than the sacrifices of those killed and wounded in our country’s service.

“Like so many others who serve America, they are not the kind to insist on a thank-you.”

His attacks on the Obama administration were really fierce but I don’t wish to voice my opinions on that subject. I will however recall that terrorism did not come out of the blue: it is also the method that has been used by the United States to combat the Cuban Revolution.

General Dwight Eisenhower himself, president of the United States, was the first one to use terrorism against our homeland and this wasn’t just a group of bloody actions against our people but dozens of events beginning in 1959 itself, later escalating to hundreds of acts of terrorism every year, using flammable substances, high-power explosives; precision infrared-ray sophisticated weapons; poisons such as cyanide; fungi, hemorrhagic dengue, swine fever, anthrax; viruses and bacteria that attacked crops, plants, animals and human beings.

There weren’t just attacks on the economy and the people; they were also aimed at eliminating the leaders of the Revolution.

Thousands of people were affected, and the economy, whose objective is to sustain alimentation, healthcare and the most basic services for the people, has been submitted to a relentless blockade that is being applied in extraterritorial terms.

I am not inventing these facts. They are on record in declassified U.S. government documents. In our country, despite the very serious dangers that have threatened us for decades, we have never tortured anyone to obtain information.

However painful the actions against the people of the United States on September 11, 2001 – actions that everybody condemned – torture is a cowardly and shameful act that can never be justified.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 27, 2009
12:54 p.m.

Obviously, the State, with its rigor and coercive force, was considered an obstruction by those like Marx, Lenin and other theoreticians, who saw it as an instrument used by the exploiters to impose the heinous capitalist system, and conceived the idea of turning it into an instrument of the Revolution in the stage of transition to an entirely new society.

Colonialists, capitalists and imperialists have created their own codes of conduct and imposed their values. They talk about freedom, democracy, human rights and so on. After the United States was founded, millions of human beings continued working as slaves; the Creator had not granted them any right, as was stated in the Philadelphia Declaration. During almost 100 years they were like merchandise which was bought and sold in the market, and for another 100 years, after the civil war, they were atrociously discriminated against and marginalized. Today, together with the American Indians and the Latin Americans, they are the poorest citizens to be found in the US prisons; they do the toughest and worst paid jobs.

It is never said that billions of people in the world suffer the consequences of ignorance, unemployment, underdevelopment, diseases that curtail their life span to two thirds or by one half -and sometimes less than that- as compared to the life span enjoyed by people in rich countries.

New problems, such as drug trafficking, organized crime, brain drain and illegal migration, add to the old ones. There is even an attempt to control human minds using the mass media and the most modern techniques of the so called entertainment industry.

What supports that order? Wealth and the use of force. For that they have all the money in this world and the most sophisticated military means. Besides, they are the big producers and exporters of weapons that pose no threat whatsoever to their international hegemony, but spur local wars, multinationals profits and their allies’ dependence.

They mint unlimited amounts of the hard currency required by international trade, and with that they acquire properties for their multinationals and take hold of the natural resources and the fruits of peoples’ labor in order to prop up the societies of consumption and waste that they have created.

Furthermore, the United States keeps a monopolist control over the international credit and investment agencies.

Whenever these concerns start going around the minds of many millions in the world who do not let themselves be misled by the lies that are proclaimed, news begin to flow showing different realities.

For example: In the year 2004, the last shown by statistics, the US multinationals’ profits abroad amounted to 700 billion dollars, for which they paid to the Treasury only 16 billion dollars in offsets, which grant special privileges to US companies investing in other countries, thus affecting those which invest inside the US and create jobs in that country. The mere attempt by the present US administration to reduce that privilege gave rise to a protest by important US business organizations whose economic and political power no one can deny.

Gathering a number of national and international news showing the national privileges that country has imposed on the whole world could even be an enlightening pastime. There are politicians inside and outside the United States who take offense if someone dares to describe that system as an empire, as if there were another word that could better define it.

The other side of the coin offers a much gloomier picture. On several occasions reference was made to the seven fleets with which the US imposes its military might on the world, resorting to more than 800 military bases scattered throughout the planet. Guantanamo, whose prison camps and tortures astonished the world’s public opinion, is only one of the hundreds of military bases that they have.

Maybe we could have a better idea of the military power with which the superpower supports the economic and social system it has imposed on humankind by referring to some data which were recently published by the specialized press.

The US military power is based on its nuclear arsenal.

It has 534 Minuteman III and Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM); 432 Trident C-4 and D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) installed on board of 17 Ohio submarines; and around 200 long-range nuclear bombers that can be supplied in mid-air, among them 16 invisible B-2. The missiles carry several warheads. The number of nuclear warheads deployed ranges between five thousand and ten thousand. Its Armed Forces are made up by more than 2 million men. Added to all these there are hundreds of military and communication satellites which make up the space shield and are the means for an electromagnetic war.

Russia, the other big nuclear power, has been surrounded by offensive nuclear weapons.

It is hardly necessary to add one more word, except for being reminded that thanks to the monopoly over money and natural resources, the United States announced yesterday through the Pentagon’s principal commander for cyber-war that that country was determined to lead the global effort to use computer technology to deter or defeat the enemies, while protecting people’s constitutional rights. The news was broadcast by the AP, the main US news agency.

How much security can be found in today’s world? That is a question with no answer!

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 6, 2009
3:32 p.m.