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Reflections of
Fidel
The Secret Summit
(Taken from CubaDebate)
WHILE neither represented at nor excommunicated
from the Port of Spain Summit we were able to find
out what has been discussed there up until today. We
were led to fully expect that the meeting would not
be private, but the stage managers deprived us of
that highly interesting intellectual exercise. We
would be informed of the essence, but not the tone
of voice, nor the eyes, nor the faces which so much
reflect people’s ideas, ethics and characters. A
Secret Summit is worse than the silent movies. To
Obama’s left was a man whom I could not identify
very well when he placed his hand on Obama’s
shoulder, like an eight-year-old school student to a
compañero in the first row. Beside him,
standing, another member of the retinue who
interrupted him to talk with the president of the
United States; I could see in those persons
importuning him the stamp of an oligarchy that has
never experienced hunger and which, in the powerful
nation of Obama, expect to have the shield to
protect the system from the feared social changes.
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
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.
Translated by Granma International
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