DANIEL’s appearance on National Television’s "Roundtable" was exactly as I had expected. He spoke with eloquence; he was persuasive, serene, irrefutable.
He did not offend, nor did he wish to offend any other Latin American country, but sticking to the truth in every minute of his appearance: Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, as spokespersons for the ALBA, expressly rejected the idea of the Final Declaration being presented as a consensus agreement.
Through Daniel we learnt that Obama himself acknowledged that he hadn’t even read that document, which was smuggled in as the official declaration of the Summit. Telesur also broadcast his appearance simultaneously. It had a wide circulation.
Daniel expressed categorical concepts. "It was the meeting of censorship. ‘End the blockade of Cuba!’ was a unanimous clamor, with different nuances, but unanimous." He affirmed that "there was a very good speech by President Rafael Correa, when he explained: ‘Elections do not signify democracy’ because the multi-party system is nothing more than a means of splitting a nation." Daniel added: "Cuba has a model where the people are not divided among green, red, yellow and orange. It is simply the Cuban people, its citizens, without those campaigns in which the interests of big capital are at play. The Cuban people are the ones who elect their authorities without the stridence of elections in the bourgeois democracies imposed by the West.
"Courtesy does not erase ideological and political differences; it does not erase the reality. I would like to emphasize that I noted that certain heads of state and government seemed to fall under a spell when shaking hands with President Obama." Alluding to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he stated: "With his little pipe and the all the mice behind we’re heading for the precipice. But Obama did not have the effect that he wanted."
"The United States has not changed, Raúl recalled that in Cumaná. It was a Republican administration that prepared the Bay of Pigs invasion and it was a Democratic administration that executed it.
"We have a U.S. president who is saying that the past has to be forgotten, but who is trapped in the past of 50 years of blockade of Cuba!; who, in 2004, when he was running for Senate, said that the blockade of Cuba was barbaric, that it had to be suspended. He was asked the question during the press conference and now he’s replying that that was eons ago. He is telling us that he lied, that’s the response of a person who is lying.
"He is stating that the blockade of Cuba cannot be lifted. That Cuba should be grateful for the concessions he has made recently. They want to sell this as a change; it doesn’t even come close to the measures that Carter took 30 years ago, it’s more like a step backward. They want us to forget history.
"The OAS is dead. It is an unburied corpse."
"African Unity has its own instrument. France isn’t there, Britain isn’t there, the former colonialists of these peoples aren’t there, the peoples of Africa are there.
"In the same way, here we have the Latin American and Caribbean peoples and, from those positions, from that dialogue, from that unity, dialoging with the North, dialoging with the United States and Canada, dialoging with the Europeans; in other words, dialoguing with the countries of the North and defending our positions.
"What also became clear in this Summit is that the United States has not changed and that we, Latin America and the Caribbean, have changed; we have changed and we are changing, holding fast to the roots of our history."
He finally explained: "The document was dead and the politics of the stick and the carrot is still in effect, because President Obama is trapped in what is the structure of an empire."