Perhaps by chance, the following day was the 94th anniversary of the glorious Soviet Socialist Revolution. Indelible pages of history were written by Russian workers, peasants and soldiers, and the name of Lenin will forever shine among men and women who dream of a just destiny for humanity.

These issues are constantly more complex and efforts invested in educating new generations will never be sufficient. For that reason, today I am dedicating a space to comment on this event, in the midst of so many taking place every day on the planet and of which news arrives in a growing number of ways barely imaginable a few decades ago.

I must say that the elections in Nicaragua were in the traditional and bourgeois style, which has nothing just or equitable about it, given that the oligarchical sectors, anti-nationalist and pro-imperialist in nature, as a rule have a monopoly on the economic and publicity resources which – in general and particularly so in our hemisphere – are in the service of the empire’s political and military interests. This precisely highlights the magnitude of the Sandinista victory.

This is a truth which is well known in our homeland since Martí died in combat in Dos Ríos on May 19, 1895, “so that the independence of Cuba will prevent in time the expansion of the United States throughout the Antilles, and that nation falling, with even more force, upon our American lands.” We will never tire of repeating it, especially after our people have demonstrated their capacity to withstand half a century of that empire’s sustained economic blockade and brutal aggression.

However, it is not hatred which moves our people, but ideas. They gave birth to our solidarity with the people of Sandino, the General of free men and women, whose deeds we read about with admiration as students more than 60 years ago now, and lacking the marvelous cultural perspectives of those who, in a few days, together with high school students, will participate in what has become a beautiful tradition: the University Books and Reading Festival.

The heroic death of the Nicaraguan hero who fought against the yankee occupiers of his territory was always a source of inspiration for Cuban revolutionaries. There is nothing strange about our solidarity with the Nicaraguan people, expressed since the very first day of the revolutionary triumph in Cuba on January 1, 1959.

Yesterday, November 8, Granma recalled the heroic death in 1976, barely two and a half years before the FSLN triumph, of its founder Carlos Fonseca Amador, “the tayacán [daring leader] conqueror of death,” as a beautiful song written in his memory says, “bridegroom of the Red and Black Homeland, all of Nicaragua cries out for you ‘Present.’”

I know Daniel well; he never adopted extremist positions and was always invariably faithful to basic principles. Charged with the presidency, based on a collegiate political leadership, he was characterized by his respectful conduct in the context of the varying points of view of compañeros from tendencies which emerged within Sandinism at a certain stage of the struggle before the triumph. He thus became a promoter of unity among revolutionaries and he maintained in constant contact with the people. The great influence that he acquired among Nicaragua’s poorest sectors is due to that.

The profundity of the Sandinista Revolution earned him the hatred of the Nicaraguan oligarchy and yankee imperialism.

The most atrocious crimes were perpetrated against his country and his people during the dirty war that Reagan and Bush promoted by the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Countless counterrevolutionary bands were organized, trained and supplied by them; drug trafficking became the instrument for financing the counterrevolution and the tens of thousands of weapons brought into the country resulted in the death or injury of thousands of Nicaraguans.

The Sandinistas maintained elections in the midst of that unequal and unjust battle.

This situation was compounded by the collapse of the Socialist camp, the imminent disintegration of the USSR and the beginning of the Special Period in our homeland. In these highly difficult circumstances and in spite of the majority support of the Nicaraguan people, expressed in all the opinion polls, a victorious election was made impossible.

The Nicaraguan people were once again forced to endure almost 17 years of corrupt and pro-imperialist governments. The indicators for the health, literacy and social justice implemented in Nicaragua began to fall painfully. However, under Daniel’s leadership, the Sandinista revolutionaries continued their struggle throughout those bitter years, and once again the people restored the government, albeit in extremely difficult circumstances which demanded maximum experience and political wisdom.

Cuba continued under the brutal yankee blockade, additionally suffering the harsh consequences of the Special Period and the hostility of one of the worst murderers who has governed the United States, George W. Bush, son of the father who had promoted the dirty war in Nicaragua, terrorist Posada Carriles’ liberty to distribute arms among Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, and who pardoned Orlando Bosch, the other mastermind of the Cubana passenger plane sabotage.

However, a new stage was beginning in our America with the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the coming to power in Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay of governments committed to the independence and integration of the Latin American peoples.

With satisfaction, I can moreover affirm that Cuba’s solidarity with the homeland of Sandino never ceased in the field of political and social solidarity. In all justice, I should point out that Nicaragua was one of the countries which best utilized Cuba’s collaboration in health and education.

The thousands of doctors who have volunteered their services in that heroic sister country feel highly motivated by the Sandinistas’ excellent use of their efforts. The same could be affirmed in relation to the thousands of teachers who, once in the early phase of the process, went to the remotest mountain regions to teach campesinos to read and write. Today, educational experiences in general and particularly the practices of medical teaching derived from the Latin America School of Medicine, in which thousands of excellent doctors have been trained, have been transferred to Nicaragua. These realities constitute an excellent stimulus for our people.

These details that I am mentioning are no more than an example of the prolific efforts of Sandinista revolutionaries for their homeland’s development.

The fundamental aspect of Daniel’s role and in my opinion, the reason behind his overwhelming victory, is that he never moved away from his contact with the people and the incessant struggle for their well-being.

Today he is a veritably experienced leader who was capable of managing complex and difficult situations, starting with the years during which his country was once again under the aegis of rapacious capitalism. He knows how to manage complicated problems in an intelligent manner, what he can or cannot do, what he must or must not do to guarantee peace and the sustained advance of the country’s economic and social development. He knows very well that the resounding victory is due to his heroic and valiant people, through their broad participation and close to two thirds of votes in his favor. He was capable of achieving close links with workers, campesinos, students, youth, women, technicians, professionals, artists and all the progressive sectors and forces sustaining the country and contributing to its advance. I believe that the call to all democratic political forces prepared to work for the country’s independence and economic and social development is very correct.

In the current world the problems are extremely complex and difficult. But while the world exists, we small countries can and must exercise our rights to independence, cooperation, development and peace.

Fidel Castro Ruz
November 9, 2011
8:12 p.m.

The post The overwhelming victory of Daniel and the FSLN appeared first on Reflections of Fidel.

For one president in the United States with a sense of ethics, in the last 28 years we have had three who committed genocides and a fourth who internationalized the blockade.

The OAS was the instrument for those crimes. Only its expensive bureaucratic apparatus took its ICHR agreements seriously. Our nation was the last of the Spanish colonies after four centuries of occupation and it was the first to liberate itself from U.S. domination after more than six decades.

“Freedom is very dear, and it is necessary, either to live without it or to decide to buy it for its price”, the Apostle of Our Independence taught us.

Cuba respects the opinions of the governments of sister nations in Latin America and the Caribbean who think in a different manner, but it doesn’t wish to be part of that institution.

Daniel Ortega who made a valiant and historic speech in Port of Spain explained to the people of Cuba that the independent countries of Africa did not invite the European former colonial powers to be part of the African Unity. It is a position worthy of being taken into account.

The OAS was not able to prevent Reagan from unleashing the dirty war against his people, mining their ports and resorting to drug trafficking to acquire weapons to fight the war, with which he financed the death, maiming or serious wounding of tens of thousands of young people in a country as small as Nicaragua.

What did the OAS do to protect it? What did it do to prevent the invasion of Santo Domingo, the hundreds of thousands of people murdered or disappeared in Guatemala, the air attacks, the assassinations of prominent religious leaders, the massive repression against the people, the invasions of Grenada and Panama, the coup in Chile, the tortured and disappeared there and in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and other places? Did it ever accuse the United States? What is its historical evaluation of these events?

Yesterday, on Saturday, Granma printed what I had written about the ICHR agreement against Cuba. I was curious later about the stance it adopted against Venezuela. It was more or less the same rubbish.

The Bolivarian Revolution’s access to power was different from that of Cuba. In our country, the political process had been suddenly interrupted by a treacherous military coup promoted by the United States on March 10, 1952, a few weeks away from the general election that was to be held on the first of June of that same year. In Cuba, once again, the people had no other alternative but to resign themselves. Again the Cubans fought, and this time the result was very different. Almost seven years later, the Revolution emerged victorious for the first time in history.

With a minimum of weaponry, more than 90% of which had been captured from the enemy during 25 months of warfare backed by the people, and in the final offensive with a general revolutionary strike, the revolutionary combatants trounced the tyranny and took control of all its weapons and power centers. The victorious Revolution became the source of law just as in any other era in history.

That was not the case in Venezuela. Chávez, a revolutionary soldier like others in our hemisphere, became president by the rules of the established bourgeois Constitution as the leader of Movimiento V República, allied to other leftist forces. The Revolution and its instruments were yet to be created. After the military uprising led by him had triumphed, the Revolution in Venezuela might have possibly taken another route. However, he abided by the established legal norms within his reach as the chief method for the struggle. He developed the habit of consulting the masses as often as necessary.

He submitted the new Constitution to a popular referendum. It was not long before he became aware of the methods of imperialism and its allies in the oligarchy to recover and hold on to power.

The coup on April 11, 2002 was the counterrevolution’s response.

The people reacted and brought him to power again when, isolated and incommunicado, he was at the point of being eliminated by the right wing which was forcing him to sign his resignation.

He didn’t give up and resisted until the very Venezuelan navy released him and air force helicopters brought him back to the Miraflores Presidential Palace which had already been occupied by the people and army soldiers in Fuerte Tiuna who had risen up against the senior officers perpetrating the coup.

At the time I thought that his policy would become more radical; however, concerned for unity and peace, at the moment of greatest strength and support, he was generous and talked with his adversaries seeking their cooperation.

The response given to that attitude by imperialism and its accomplices was the oil coup. Perhaps one of the most brilliant battles he waged at that time was the one he carried out to supply fuel to the people of Venezuela.

We had talked many times since he visited Cuba in 1994 and he spoke at the University of Havana.

He was a true revolutionary, but as he was gaining awareness of the injustice rampant in Venezulean society his thinking took on greater depth until he arrived at the conviction that Venezuela had no alternative other than radical and total change.

He knows even the smallest details of the Liberator’s ideas, a person he profoundly admires.

His adversaries understand that it is not easy to win when faced with the tenacity of a man who struggles without even a moment’s rest. They could decide to take his life but his internal and external foes know what that would mean for their interests. There can be irrational lunatics and fanatics, but neither leaders, peoples or humanity itself are exempt from such dangers.

Considering it calmly, today Chávez is a formidable adversary for the capitalist production system and for imperialism. He has become a real expert on many of human society’s basic problems. I have seen him in these days as he inaugurated dozens of health services. He is impressive. He forcefully criticizes what was happening with vital services such as hemodialysis, which used to be provided in private centers and paid by the State. The poor were condemned to die if they lacked the money. The same was happening with many other services; today, new facilities are available in the hospitals with the support of the most modern equipment.

He masterfully handles even the most insignificant details concerning national production and social services. He is on top of the theory and practice of socialism needed by his country and he makes great efforts through his most profound convictions. He defines capitalism for what it is: he doesn’t draw caricatures of it; he reveals X-rays and pictures of the system.

We are dealing with a peculiar and horrible ensemble of forms of exploitation of human work: unjust, unequal, arbitrary. He doesn’t simply talk about the worker; he shows him on television working with his hands, showing his energy, his knowledge, his intelligence, creating the goods or services that are essential to human beings; he asks them about their children, their families, husbands or wives, their kin, where they live, what they are studying, what they are doing to improve themselves, their age, salary, future pension, all the grotesque lies about property that are being spread by the imperialists and capitalists. He shows the hospitals, schools, factories, boys and girls; he provides facts about the factories being built in Venezuela, the machinery, figures on the growth of employment, natural resources, plans, maps, and he provides news on the latest gas discovery. The most recent measure adopted by Congress: the law nationalizing the 60 key companies supplying services each year to PDVSA, the state oil company, for a value of more than 8 billion dollars. They were not private property; Venezuela’s neo-liberal governments created them with resources belonging to PDVSA.

I had not seen such a clear transformation into images of an idea, broadcast by television. Chávez doesn’t just have a special talent to capture and transmit the essence of the processes but he accompanies it with a prodigious memory; it is rare for him to forget a word, a phrase, a verse, a musical inflection; he combines words that express new concepts. He speaks of a socialism that seeks justice and equality; “while cultural colonialism continues to live in our minds, the old will never die and the new will never be born”. He combines eloquent verses and phrases in articles and letters. Above all else he has shown himself to be the political leader in Venezuela who is capable of creating a party, incessantly transmitting revolutionary ideas to its members and educating them politically.

I especially observed the faces of the captains and other crew members of the ships of the nationalized companies; their words reflect inner pride, gratitude for the recognition, security in the future; the faces of the jubilant young economy students who name him godfather of the promotion at the point of finishing their university studies when he tells them more than 400 of them are needed to move to Argentina, ready to work in the management of 200 new factories in a program agreed to with that country; they will be sent there at the end of their course to be trained in the production processes.

Ramonet was with him; he was amazed at Chávez’ work. When about eight years ago we started our revolutionary cooperation with Venezuela, he was in the Palace of the Revolution, asking hundreds of questions. The writer knows the subject and he racks his brains trying to guess what will be replacing the capitalist production system. The Venezuelan experience is certainly filling him with astonishment. I have been witness to a unique effort in that direction.

It is a battle of ideas that has been lost beforehand by the adversary who has nothing to offer humanity.

No wonder the OAS is hypocritically trying to present him as an enemy of freedom of expression and democracy. Almost half a century has gone by since those chipped and hypocritical weapons came up against the steadfastness of the Cuban people. Today, Venezuela is not alone and it has the experience of 200 years of exceptional patriotic history on its side.

This struggle has barely begun in our hemisphere.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 10, 2009
1:36 p.m.

The post The struggle has barely begun appeared first on Reflections of Fidel.

Up to that point, there was a strange atmosphere at the Summit.

The artistic show organized by the host country really sparkled. I have only seen anything like it on a very few occasions, if ever. A good speaker, seemingly a Trinidadian, had proudly stated that it was unique.

It was a veritable extravaganza of both culture and luxury. I meditated a while. I calculated what all that would have cost and I suddenly realized that no other country in the Caribbean could give itself the luxury of presenting such a spectacle, that the venue of the Summit is immensely wealthy, a species of the United States surrounded by small poor countries. Could the Haitians with their extremely rich culture, or Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica, Guyana, Belize or any other, be the venue of such a luxurious Summit? Their beaches might be marvelous, but they are not surrounded by the towers that characterize the Trinidadian landscape and, with that non-renewable raw material, accumulate the copious resources that currently sustain that country’s wealth Almost all the other islands integrating the Caribbean community, located further to the north, are directly lashed by the hurricanes of growing intensity that scourge our beautiful Caribbean islands every year.

Might somebody at that meeting have remembered that Obama promised to invest whatever money is required in order to make the United States self-sufficient in fuel? Such a policy would directly affect many of the states meeting there who will not possess the technology and the vast investments required for an effort in that or another direction.

Something really made an impact on me on the stage of the Summit that has taken place up until today, Saturday, April 18, at 11:47, when I am writing these lines: Daniel Ortega’s speech. I have promised myself not to publish anything until Monday, April 20 in order to observe what happened in the famous Summit.

He did not speak as an economist, a scientist, an intellectual or a poet. Daniel did not select over-elaborate words in order to impress his audience. He spoke as the president of one of the five poorest countries in the hemisphere, as the revolutionary combatant, on behalf of a group of Central American and countries and the Dominican Republic that are members of the SICA (Sistema de la Integración Centroamericana).

It would suffice to be one of the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who learned to read and write in the initial stage of the Sandinista Revolution, during which the illiteracy rate was reduced from 60% to 12%, or when Daniel returned to power in 2007, when illiteracy had risen to 35%.

His speech lasted approximately 50 minutes, delivered in a measured and calm voice, but if it was to be reproduced in full, it would make this reflection too extensive.

I will synthesize his unique speech using his own words in each of the basic ideas that he transmitted. I won’t use dot, dot, dot and I will only use internal quotation marks when Daniel refers to the textual words of another person or institutions:

“Nicaragua had recourse to the International Court of Justice in the Hague: it filed its case against the policy of war, the terrorist policy that President Ronald Reagan was developing on behalf of the United States.

Our crime: having liberated ourselves from the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, imposed by the intervention of yanki troops in Nicaragua.

Central America has been shaken since the century before last by what have been expansionist policies, policies of war that led us to unite as Central Americans to defeat them.

Then came the interventions, which extended from 1912 to 1932 and left as a result the imposition of the dictatorship of the Somozas, armed, financed and defended by U.S. governors.

I had the opportunity to meet with President Reagan in full wartime; we shook hands and I asked him to end the war on Nicaragua.

I had the opportunity to meet with President Carter and when he told me that “now that the Somoza dictatorship has gone, it was time for the Nicaraguan people to change Nicaragua.” I said to him: No, Nicaragua does not have to change, it is you that have to change, Nicaragua has never invaded the United States; Nicaragua has never mined U.S. ports; Nicaragua has never thrown a single stone against the U.S. nation; Nicaragua has not imposed governments on the United States; you are the ones who have to change, not the Nicaraguans.

Nicaragua was still subjected to the war imposed by the United States; in response to the case that Nicaragua brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the Court found and ruled; it said with total clarity that: “The United States should stop all military action, the mining of ports, funding the war; that it should indicate where the mines were that it had placed and refused to give that information;” it also instructed the United States to compensate Nicaragua for the economic-commercial blockade that it had imposed on it.

The struggles that we are waging in Nicaragua, in Central America and in Latin America to liberate our peoples from illiteracy are struggles that we are waging with the unconditional, generous solidarity of the sister people of Cuba, of Fidel, who was the one who promoted those cooperative literacy processes, and its President Raúl Castro, who has given continuity to these programs, open to all of the Latin American and Caribbean peoples.

Then the Bolivarian people, the people of Venezuela, with their President Hugo Chávez Frías, joined in.

Present here are a large majority of the presidents and heads of government of Latin America and the Caribbean; the president of the United States, the prime minister of Canada are participating; but here there are two major absentees: one, Cuba, whose crime has been to fight for its independence, for the sovereignty of the peoples; lending solidarity, without conditions, to our peoples, and for that it is being sanctioned, for that it is being punished, for that it is being excluded. For that reason, I do not feel comfortable at this Summit, I feel ashamed of participating in this Summit in Cuba’s absence.

Another nation is not present here because, unlike Cuba, an independent nation of solidarity, that other nation is still being subjected to colonialist policies: I am referring to the sister people of Puerto Rico.

We are working to build a great alliance, a grand unity of the Latin American and Caribbean peoples. The day will come when the people of Puerto Rico will also be here in that great alliance.

In the decade of the 50s racial discrimination was institutionalized, it was part of the American way of life: black people could not enter white restaurants, or white bars; children of black families could not go to the schools in which white children studied. In order to break down that wall of racial discrimination – and President Obama knows that better than we do – Martin Luther King said; “I have a dream.” The dream was made real and the wall of racial discrimination was brought down in the United States of America, thanks to the struggles of that people.

This meeting, this encounter is beginning precisely on the day that the invasion of Cuba was initiated in 1961. Talking with the president of Cuba, Raúl Castro, Raúl gave me some information: “Daniel, President Obama was born on August 4, 1961, he was three-and-a-half months old when the Bay of Pigs victory was won on April 19 of that year; evidently, he had no responsibility for that historic event. On April 15, the bombardments; on the 16th, socialism was proclaimed, by Fidel, at the burial of the victims; the invasion started on the 17th; the fighting continued on the 18th and the 19th, the victory, in less than 72 hours. Raúl.” (Raúl told me on his return from Cumaná, that when he wrote a note for Daniel, he made a rapid calculation and made an error on affirming that the Bays of Pigs invasion happened when Obama was three-and-a-half months old, when he should have said that he was born three-and-a-half months afterward; that he was responsible for that error).

That is history. In 2002, likewise in the month of April, on April 11, came the coup d’état with the intention of assassinating a president-elect of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; President Hugo Chávez was captured, and the order went out to assassinate him. When the puppet government emerged, the U.S. government – via its spokesman – recognized the coup leaders and gave the right to the coup leaders. We have the right to say that that is not history; barely seven years ago came those acts of violence against the institutionality of a people, of a progressive nation, in solidarity and revolutionary.

I think that the time I am taking is far less than that I had to spend – three hours – waiting at the airport inside a plane.

Freedom of expression has to be for the large and the little: Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic as an associate. The territorial area is 568, 988 square kilometers. The population adds up to a little more than 41.7 million inhabitants.

We propose that TPS (Temporary Protection Status) is given to all immigrants in the United States, but the causes of emigration lie in underdevelopment, in the poverty in which Central American peoples live.

The only way of halting the flow of emigrants toward the United States is not by raising walls, reinforcing military patrols on the borders is not the only way.

The United States needs the Central American labor force, like it needs the Mexican labor force; when that labor force reaches beyond the demands of the U.S. economy, then come the repressive policies; it is contributing funds without political conditions, without the conditioning of the International Monetary Fund.

We have the thankless task of having to look after the borders with the United States on account of drug consumption.

In Nicaragua alone, last year, the national police seized more than 360 tons of cocaine. That, at the market price in the United States, certainly adds up to more than $1 billion.

How much is the United States contributing to Nicaragua for looking after its borders? It is contributing $1.2 million.

It is not just, it is not equitable, it is not moral that it is the G-20 that keeps on making the major decisions; the hour has come for it to be the G-192; in other words, every country in the United Nations.

Those who have had negotiations with the Fund (IMF) know perfectly well what the Fund has signified, how they have sacrificed social programs, agricultural programs, productive programs, in order to pull out the resources and pay the debt, the debt imposed by the regulations established by global capitalism.

It has been no more than an instrument for establishing and developing – from the metropolises – colonial, neocolonial and imperialist policies.

In that heroic struggle that Mahatma Gandhi waged for India’s dependence from Britain, he said: “Britain has utilized one quarter of the planet’s resources to reach its present state of development. How many resources will India need to reach that same development?”

Now in the 21st century, and since the end of the 20th century, it wasn’t only Britain but all of the developed capitalist countries establishing their hegemony at the cost of the destruction of the planet and of the human species, by imposing the consumer values of their model.

The only way of saving the planet and with that the sustainable development of humanity, will be to establish the bases of a new international economic order, of a new social, political economic model, which is genuinely just, cooperative and democratic.

In the project known as PETROCARIBE and in the ALBA – virtually all the Caribbean countries are in PETROCARIBE – but some Central American countries are also in it. There are SICA countries that are in PETROCARIBE: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama.

“The heads of state and government of the Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela, member countries of ALBA, consider that the draft declaration of the 5th Americas Summit is insufficient and unacceptable for the following reasons:

(He immediately reads the ALBA statement on the document proposed for the Americas Summit.)

“It does not give any response to the issue of the Global Economic Crisis, despite this constituting the greatest challenge that humanity has had to confront in decades.

“It unjustifiably excludes Cuba, without mentioning the general consensus that exists in the region for condemning the blockade and the attempts at isolation to which its people and government have been incessantly subjected in a criminal manner.

“What we are experiencing is a global economic crisis of a systemic and structural nature and not just another cyclical crisis.

“Capitalism has provoked the ecological crisis by submitting the necessary conditions for life on the planet to the predominance of the market and profits.”

In order to avoid this outcome it is necessary to develop an alternative model to the capitalist system. A system in harmony with our Mother Earth and not of the plunder of natural resources; a system of cultural diversity and not of the crushing of cultures and the imposition of cultural values and lifestyles that are far from the realities of our countries; a system of peace based on social justice and not on imperialist politics and wars; a system that does not reduce them to mere consumers or merchandise.

In relation to the U.S. blockade of Cuba and the exclusion of this country from the Americas Summit, the countries of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America reiterate the declaration that all the Latin American and Caribbean countries adopted last December 16, 2008, on the need to put an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed on Cuba by the government of the United States, including the application of the so-called Helms-Burton Act, widely known to everybody.

In my country, Nicaragua, the governments that preceded me fulfilled neoliberal policies to the letter. From 1990, when the Sandinista Front left government, to January 10, 2007, when the Sandinista Front returned to government; it was applied for 16 years.

When the Revolution triumphed in Nicaragua in 1979, the dictatorships and governments imposed and sustained by U.S. governors in Nicaragua, the democrats who had called themselves democrats, left Nicaragua with 60% illiteracy.

Our first great battle was to do away with illiteracy and we began that great battle and managed to reduce illiteracy to 11.5-12%. We were unable to go any further because a policy of war was imposed on us by the Reagan administration.

We handed over government in 1990 with a 12.5% illiteracy rate in the country and received the country, in January 2007, with an illiteracy rate of 35%.

These are not figures invented by the government, they are data worked out by specialized educational and cultural agencies.

That is the result of the neoliberalism applied to Nicaragua, of the privatizations applied in Nicaragua, because public health was privatized, education was privatized, the poor were excluded; for other people the change was good, because they grew rich; the model has demonstrated that it is very successful in terms of accumulating wealth, successful in terms of expanding poverty. It is a great concentrator of wealth and a great multiplier of destitution and poverty.

It is a problem of an ethical order, a problem of a moral order on which the future rests, not only that of the most impoverished countries, like the five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that I have mentioned here, in which we have nothing much more to lose than our chains, if there is not a change of values that allows us to be really sustainable.

It is no longer a matter of ideology, it is not a political matter; it is a matter of survival. And all of us are going there, from the G-20 to the G-5, we, the most impoverished of Latin America and the Caribbean.

I think that we have to take on this crisis that is affecting the world and which is leading to discussions, debates, the search for solutions, taking into account that the current model of development is no longer possible, is no longer sustainable.

The only way of saving all of ourselves is by changing the model.

Thank you very much.”

Daniel’s phrases at the opening of the Summit resembled the pealing of a bell tolling for a politics of centuries applied up until recently to the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

It is 19:58. I have just listened to the words of President Hugo Chávez. It would seem that Venezolana de Televisión smuggled a camera into the “Secret Summit” and transmitted some of his words. Yesterday, we saw him amiably returning Obama’s gesture of going over to where he was and greeting him, doubtless an intelligent gesture on the part of the president of the United States.

This time Chávez got up from his chair, went over to Obama’s chair at the head of a rectangular room together with Michelle Bachelet, and presented him with the well-known book by Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America, systematically brought up to date by the author. I don’t know at which point in the day that took place, I’m simply mentioning the time when I heard it.

It was announced that the Summit is to end tomorrow at midday.

The president of the United States has been very active. According to the news he not only met with the Summit plenary, but also with all the sub-groups in the region.

His predecessor went to bed early and slept for many hours. It would seem that Obama works a lot and sleeps little.

Today, the 19th, at 11:57, I haven’t seen anything new. The CNN channel is without fresh news. I heard the 12 chimes of the clock; at that moment the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago took the Summit platform. I dedicated myself to listening to him, and noticed some rather strange things. Manning’s face was tense. After a while, Obama spoke and then responded to questions from the press; I saw him brusquer, although calm. What most caught my attention is that a press conference was organized, made up of various leaders, at which none of those who opposed the [final] documents spoke.

Manning had previously stated that the document was prepared two years ago when there was not a profound economic crisis and thus the current problems were not approached with total clarity. Undoubtedly, I thought, McCain was missing. Definitely the OAS, Leonel and the Dominican Republic recalled the surname of the military chief of the 1965 invaders and the 50,000 soldiers that occupied it to prevent the return of Juan Bosch, who was not a Marxist Leninist.

Those present at the press conference were prime minister of Canada, an openly rightist man and the only one to have been ill-mannered toward Cuba; Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico; Martin Torrijos of Panama; and, logically, Patrick Manning. The Caribbean leader and the two Latin American ones were respectful toward Cuba. None of them attacked it and they had expressed their opposition to the blockade.

Obama spoke of the military might of the United States, which could help in the war on organized crime and the importance of the U.S. market. He likewise acknowledged that the programs being carried out by the Cuban government, such as sending medical contingents to Latin American and Caribbean countries, could be more effective than Washington’s military strength at the hour of winning influence in the region.

As Cubans, we do not do that in order to win influence; it is a tradition that began in Algeria in 1963, when it was fighting against French colonialism, and we have done so in dozens of Third World countries.

He was brusque and evasive in relation to the blockade in his interview with the press; but he was already born and will be 48 on August 4.

That same month, nine days later, I shall be 83, almost double his age, but now I have much more time to think. I wish to remind him of an elemental ethical principle related to Cuba: any injustice, any crime, in any epoch has no excuse whatsoever for lasting; the cruel blockade against the Cuban people costs lives, costs suffering; it also affects the economy on which a nation is sustained and limits its possibilities of cooperating with services in health, education, sport, energy savings and environmental protection with many poor countries of the world.

Fidel Castro Ruz
April 19, 2009
2:32 p.m.

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