http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/mayo/lun19/Reflections-19mai.html
Havana. May 19, 2008
Reflections of Fidel
Two hungry wolves and a Little Red Riding Hood
ONE basic idea has been occupying my mind since my old days as a utopian
socialist. It came from nowhere, with the simple notions of good and evil
inculcated in everybody by the society in which they are born, full of
instincts and lacking in values that parents, particularly mothers, begin to
sow in any society or epoch.
As I did not have a political mentor, hazard and chance were inseparable
components of my life. I acquired an ideology on my own account from the moment
when I had a real opportunity to observe and meditate upon the years I lived as
a child, an adolescent and a young student. For me education became the
instrument par excellence for change in the period in which it has befallen me
to live and on which the very survival of our fragile species might depend.
After many years of experience, what I think today on the delicate issue
is totally coherent with this idea. I do not need to apologize - as certain
people prefer to do - for stating the truth, although it might be hard.
More than 2,000 years ago, Demosthenes, a famous Greek orator, ardently
defended in public squares a society in which 85% of the people were slaves or
citizens lacking in equality and rights, as a natural state of affairs.
Philosophers shared that point of view. The word democracy emerged there. They
could not have been asked for more in their time. Today, with a vast wealth of
knowledge, the productive forces have multiplied innumerable times and messages
via the mass media are drawn up for millions of people; the overwhelming
majority, fed up with traditional politics, do not want to hear anything about
that. Public figures lack confidence at a time when it is most needed by the
peoples given the risks that threaten us.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama, a U.S. citizen of
Japanese origin, born and educated in the United States and with a university
degree in that same country, wrote his book The End of History and the Last
Man, which many people must know as it was highly promoted by the leaders of
the empire. He had become a hawk of neoconservatism and a promoter of the one
way of thinking
According to him, only one class would remain, the U.S. middle class; the
rest of us, I think, would be condemned to live as beggars. Fukuyama was a
definite supporter of the war on Iraq, like Vice president Cheney and his
select group. For him, history ends in what Marx saw as "the end of prehistory."
In the opening ceremony of the Latin American and Caribbean-European
Union Summit in Peru on May 15, English, German and other languages were spoken
without essential parts of the speeches being translated by the television
channels into Spanish or Portuguese, as if in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador or
other nations, Indians, Blacks, mixed-race persons and whites - more than 550
million people, in their vast majority poor - spoke English, German or another
foreign language.
However, these days the grand Lima meeting and its final declaration is
being spoken of with praise. There, among other things, it was understood that
the weapons acquired by a country threatened with genocide by the empire, as
Cuba has been for many years and Venezuela is today, are not to be ethically
differentiated from those that deploy repressive forces to repress the people
and defend the interests of the oligarchy, allied with that same empire. One
cannot convert nations into just one more item of merchandise or compromise the
present and future of the new generations.
The Fourth Fleet was not mentioned, of course, in the televised speeches
of that meeting, as an interventionist and threatening force. One of the Latin
American countries represented there has just practiced combined maneuvers with
U.S. Nimitz-type aircraft carriers, endowed with all kinds of weapons of mass
destruction.
A few years ago the repressive forces in that country disappeared,
tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people. The sons and daughters of
the victims were expropriated by the defenders of the properties of the
wealthy. Their principal military leaders cooperated with the empire in its
dirty wars. They trusted in that alliance. Why fall into the same trap again?
Although it is easy to infer which is the country referred to, I do not want to
mention it in order not to hurt a sister nation.
The Europe that raised its voice in song is the same that supported the
war on Serbia, the U.S. conquest of Iraq's oil, the religious conflicts in the
Near and Middle East, the secret prisons and landings, and the conspiracies of
horrendous torture and assassination hatched by Bush.
That Europe shares with the United States extraterritorial legislation
which, in violation of the sovereignty of their own territories, is increasing
the blockade against Cuba by blocking the supply of technologies, components
and even medicines to our country. Its publicity media is associated with the
empire's media power.
What I said in the first Latin American meeting with Europe nine years
ago in Rio de Janeiro has lost none of its validity. Nothing has changed since
then except the objective conditions, which are making atrocious capitalist
exploitation even more unsustainable.
The meeting's host was at the point of making the Europeans fly off the
handle when, in the closing session, he mentioned certain points proposed by
Cuba:
1) To cancel the debt of Latin America and the Caribbean.
2) To annually invest 10% of what is being spent on military activities
in the Third World nations.
3) To end the enormous subsidies to agriculture which compete against our
countries' agricultural products.
4) To allocate to Latin America and the Caribbean their part of the
commitment of 0.7% of its GDP.
Judging by the faces and the looks, I observed that the European leaders
were swallowing hard for some seconds. But, why get so uptight? In Spain it
would be even easier to make vibrant speeches and marvelous final declarations.
There had been a lot of hard work. The banquet was coming. There would not be
any food crisis on the table. The proteins and liquors would be flowing free.
The only person missing was Bush, who was working tirelessly for peace in the
Middle East, as is his custom. He was excused. Long live the market!
The dominant spirit among the rich representatives of Europe was one of
ethnic and political superiority. All of them were the bearers of capitalist
and consumerist bourgeois thinking and talked and applauded in its name. Many
brought with them the businesspersons who are the pillar and support of "their
democratic systems, guaranteeing freedom and human rights." You would have to
be an export in cloud physics to understand them.
At the present time, the United States and Europe are competing between
and against each other for oil, essential raw materials and markets, now with
the addition of the pretext of combating terrorism and organized crime, which
they themselves have created with voracious and insatiable consumer societies.
Two hungry wolves disguised as good grandmothers, and a Little Red Riding Hood.
Fidel Castro Ruz,
May 18, 2008
10:32 p.m.
Translated by Granma International
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