http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/septiembre/mier12/37reflexiones.html
Havana. September 12, 2007
Translated by ESTI
Reflections of President Fidel Castro
The Empire and Its Lies
It was Reagan who created the Cuban American National Foundation,
whose sinister involvement in the blockade and in terrorist actions against
Cuba would be revealed years later, when the United States declassified secret
documents, albeit full of information that had been shamefully crossed out. Had
these documents come to light earlier, our conduct would not have been
different.
When, on March 30, 1981, we received news in Cuba that Reagan had
been shot with a low-caliber weapon in an assassination attempt, we sent him a
message condemning the act. The 22-caliber lead bullet lodged in one of his
lungs was causing him pain and putting his life at risk. The message is
contained in the conversation that, following precise instructions, our then
minister of foreign affairs, Isidoro Malmierca, had with Wayne Smith, former
head of the US Interests Section in Havana.
What follow are excerpts, quoted verbatim, of the conversation
between the two:
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: We summoned you to this meeting on the express
request of President Fidel Castro. He asked me to begin by expressing our
appreciation for the information on the assassination attempt on President
Reagan that you provided us with through director Joaquín Más. On behalf of
President Fidel Castro, we also wish to express how deeply we regret this event
and our sincere hope that President Reagan will recover from this attack as
quickly as possible.
"WAYNE SMITH: Thank you, very much.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: We have been receiving information about the
medical attention the President is receiving. Initially, you had also received
information that the consequences of the attack did not appear to be that
severe, but it seems the situation is more complicated and he is undergoing
surgery.
"WAYNE SMITH: Yes. Our impression is that he has been operated on
already, but over the radio they are now saying that the operation is to begin
now. It is likely to be over in, say, an hour. A 3-hour surgery, I mean, is
nothing simple, especially for a 70-year-old man. They say there's no danger.
My interpretation of this is that there's no immediate danger. But, for a
70-year-old man, a 3-hour surgery is a serious matter. They say he is not in
serious condition, that his condition is stable. We hope everything goes well.
I thank you for your best wishes, your concern and President Fidel Castro's
message.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: In Washington, Mr. Frechette also approached
the Cuban Interests Section and conveyed us information on this situation. He
explained that you had also received information on this. Again, President
Fidel Castro personally asked me to meet with you and to express our sincere
hope that President Reagan recover promptly from the consequences of the
attack.
"WAYNE SMITH: Thank you, very much. My God! This is a difficult
situation. President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and it looks as though
the person responsible for the assassination attempt on Reagan is from Dallas.
He currently lives in Colorado, but he's from Dallas. I don't know...
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: In some cables, I read that he was born near
Denver, 30 kilometers from Denver.
"WAYNE SMITH: I don't know. One of my consuls here in the Interests
Section told me he had heard on the radio that it's a guy who studied in the
same school he did. I don't know, he may have lived a number of years in
Dallas. I don't know what's in the air people breath in Dallas.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: They say they're three brothers, the sons of a
man who's in the oil business.
"WAYNE SMITH: His dad, yes. He's 22 years old. He was a student at
Yale University, but he had recently abandoned his studies. He may feel bitter,
a young man who has failed, who acted out of resentment. To be completely
frank, I'm glad it's a guy like that and not, say, a Puerto Rican or something
like that, which could have political implications.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: You mean speculations about the political
motivations behind that.
"WAYNE SMITH: Yes, that could, undeniably, prompt, encourage
political readings. An attack by a white man from Colorado, Texas does not lend
itself easily to political interpretations.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: There have even been a number of police reports
which say that he acted alone, that he has no ties to any groups...
"WAYNE SMITH: Yes, it must have been an insane or fanatical person.
He got so close to the President...He was captured immediately. He took out his
weapon and fired.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: Brady died?
"WAYNE SMITH: No.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: They were saying he died.
"WAYNE SMITH: Yes. There were reports to that effect, that he had
died. But the latest news is that he didn't, that he's in very serious
condition, but that he hasn't died. I imagine that that a 45-calibre round
would have been deadly, but a 22-calibre certainly gives him possibilities...
It seems the shot hit him on the head, apparently in the head...That's not good
news, there isn't much hope.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: A shot to the head, no matter what the caliber,
is something very serious.
"WAYNE SMITH: Brady is in critical condition. He may survive, but
he'd be a vegetable.
"ISIDORO MALMIERCA: I do regret that we should meet because of such
an unfortunate event.
"WAYNE SMITH: I thank you for your best wishes. I will immediately
send out a cable telling my government of our conversation. I kindly ask that
you express my gratitude to President Fidel Castro.
No comments are needed. Malmierca's version, written immediately
after the meeting, speaks for itself. Wayne Smith is today a staunch opponent
of the blockade and aggressions against Cuba.
But this is not the only example of our conduct towards the
President of a country which, since the days of Eisenhower, has hatched
hundreds of plots to physically eliminate me.
A highly confidential report submitted in the summer of 1984 to an
agent responsible for the security of Cuban representatives in the UN warned of
a possible assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan by a far-right
group in North Carolina. Upon receiving it, we immediately informed US
authorities. Our official suggested that we deliver the information via Robert
C. Muller, head of security of the US mission to the United Nations, with whom
we maintained contact to ensure the protection of Cuban delegations visiting
the international organization.
The assassination was planned for an imminent date, for Reagan's
visit to North Carolina, as part of his re-election campaign.
We had all of the information at our disposal. We had the names of
those implicated in the plot; the day, time and place where the assassination
was to take place; the types of weapons the terrorists had and where they were
being kept. In addition to all this, we knew where the elements who were
plotting this were meeting and had a brief account of what had been said at a
meeting.
The information was given Muller at a meeting in a building located
in 37 and 3rd Avenue, two blocks away from the Cuban mission.
We provided him with all the information, making sure the most
important details, such as the names of those involved, the place, time and
type of weapons to be used, were clear.
At the end of the conversation, our official informed Muller he had
received instructions from the Cuban government to report the matter urgently
and that we had selected him because we knew he was an expert on security
matters.
Muller read out what he had written down to ensure he had not
changed anything and that all of the important information was there.
He asked about the source and was told it was reliable. He said
that the Secret Service would need to meet with the Cuban officials. He was
told this would not be a problem.
At around four thirty in the afternoon that day, Secret Service
agents met with the Cuban representatives.
The meeting was held in apartment 34-F, in the 34th floor of the
Ruppert Towers building located in 92, between Third and Second Avenue, in
uptown Manhattan.
The agents were two young, white men with brush haircuts wearing
suits. Their chief aim was to verify what Muller had reported, as evidenced by
the copy of the cable he had sent them they brought with them. When the
contents of the cable were read, they were told no information was missing.
The Secret Service agents wanted to know who had provided the
information and how it had come into our possession. They were told what Muller
was told. They were also interested in knowing if we could elaborate on the
information, and they were told that, if any new information were to arrive,
they would be immediately informed.
They left their cards and asked to be contacted directly if any
additional information was received, saying there was no need to use Muller as
an intermediary.
The following Monday, we received news that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation had detained a group of people in North Carolina, against whom a
number of charges had been brought, none, as is logical to assume, related to
the plan to assassinate President Reagan, who traveled to that State shortly
afterwards as part of his presidential re-election campaign.
Four or five days following the arrests, at the end of the week,
Muller phoned the Cuban mission to invite the Cuban official to lunch. They had
lunch at the UN delegates' lounge. The first thing Muller did was ask that the
official convey the United States' gratitude to the Cuban government for the
information provided, confirming that an operation against those involved had
been carried out. A Cuban anti-terrorist activist had saved the life of a US
President!
Some US press reports mention an intimate diary, over 700 pages
long, kept by Reagan- from the time he entered office to the day he handed the
presidency over to Bush Sr.- which tries to suggest that his government was not
that aggressive towards Cuba.
However, according to some accounts, in his memoirs, Robert
McFarlane, then Undersecretary of State under Alexander Haig, wrote that, of
all the governments that had had dealings with Fidel Castro since 1959,
Reagan's seemed the least indicated to hold talks with Cuba's communist regime.
Perhaps Reagan was grateful for our concern, when he was nearly
assassinated in 1981, and for the warning that saved his life from imminent
danger, and he expressed this gratitude through Robert C. Muller.
Reagan signed the first migratory accord with Cuba, but he could
not rise above his milieu, for there were others, further to the right than he
was, who would have physically eliminated him, as they did Kennedy after he
faced the terrible risk of a thermonuclear war. To be sure, Reagan did change
his policy towards Cuba in an electoral year, did not honor the accord he
signed which guaranteed the granting of up to 20 thousand visas a year for safe
trips by granting less than a thousand, and kept in effect the Cuban Adjustment
Act, which has cost Cuba many lives.
On September 11, 2001, true chaos reigned in this neighboring
country. For long, planes were forbidden to land at airports. A countless
number of passenger planes were mid-flight somewhere. These were the news
spread by the media in the United States. There were reports of thousands of
victims in New York, including Twin Tower staff, firefighters and visitors.
There were also reports of people on a passenger plane which was flown into the
Pentagon. We offered to supply the United States with clean blood from regular
donors if it was needed for any eventuality. Blood donations have long
constituted a tradition of the Revolution.
These events happened to coincide with the day in which we had
convened nearly 15,000 higher education students and university graduates for a
6:00 pm gathering, on the occasion of the re-opening of the Salvador Allende
School, where 3,599 young people would begin higher studies and avail
themselves of new and tried methods to become primary school teachers.
That painful incident occurred six years ago today. Today, we know
that the public was deliberately misinformed. I don't recall any talk, that
day, of the fact that, in the basements of those towers, whose higher floors
housed the banks of multinational corporations and other offices, lay nearly
200 tons in gold bars. An order to shoot to death anyone who attempted to get
to the gold had been issued. The calculations with respect to the steel
structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do
not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists, information,
demolition experts and others. What is most shocking is the claim that we may
never know what actually happened. It is known, however, that a number of
people en route to San Francisco from New Jersey, had conversations with their
relatives when the air vessels were already under the control of individuals
who were not members of the crew.
An analysis of the impact of planes similar to those against the
towers, following accidental plane crashes in densely-populated cities,
concludes that no plane crashed against the Pentagon and that only a projectile
could have created the geometrically round hole that the alleged plane created.
No passenger that perished there has turned up, either. No one in the world
questioned the news about the attack on the Pentagon building. We were
deceived, as were the rest of the planet's inhabitants.
When I spoke at the Ciudad Deportiva sports complex that September
11th, I spoke of the tragedy that had hit the United States. In the interests
of conciseness, I am reproducing the following excerpts from that speech:
(.) We did not even consider postponing the ceremony. It could not
be postponed, despite the international tension created by such events. I would
imagine that almost everyone knows about them, but to briefly summarize, at
approximately 9:00 this morning, a Boeing airplane, a really big one, crashed
straight into one of the two New York famous towers which make up one of the
highest buildings in the world. Naturally, the tower caught on fire because of
all the fuel from such a big airplane, and some horrific scenes began. And
then, 18 minutes later, another plane, also from an U.S. airline, crashed
straight into the second tower.
A few minutes later, another plane crashed into the Pentagon. News
arrived, in the midst of a certain amount of confusion, of a bomb outside the
State Department, and other alarming events, although I have mentioned the most
important.
Obviously, the country had fallen victim to a violent surprise
attack, unexpected, unimaginable, something truly unheard of. And the scenes
that ensued were appalling, especially when the two towers were burning, and
foremost when they both collapsed, all 100 floors, spilling over onto
neighboring buildings, when it was known that there were tens of thousands of
people working there, in offices representing many companies from various
countries.
It was only logical that this would be a shock for the United
States and the rest of the world. The stock markets started to collapse, and
because of the political, economic and technological importance and the power
of the United States, the whole world was shaken up today by those events. So,
we had to follow the events throughout the day, but at the same time, we also
had to continue thinking about the conditions and circumstances in which this
ceremony would take place.
Therefore, there were two issues: the school and the extremely
important course it will offer, and the political and human catastrophe that
had taken place over there, especially in New York.
(.) Today is a day of tragedy for the United States. You know very
well that hatred against the American people has never been sown here. Perhaps,
precisely because of its culture, its lack of prejudice, its sense of full
freedom -with a homeland and without a master-- Cuba is the country where
Americans are treated with the greatest respect. We have never preached any
kind of national hatred, or anything similar to fanaticism, and that is the
reason for our strength, because our conduct is based on principles and ideas.
We treat all Americans who visit us with great respect, and they have noticed
this and said so themselves.
Furthermore, we cannot forget the American people who put an end to
the Vietnam War with their overwhelming opposition to that genocidal war. We
cannot forget the American people who -in numbers that exceeded 80% of the
population-- supported the return of Elián González to his homeland. We cannot
forget their idealism, although it is often undermined by deception, because
-as we have said often times- in order to mislead Americans to support an
unjust cause, or an unjust war, they must first be deceived. The classic method
used by that huge country in international politics is that of deceiving the
people first, to count on their support later. When it is the other way around,
and the people realize that something is unjust, then based on their
traditional idealism they oppose what they have been supporting. Often these
are extremely unjust causes, which they had supported convinced that they were
doing the right thing.
Therefore, although unaware of the exact number of victims but
seeing those moving scenes of suffering, we have felt profound grief and
sadness for the American people.
We do not go around flattering any government, or asking for
forgiveness or favors. We neither harbor in our hearts a single atom of fear.
The history of our Revolution has proven its capacity to stand up to
challenges, its capacity to fight and its capacity to resist whatever it has
to; that is what has turned us into an invincible people. These are our
principles. Our Revolution is based on ideas and persuasion, and not on the use
of force.
(.)That has been our reaction, and we wanted our people to see the
scenes and watch the tragedy. We have not hesitated to express our sentiments
publicly, and right here I have a statement, which was drafted as soon as the
facts were known and handed out to the international media around 3:00 p.m. In
the meantime, our television networks were broadcasting news of the events.
This statement was scheduled to be read to the Cuban public tonight during the
evening TV newscast.
I am going to move the time up a few minutes by reading to you here
and now the Official Statement from the Government of Cuba on the events that
took place in the United States:
"The Government of the Republic of Cuba has learned with grief and
sadness of the violent surprise attacks carried out this morning against
civilian and official facilities in the cities of New York and Washington,
which have caused numerous deaths.
(.)"It is not possible to forget that for over four decades our
country has been the target of such actions fostered from within the United
States territory.
"Both for historical reasons and ethical principles, the Government
of our country strongly repudiates and condemns the attacks against the
aforementioned facilities and hereby expresses its most heartfelt sympathies to
the American people for the painful, unjustifiable loss of human lives
resulting from these attacks.
"In this bitter hour for all Americans, our people express their
solidarity with the American people and their full willingness to cooperate, to
the extent of their modest possibilities, with the health care institutions and
any other medical or humanitarian organization in that country in the
treatment, care and rehabilitation of the victims of this morning's events."
Although it is not known whether the casualties are 5000, 10,000,
15,000 or 20,000, it is known that the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers
and into the Pentagon were carrying hundreds of passengers, and we have offered
to provide whatever we can, if necessary.
That is a country with great scientific and medical development and
resources, but at some point in time it could need blood of a specific type or
plasma -any other product that we could donate, we would be most willing to
give-- or medical support or paramedics. We know many hospitals are short of
specific technicians and professionals. In other words, we want to express our
disposition and readiness to be helpful in relation to these tragic events.
(.) The hijacking of planes -a method used against Cuba-- became a
universal plague, and it was Cuba that solved this problem when, after repeated
warnings, we sent two hijackers back to the United States. It is painful
because they were Cubans but we had issued public warnings, so they came and we
returned them. We complied with our public pledge, yet they never again
provided us with any information about them to give to their relatives. They
have their own ways of doing things. No one knows. I know they were sentenced
to 40 years imprisonment, and that put an end to those hijackings".
(.) None of the problems affecting today's world can be solved with
the use of force; there is no global, technological or military power that can
guarantee immunity against such acts, because they can be organized by small
groups [which are] difficult to detect.
(...) It is very important to know what the reaction of the U.S.
Government might be. Possibly the world will be living dangerous days, and I am
not talking about Cuba. Cuba is the most peaceful country in the world, for
several reasons: our policies, our forms of struggle, our doctrine, our ethics,
and also, comrades, and due to an absolute absence of fear.
Nothing troubles us. Nothing intimidates us. It would be very
difficult to concoct a slanderous accusation against Cuba; not even its
inventor and the patent holder would believe it. It would be very difficult.
And Cuba means something in the world today. It has a very high moral position,
and a very sound political position in the world.
The days to come will be tense inside the United States. A number
of people will start putting forward opinions.
(.) We would advise the leaders of that powerful empire to remain
calm, to act with a cool head, to avoid getting carried away by a fit of rage
or hatred, and not to start trying to hunt people down by throwing bombs just
anywhere.
I reiterate that none of the world's problems, not even terrorism,
can be solved with the use of force, and every act of force, every imprudent
action that entails the use of force anywhere, is going to seriously aggravate
the world problems.
The way is neither the use of force nor the war. I say this with
the full authority of someone who has always talked honestly, of someone with
sound convictions and the experience of surviving the years of struggle that
Cuba has lived through. Only reason, and the intelligent policy of seeking
strength through consensus and international public opinion, can definitely
eradicate this problem. I think this unexpected episode should be used to
undertake an international effort against terrorism. However, this
international struggle against terrorism cannot be won by eliminating a
terrorist here and another one there, by killing people here and there, using
similar methods to theirs and sacrificing innocent lives. It can only be won,
among other ways, by putting an end to State terrorism and other repulsive
forms of killing, by putting an end to genocide, and by seriously pursuing a
policy of peace and respect for moral and legal standards. The world cannot be
saved unless a path of international peace and cooperation is pursued.
(.) We have proven that we can survive, live and make progress, and
everything seen here today is an expression of unprecedented progress in all of
human history. Progress is not achieved only through the manufacturing of
automobiles; developing people's minds, providing knowledge, promoting culture,
and looking after human beings the way they should be looked after makes
progress. That is the secret of the tremendous strength of our Revolution.
The world cannot be saved in any other way, and by that I mean the
situations of violence. Let us seek peace everywhere and protect all the people
from that plague of terrorism. There is another horrible plague today, which
is called AIDS, for instance. There is another plague, which kills tens of
millions of children, teenagers and adults in the world, that is, hunger,
disease and a lack of health care and medicines.
In the political arena, there are absolutist ideas, and attempts to
impose a single way of thinking on the world; this fosters rebellious attitudes
and irritation everywhere.
This world cannot be saved -and this does not have anything to do
with terrorism-- if this unfair economic and social order continues to be
developed and applied; an order that is leading the world to disaster, along a
path from which there is no escape for the 6.2 billion people living today and
the future inhabitants of this planet, suffering ever greater destruction and
plunged further into poverty, unemployment, hunger and despair. This has been
proven by the masses in places that have already gone down in history, like
Seattle, Quebec, Washington and Genoa.
The world's most powerful economic and political leaders now find
it almost impossible to meet; everywhere we can see that people are less and
less afraid, and are rising up. I was recently in Durban, a pr
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