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An acid test — April 30, 2008 While on May 1st, Workers Day, our people are joyfully celebrating this year, which marks half a century since the triumph of the Revolution and the 70th anniversary of the creation of the CTC, our sister republic of Bolivia, committed to the health, education and guaranteed security of its people, is just a few days or even hours away from suffering dramatic events. As horrifying news arrives from all over the world about the scarcity and cost of food, the price of energy, climate change and inflation, problems that are being presented in unison for the first time as vital questions, imperialism is bent on breaking up Bolivia and subjecting it to alienating work and hunger. In that country, four of the economically-strongest departments, with the Santa Cruz oligarchies in the vanguard, are aspiring to proclaim their independence, and have projected, with the help of the empire, a program of referendums, for which the mass media has prepared the ground and the opinions of voters with all kinds of illusions and deception. The armed forces, by virtue of their historic role in a country that has been attacked and divested of access to the sea and other vital resources, do not want Bolivia’s disintegration, but the Yankee plan, perfidiously conceived, is to utilize certain anti-patriotic military groups to get rid of Evo in the interest of unity, something that would be a merely formal gesture once the transnational corporations take over basic productive industries. Imperialism’s dictate is to punish and get rid of Evo. This is the moment for denunciation and truth. For not having foreseen and reflected on the factors that have led to a profound international crisis, “every man for himself!” would seem to be the cry currently heard in many parts of the world. For the peoples and governments of Latin America, it will be an acid test. For our doctors and educators, anything that happens in the country where they are carrying out their noble and peaceful work, it will be one as well. They, in situations of danger, they will not abandon their patients or students. Fidel Castro Ruz Our spirit of sacrifice and the empire’s extortion — April 24, 2008 The first report I saw came from the Italian news agency ANSA on April 22. “La Paz, April 22.— A commission of deputies are to investigate the case of Bolivian scholarship student who died in Cuba, and whose body was repatriated without several vital organs, including the brain. “Guillermo Mendoza, president of the Chamber’s Social Policy Commission, announced that he would ask the Foreign Ministry for all facts on the case, according to the Catholic news agency Fides. “The family of Beatriz Porco Calle, who was studying in Cuba on a scholarship, claimed that Cuban Embassy officials delivered her body without her eyes, tongue, teeth or other vital organs, including her brain, without any explanation whatsoever. “Deputy Mendoza said he would carry out ‘a thorough review’ of Cuban legislation on organ transplants and of the agreements signed by Bolivian scholarship students when they travel to Cuba.” The Spanish news agency EFE has a similar article, but which adds, “…the family of the young woman demanded compensation from the Cuban Embassy in Bolivia, and when it was denied, ‘threatened to go to the press.’” “I think the families have gone too far in asking for ‘compensation,’ said the (Bolivian) foreign minister, who affirmed that his government had done ‘humanitarian work’ in this case,” the article said. For any observer of reality, not much more was needed. Everything could be deduced about what had happened. Despite that, I inquired about the formal paperwork, I asked for details and clarification in order to respond to this alleged and inhuman plunder of a corpse. I asked in addition for specific information, with exact figures, on our medical cooperation with Bolivia, a country of our America that the empire would like to destroy. Since the election of Evo Morales, an Indian through-and-through, in long-suffering Bolivia, we have offered support in public health and education. I remember that afternoon very well. We were convinced that we could save many thousands of lives every year and restore the vision and full health to countless people, at no cost whatsoever to that nation. An intensive, proven comprehensive literacy program was to be implemented immediately in several languages, including the one most spoken: Spanish. In Bolivia, 119 Cuban teachers worked with the goal of transmitting their experience and knowledge, in order to declare it a territory free of illiteracy in just two-and-a-half years. From the start, our country provided the equipment and educational materials necessary to meet this challenge: 30,000 21-inch televisions imported from China; an equal number of VCRs, with 16,459 transformers and 2,000 photovoltaic systems, which comprised a whole network for the subsequent educational courses throughout the day; 1.359 million flashcards for teaching people to read and write in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara; reading booklets and other materials that I will leave out so that this list will not be an endless one. Some solar panels from our reserves for war were sent to Bolivia. The likewise free transport of those materials was officially guaranteed by Cuba to Evo during a visit to our country a few weeks after his victory. For its part, Venezuela, which had just been declared a territory free of illiteracy using the “Yes, I Can Do It” method, joined the program. In Bolivia, 23,727 literacy stations were created, with 76.6% of illiterate people joining up, and 62% of those who did not learn to read and write in elementary school are now able to do so; they were not charged a single centavo. It was, however, in the healthcare field where the greatest cooperation efforts with that nation were made, there where Che and other Cuban and Latin American comrades and a young German internationalist died. In that sphere, no country can compete with Cuba today and perhaps not for quite some time. It is a form of free collaboration with the poorest, and at the same time a source for exporting services to other countries in the world that have many more resources available. In Latin America especially, and in the Caribbean, we have provided free cooperation in that field to the neediest. There are 1,852 compatriots working ardently in Bolivia; of those, 1,226 are doctors; 250 are specialized nurses; 119 are health technicians; nine are dentists; and 86 are professionals and technicians in other fields; plus 102 selected people, dedicated to the vital services of all types needed by Cuban brigades abroad and patients admitted. The Cuban Medical Brigade is working in 215 municipalities in Bolivia’s nine departments, attending to modest people and those who ask for their services. They have optimal equipment, donated by our country. In 18 ophthalmological surgical posts, 186,508 patients have received eye surgery. Their capacity easily exceeds 130,000 annually. Our doctors have now provided almost 12 million consultations since the first ones arrived in Bolivia. Just by calculating, the number of lives saved may be estimated, given that, generally, their patients were not receiving any attention at all. Perhaps the most striking aspect of our medical cooperation lies in the education of 5,291 young Bolivians who are studying medicine in Cuba, including 621 at the Latin American School of Medicine, where three classes have graduated with excellent results, and 4,670 from the new program. I am not exaggerating when I say that the firmest and most combative friends of Cuba in Latin America, and of course in Bolivia, include the families whose sons and daughters are studying that specialty in our country. The number of the passport carried by the young student Beatriz Porco Calle, 22 years old, to whom the news article refers, was 5968246; she was from the department of Oruro, Samara province, municipality of Curahuara de Carangas, rural community of Toypicollana, of indigenous descent and Christian Adventist religion. She was doing well in her second year of medical school, at the Miguel Sandarán Corzo Faculty in Matanzas. She suddenly fainted on March 6 in the bathroom of her dorm. Doctors and professors decided to take her immediately to the provincial hospital. The physical exam did not reveal anything that could explain the reason, nor did the laboratory analysis and other tests, including a CT scan. She recovered well and was released. She presented migraines and dizziness shortly afterwards. Further medical investigation. She felt stressed. The appropriate medications for such situations were applied. On March 23, at 7:30 p.m., loss of consciousness again. Once again to the emergency room, accompanied by a professor; intensive care, where she was diagnosed before dying with what is known as brain death. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Bolivian ambassador were notified, and they prepared travel documentation in case of death, which is what occurred almost one week later, on the 28th. She was sent to the National Institute of Legal Medicine, which was obliged to do an autopsy to establish the cause of death. The pertinent paperwork was strictly followed. The student’s boyfriend and other classmates collected her belongings and sealed the baggage. In the Faculty, a mass on March 31. The Institute’s literal diagnosis: “death by endocraneal hypertension, hemorrhagic cerebrovascular disease due to congenital cerebral vascular malformation within the meninges.” In that case, the extraction of the visceral block and the taking of relevant samples were inevitable. A professor from her Faculty accompanied the body to Bolivia until it was given to her relatives. The Cuban Medical Mission paid for the cost of shipping the body to her hometown and for the funeral. It is hard to write about this. Even harder to read the cables that are transmitting throughout the world the idea of a body stripped of its organs, obliging Cuba to provide these explanations. What happened is quite clear. The empire needs to counteract truths about Cuba that it cannot bear. It schemes and encourages relatives to demand compensation; it assigns the task, as may be seen in one of the cables, and sends a repugnant lie around the world via a parliamentary deputy and the Fides news agency. From there, the demolition machine of its media and media techniques. In our own country — I do not hesitate to say this — there are insensitive people, with scarce knowledge of certain realities, who will quickly and unthinkingly respond by saying, “we shouldn’t be helping Bolivia.” They will never understand that both in politics and in revolution, the alternative to an erroneous or mistaken strategy is defeat. Fidel Castro Ruz Making no concessions to enemy ideology — April 15, 2008 I have decided to write this reflection after listening to a public comment disseminated by one of the media of the Revolution, which I will not specifically mention. We must be very careful about the assertions we make, in order not to play into our enemy’s ideology. We can not blame the Special Period for the system that imperialism has imposed on the world; it did not invent climate change, or a civilization that depends on the consumption of hydrocarbons, where every individual member of a family moves around in automobiles which travel almost empty, or the nefarious idea of turning foodstuffs into fuel. It did not invent world wars for the distribution of the planet, military bases, nuclear and radio-electronic weapons, satellites that spy on everything and hit their target with lethal beams, guided missiles, or submarines that fire from a distance of 1,000 meters under the sea. That is science and technology in the service of death and destruction. It did not invent political geography or determine how much land each nation should own, which resulted from other historical factors. Everything that is said or asserted should be carefully meditated to avoid making shameful concessions. The nature and psychology of human beings should be analyzed; their time for action is very brief, it is just a fraction of a second in the history of the human species. To understand this is a great remedy against all vanities. The Special Period was the inevitable consequence of the demise of the USSR, which lost the ideological battle and led us into a period of historical resistance from which we have not fully emerged as yet. How difficult it is to be brief in the battle of ideas! Fidel Castro Ruz Bush, Millionaires, Consumption and Under-Consumption -— April 10, 2008 No one requires additional proof of the growing hatred that drives the slaughter in Iraq, a country where 95 percent of the population is Muslim —of these, over 60 percent are Shiites and the remainder Sunnis—or the killings in Afghanistan, where over 99 percent of the population is also Muslim —80 percent Sunni and the remainder Shiite. The two nations are also made up of nationalities and ethnic groups of diverse origins and locations. In addition to U.S. soldiers, troops from nearly all European states are based in Afghanistan, including the French reinforcements sent by Sarkozy. The Russians didn’t jump onto the war’s bandwagon; far too much of their blood was spilt there, and the invasion’s political cost was incalculable. It is likely that citizens of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia and the Ukraine perished on Afghan soil fighting as Soviet soldiers. Today, as former Soviet republics, these states are part of or aspire to join NATO. Another significant detail is the fact that the struggle against heroin traffic goes unmentioned in a country where war has turned poppy growers into the only people capable of satisfying the country’s medical demand of opium and, in addition to this, of supplying countless people with the drug. The Russian president notes that NATO has grown from 16 to 28 members. Bush declares he looked into the eyes of his Russian counterpart and read his thoughts —that’s what he uses the teleprompter for— but he didn’t say whether it was written in English or Russian. Over 500 billion dollars were siphoned out of Russia through capitalist Western European countries, a significant part of which was invested in highly profitable companies or luxury homes. The rest was deposited in U.S. banks, with the government’s consent. It was completely illegal and immoral. Before its collapse, the USSR was the victim of acts of sabotage, such as the detonation of a Siberian gas pipeline, using devices run with U.S. software, the empire's Trojan horse. The USSR then fell apart from within before Reagan, as has been demonstrated. I cannot help but recall the Monday of April 3rd, when I laid down the voluminous international news bulletin and opened that day’s Granma edition to distract myself a while. I began by perusing the last page. What a surprise! Juan Varela offered a nearly flawless description of the differences between the 24-hour roadside cafeteria and gas station center of Aguada de Pasajeros, in the province of Cienfuegos, and Nueva Paz, in the province of La Habana. In the first, the battle, which was and is still being fought, has for now been won. In the second, though the battle is being waged, victory has not yet been attained. What does Juan Varela tell us? “The peddlers arrive from different places; they operate as some sort of association and employ a clever warning system. Using signals, they alert each other of the presence of law enforcement or state officials. Showing feline stealth, in a few minutes they can dismantle their stage of operations and transport the goods to a previously agreed to location. There, they await the signal announcing that the coast is clear”. Where do the goods sold by this fifth column in Nueva Paz come from? They are stolen from factories, means of transportation, warehouse or distribution facilities. Those who extol egoism and oppose all forms of restrictions by the State, which they consider meddlesome, will never be capable of building a solid and lasting society, a society which, today, thanks to the development of the productive forces, can only be the fruit of education and conscience, of values which must be sown and cultivated. Thinking is not forbidden. Neither is dreaming. But thinking does not harm to anyone, while dreaming can doom an entire country and even more than that: the human species itself. The development of productive forces by science has been accompanied by the parallel development of destructive forces. Can anyone dispute this? Turning the Granma’s page that same day, I came across the section titled “Chasing the News”, written by columnist Elson Concepción Pérez. The article, which I quote, is priceless: “Not one article in the mainstream press refers to the social differences, the unemployment, the inflation and the other evils that arrived with capitalism. “On the Internet, however, you can see the other side of the coin: a group of 300 Romanians —the richest in the country—, have accumulated more than US $33 billion, which, according to the ‘Top 300’ section of the weekly magazine Capital, is equivalent to 27 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. “While those living below the poverty line are in the millions, the Eastern European nation has one citizen with a fortune calculated at between US $3.1 and $3.3 billion. His name is Dinu Patriciu, and he recently sold a part of the Rompetrol oil company to Kazakhstan’s Kazmunaigaz group for $2.7 billion euros.” Nearly 4 billion dollars. “Dinu dethroned (…) Losif Constantin Dragan, who fell to seventh place with a fortune of between US $1.5 and $1.6 billion, according to the publication. “Gigi Becali, owner of the Steaua Soccer Club, is now in second place with a fortune of at least US $2.8 billion, accumulated primarily in the real estate industry. “Former tennis player and businessman Ion Tiriac, the second richest Romanian in 2006, with interests in banking, insurance and automobiles, is now third with a fortune of over US $2.2 billion.” Thus reports Elson, in detailed fashion, in this section of Granma. Let us not forget that Romania was a socialist country with a fairly well developed oil and petrochemical industry, blessed with a fertile soil and a climate favorable to the production of protein and calorie-rich foods, to name but a few sectors. As in Cuba, there were those with theories about easy access to consumer goods: imperial ears and eyes hungry for these dreams. Another threat posed by developed capitalism is climate change. An AFP cable reports on the declarations of James Hansen, NASA’s chief climate expert. Created by Eisenhower on July 29, 1958, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is an institution that has been decisive in the consolidation of the United States’ current level of power. “We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” James Hansen, 67, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told AFP here. “But there are ways to solve the problem” of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the “tipping point” of 385 parts per million. “(…) The major obstacle to saving the planet from its inhabitants is not technology, insisted Hansen, named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2006 by Time magazine.” “(…) What's become clear to me in the past several years is that both the executive branch and the legislative branch are strongly influenced by special fossil fuel interests," he said (…). "(…) The industry is misleading the public and policy makers about the cause of climate change. And that is analogous to what the cigarette manufacturers did. They knew smoking caused cancer, but they hired scientists who said that was not the case.” “(…) Last year Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress that “interference with communication of science to the public has been greater during the current administration than at any time in my career.” “Government public relations officials, he said, filter the facts in science reports to reduce ‘concern about the relation of climate change to human-made greenhouse gas emissions.’” “(….) The policy makers, ‘the people who need to know are ignorant of the actual status of the matter, and the gravity of the matter, and most important, the urgency of the matter,’ he charged.” Another important fact I want to underscore is this: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a bulwark of the developed capitalist system imposed on humanity, possesses 3,217 tons of gold. The United States, which controls 17 percent of the votes —a privilege granted the superpower after the conclusion of World War II— can veto any decision, even if all other members of the Fund have approved it. The institution, burdened by an oversized bureaucracy, decided to sell off 403.3 tons of gold, to function “more efficiently”. The real reason for this is that it has lost all its customers because of the unfair conditions it imposes on its loans. The 403.3 tons of gold, at the current price, are equivalent to 12 billion dollars. This is a paltry sum: the U.S. government forces the same amount into circulation, to save its banks, in a matter of hours. The empire’s colossal disinformation apparatus which, among other things, referred to my message to intellectuals claimed that Fidel was attacking the use of computers, portraying me as someone detached from reality. During his closing remarks at the UNEAC Congress, Minister of Culture and prestigious intellectual Abel Prieto brilliantly replied to the intrigue, invoking the more than 600 Computer Youth Clubs that have been opened across Cuba in the last 20 years, where over 200,000 Cubans complete computer sciences training programs every year. He also referred to the University of Information Sciences, visited by Congress participants, where over 1,600 well-trained engineers graduate in the specialty every year, and the investment made, during the Special Period, to undertake the nearly impossible project of reconstructing the Cubanacan Art Schools. The persuasive, realistic and cogent words of Esteban Lazo, a black, white-haired man with a voice that resounds with his 64 years of experience, an exceptional witness to these processes having been the Party’s First Secretary in Havana and other provinces before that, gave Abel’s arguments even more strength. If the empire managed to secure control of Cuba again, not one of these higher institutions created by the Revolution would remain to guarantee young people this right. It would send most young people to the countryside, to cut sugarcane. It is a declared policy. It would attempt to steal the artistic and scientific talents Cuba has nurtured, as it has done in other countries in our hemisphere. Having more than 70,000 specialists in general comprehensive medicine and hundreds of thousands of other professionals, helping others, the poorest included, and exporting these services, is a sin of which a Third World country cannot be forgiven. Ultimately, we have held our ground in spite of the blockade, their aggressions and their brutal acts of terrorism for nearly half a century. I had the privilege of listening to important speeches, delivered by invitees from Latin America and other countries, at the 7th Hemispheric Meeting for the Struggle against FTAs and the Integration of Peoples. I thank them for their words of solidarity and join in their causes, which they defend with so much talent and courage. Building awareness and mobilizing the people politically is indeed a lofty slogan! Fidel Castro Ruz
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Fidel Castro Ruz is the President of Cuba. |
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