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Proclamation by an adversary of the US government
Mr. George W. Bush: the million
Cubans who are gathered here today to march past
your Interests Section is just a small part of a
valiant and heroic people who would like to be here
with us, if it were physically possible.
We have not gathered in a hostile
gesture to the American people whose ethics, rooted
in the time when the first pilgrims emigrated to
this hemisphere, are well known to us. Neither do we
wish to upset the officials, employees and guards of
this mission, who are given all the safety and
guarantees that a civilized and educated people such
as ours can offer while they serve their terms. This
is an outraged protest and a denunciation of the
brutal, ruthless and cruel measures against our
country that your country has just adopted.
We know beforehand what you
believe or want to make others believe about those
who are marching here. In
your opinion they are oppressed masses who yearn for
liberty and who have been forced onto the streets by
the Cuban government.
You completely ignore that no force
in the world could drag a dignified, proud people,
which has withstood 45 years of hostility, blockade
and aggression from the most powerful nation on
earth, on to the streets like a flock of animals
each one with rope around their neck.
A statesman, or whoever claims to be
one, should know that down through history really
humane ideas of justice have been shown to be much
more powerful than force; force leaves in its wake
only dusty, contemptible ruins; humane ideas leave a
luminous trail that no one will ever be able to
extinguish. Every era has had its own ideas, both
good and bad ones, and they have accumulated. But
the worst, most sinister and uncertain ideas belong
in this era in which we live in a barbarous,
uncivilized, globalized world.
In the world that you seek to impose
on us today there is not the slightest notion of
ethics, credibility, standards of justice,
humanitarian feelings, nor of the elementary
principles of solidarity and generosity.
Everything that is written about
human rights in your world, and in the world of your
allies who share in plundering the world, is an
enormous lie. Billions of human beings live in
infrahuman conditions starving, without enough food,
medicine, clothes, shoes or shelter and without even
a minimum amount of knowledge or enough information
to understand their tragedy and that of the world in
which they live.
Surely nobody has told you about the
tens of millions of children, adolescents, youths,
mothers, middle or elderly people who die every year
but that could have been saved in this "idyllic Eden
of dreams" which is Earth, nor have they told you at
what rate the natural conditions for life are being
destroyed and that the hydrocarbons which took the
world 300 million years to create are being
squandered in a century and a half, with devastating
effects.
You have only to ask your assistants
for precise data on the tens of thousands of
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, bombers,
smart long range missiles, battleships and aircraft
carriers, conventional and non-conventional weapons
in your arsenals which are enough to wipe out all
life of the planet.
Neither you nor anyone else would
ever be able to sleep again. Neither would your
allies, who are trying to emulate your military
build-up. If your allies low responsibility
coefficient, political talent, inequality between
their respective states and their infinitesimal
inclination to reflect in the time they have left
between protocols, meetings and advisors, are taken
into account, those who have the destiny of the
world in their hands can harbor few hopes when, half
puzzled half indifferent, they gaze upon the real
madhouse that world politics has become.
The purpose of these words is not to
offend nor insult you: but since you have set out to
intimidate, to terrorize this country and eventually
to destroy its socio-economic system and
independence, and if necessary its very physical
existence, I consider it my elemental duty to remind
you of a few home truths.
You have neither the morality nor
the right, none whatsoever, to speak of freedom,
democracy and human rights when you hold enough
power to destroy humanity and are attempting to
install a world tyranny, side-stepping and
destroying the United Nations Organization,
violating the human rights of any and every country,
waging wars of conquest to take over world markets
and resources and installing decadent and
anachronistic political and social systems which are
leading the human race into the abyss.
There are other reasons why you
cannot mention the word democracy: among these is
the fact that everyone knows you became president of
the United States through fraud. You cannot speak of
freedom because you cannot conceive of a world other
than one ruled by fear of the lethal weapons which
your inexpert hands might rain down on humanity.
You cannot speak of the environment
because you are completely ignorant of the fact that
the human race is in danger of disappearing.
You label a tyranny the economic and
political system that has guided the Cuban people to
higher levels of literacy, knowledge and culture
than those in the most developed countries in the
world. The same that has reduced infant mortality to
a rate lower than that of the United States and
whose population is provided with all healthcare and
education services and with other extremely
important social and human services free of charge.
Listening to you talk of human
rights in Cuba has a hollow, absurd ring. This, Mr.
Bush, is one of the few countries in this hemisphere
where not once in 45 years has there been a single
case of torture, a single death squad, a single
extrajudicial execution or a single ruler who has
become a millionaire through having held power.
You lack the moral authority to
speak of Cuba, a dignified country which has
withstood 45 years of a brutal blockade, economic
war and terrorist attacks which have cost thousands
of lives and ten of billions of dollars in economic
losses.
You are attacking Cuba for petty,
political reasons, trying to obtain electoral
support from a shrinking group of renegades and
mercenaries who have no ethical principles
whatsoever. You lack the moral right to speak of
terrorism because you are surrounded by a bunch of
murderers who have caused the death of thousands of
Cubans through terrorist methods.
You do not hide your contempt for
human life, because you have not hesitated to order
the extrajudicial death of a secret, unknown number
of people in various parts of the world.
You have no right whatsoever, except
for that of brute force, to intervene in Cuba’s
affairs and, whenever the fancy takes you, to
proclaim the transition from one system to another
and to take measures to make this happen.
This people can be exterminated -it’s
as well you know this- or wiped off the face of the
earth but it cannot be subjugated nor put once again
into the humiliating position of a United States
neo-colony.
Cuba fights on the side of life in
the world; you fight on the side of death. Whereas
you kill countless people with your indiscriminate,
pre-emptive surprise attacks, Cuba saves the lives
of hundreds of thousands of children, mothers, old
and sick people all over the world.
The only thing you know about Cuba
are the lies that spill forth from the ravenous
mouths of the corrupt and insatiable mob of former
Batista supporters and their descendents who are
experts in electoral fraud and capable of electing
President of the United States someone who did not
obtain enough votes to claim victory.
Human beings are not aware of nor
can they be aware of freedom in a regime of
inequality like the one you represent. No one is
born equal in the United States. In the black and
Latin ghettos and on the reservations for the
natives who once inhabited that land but were
exterminated, there is no other equality but that of
being poor and excluded.
Our people, educated in solidarity
and internationalism, do not hate the American
people nor do they want to see young white, black,
Native Americans, mestizo or Latin soldiers from
that country die, young people driven by
unemployment to enlist in the military to be sent to
any corner of the world in traitorous, pre-emptive
attacks or in wars of conquest.
The unbelievable torture applied to
prisoners in Iraq has rendered the world speechless.
I do not seek to offend you with
these words, as I have already said. My only hope is
that in your leisure time one of your assistants
would bring these truths to your notice, even though
they may not be completely pleasing to you.
Since you have decided that the die
is cast, I have the pleasure of saying farewell like
the Roman gladiators who were about to fight in the
arena: Hail Cesar, those who are about to die salute
you!
My only regret is that I would not
even see your face because in that case you would be
thousands of miles away while I shall be in the
frontline to die fighting in defense of my homeland.
In the name of the Cuban people,
Fidel Castro
Ruz.
May 14/2004
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