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Reflections of Fidel
The fruit which did not fall
(Taken from CubaDebate)
CUBA
was forced to fight for its existence facing an
expansionist power, located a few miles from its
coast, and which was proclaiming the annexation of
our island, which was destined to fall into its lap
like a ripe fruit. We were condemned not to exist as
a nation.
Within the glorious legions of patriots who, during
the second half of the 19th century, fought against
the abhorrent colonial status imposed by Spain over
300 years, José Martí was the man who most clearly
perceived such a dramatic destiny. He confirmed it
in the last lines that he wrote, the night before
the anticipated difficult combat against a
battle-hardened and well equipped Spanish column,
when he declared that the fundamental objective of
his struggle was, “…to prevent the United States
from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains
its independence, and from overpowering with that
additional strength our lands of America. Everything
that I have done up until now, and everything that I
will do, is to this end.”
Without understanding this profound truth one cannot
today be either a patriot or a revolutionary.
Without any doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of
many technical resources and the substantial funds
directed at dehumanizing the masses constitute
considerable but not invincible obstacles.
Cuba
demonstrated – starting from its position as a
colonial yankee trading post, together with the
illiteracy and generalized poverty of its people –
that it was possible to confront the country which
was threatening the definitive absorption of the
Cuban nation. Nobody can even affirm that there was
a national bourgeoisie opposed to the empire; the
bourgeoisie developed in such close proximity to it
that, shortly after the triumph, it sent 14,000
totally unprotected children to the United States,
although that act was associated with the perfidious
lie that parental custody was to be suppressed. This
is what history recorded as Operation Peter Pan,
described as the largest maneuver of child
manipulation for political ends recalled in the
Western Hemisphere.
National territory was invaded, barely two years
after the revolutionary triumph, by mercenary forces
– comprising former Batista soldiers and the sons of
landowners and the bourgeoisie – armed and escorted
by the United States with warships from its naval
fleet, including aircraft carriers with equipment
ready to enter into action, and which accompanied
the invaders to our island. The defeat and capture
of virtually all the mercenaries in less than 72
hours and the destruction of their aircraft
operating from bases in Nicaragua and their naval
transportation, constituted a humiliating defeat for
the empire and its Latin America allies, which had
underestimated the Cuban people’s fighting capacity.
In
the face of the termination of oil supplies on the
part of the United States, the subsequent total
suspension of the historic sugar quota in that
country’s market, and the prohibition of trade
established over more than 100 years, the USSR
responded to each one of these measures by supplying
fuel, buying our sugar, trading with our country and
finally, supplying the weapons that Cuba could not
acquire in other markets.
The
idea of a systematic campaign of CIA-organized
pirate attacks, sabotage and military actions by
armed bands created and supplied by the United
States before and after the mercenary attack, and
which would culminate in a military invasion of Cuba
by this country, gave rise to events which placed
the world on the brink of a total nuclear war, which
neither of the parties involved nor humanity itself
could have survived.
Without any doubt, those events resulted in the
removal from the presidency of Nikita Khrushchev,
who underestimated his adversary, disregarded
opinions presented to him and did not consult with
those of us in the front line concerning his final
decision. What could have been an important moral
victory thus turned into a costly political setback
for the USSR. For many years the worst of crimes
against Cuba continued and more than a few of them,
like the U.S. criminal blockade, are still being
committed.
Khrushchev made exceptional gestures to our country.
On that occasion, I unhesitatingly criticized the
non-consulted agreement with the United States, but
it would be ungrateful and unjust not to acknowledge
his exceptional solidarity at difficult and decisive
moments for our people in their historic battle for
independence and revolution in the face of the
powerful empire of the United States. I understand
that the situation was extremely tense and he did
not wish to lose any time when he made the decision
to withdraw the missiles and the yankees, very
secretly, agreed to give up the invasion.
Despite the decades gone by, already half a century,
the Cuban fruit has not fallen into yankee hands.
News
reports currently coming in from Spain, France,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, the United
Kingdom, the Malvinas and countless other points on
the planet are serious, and all of them augur a
political and economic disaster as a result of the
stupidity of the United States and its allies.
I
will confine myself to a few subjects. I must note
that, going by what everyone is saying, that the
selection of a Republican candidate to aspire to the
presidency of this globalized and far-reaching
empire is, in its turn – I am serious – the greatest
competition of idiocy and ignorance that I have ever
heard. As I have things to do, I cannot devote any
time to the subject. I already knew it would be like
that.
Some
news agency cables better illustrate what I wish to
analyze, because they demonstrate the incredible
cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One
of them, with amazing tranquility, talks of a Cuban
political prisoner who, it states, died after a
hunger strike lasting 50 days. A journalist with
Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio news or
any other revolutionary organ might be mistaken in
any interpretation of any subject, but would never
fabricate an item of news or invent a lie.
A
Granma informative note affirms that there was
no hunger strike; the man was an ordinary prisoner
sentenced to four years for attacking and injuring
his wife in the face; that his own mother in law
asked authorities to intervene; family members were
kept fully abreast of all procedures used in his
medical treatment and were grateful for the effort
made by medical specialists who treated him. He
received medical attention, as the note states, in
the best hospital in the eastern region, as is the
case with all citizens. He died from secondary
multi-organic failure related to a severe
respiratory infection.
The
patient had received all the medical attention
administered in a country which has one of the
finest medical services in the world, provided free
of charge in spite of the blockade imposed on our
homeland by imperialism. It is simply a duty that is
fulfilled in a country where the Revolution is proud
of always having respected, for more than 50 years,
the principles which give it its invincible
strength.
It
would be more worthwhile for the Spanish government,
given its excellent relations with Washington, to
travel to the United States and inform itself as to
what is taking place in yankee jails, the ruthless
conduct meted out to millions of prisoners, the
policy of the electric chair and the horrors
perpetrated on detainees in the country’s jails and
those who are protesting in its streets.
Yesterday, January 23, a strong Granma editorial
titled “Cuba’s truths,” which occupied an entire
page of the newspaper, explained in detail the
unprecedented shame of the campaign of lies
unleashed against our Revolution by certain
governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuba
subversion.”
Our
people are well aware of the norms which have
governed the impeccable conduct of our Revolution
since the first battle and which has never been
stained over more than half a century. They also
know that it can never be pressured or coerced by
enemies. Our laws and norms will be respected
unfailingly.
It
is worth noting this with clarity and frankness. The
Spanish government and the shaky European Union,
plunged into a profound economic crisis, must know
what should guide them. It is pitiful to read news
agency reports of the statements of both utilizing
their barefaced lies to attack Cuba. First concern
yourselves with saving the euro if you can, resolve
the chronic unemployment from which young people are
increasingly suffering, and respond to the
indignados, constantly attacked and beaten by
the police.
We
are not ignorant of the fact that Spain is now being
governed by admirers of Franco, who dispatched
members of the Blue Division, together with the Nazi
SS and SA, to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them
participated in the cruel aggression. In the most
cruel and painful operation of that war: the siege
of Leningrad, where one million Russian citizens
died, the Blue Division was among the forces
attempting to strangle the heroic city. The Russian
people will never pardon that horrific crime.
The
fascist right of Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of
the empire, must know something about the 16,000
casualties of their predecessors in the Blue
Division and the Iron Crosses which Hitler awarded
to officers and soldiers from that division. There
is nothing unusual about what the Gestapo police are
doing now to the men and women demanding the right
to work and bread in the country with the highest
unemployment in Europe.
Why
are the mass media of the empire lying so
barefacedly?
Those who manipulate the media are striving to
deceive and dehumanize the world with their crude
lies, possibly thinking that it constitutes the
principal resource for maintaining the global system
of domination and plunder imposed, particularly upon
victims in close proximity to the headquarters of
the metropolis, the close to 600 million Latin
American and Caribbean people living in this
hemisphere.
The
sister republic of Venezuela has become the
fundamental objective of this policy. The reason is
obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have
imposed its Free Trade Treaty on all the peoples of
the continent who inhabit it from the south of the
United States, a region where the greatest reserves
of land, fresh water and minerals of the planet are
to be found, as well as large energy resources
which, administered in a spirit of solidarity toward
other peoples of the world, constitute resources
which cannot and must not fall into the hands of
transnationals imposing a suicidal and infamous
system on them.
For
example, it is enough to look at the map to
comprehend the criminal dispossession signified by
stripping Argentina of a little piece of its
territory in the extreme south of the continent.
There, the British deployed their decadent military
apparatus to murder rookie Argentine recruits
wearing summer clothing in the middle of winter. The
United States, and its ally Augusto Pinochet,
shamelessly supported them. Now, just before the
London Olympics, its Prime Minister David Cameron is
also proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his
right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines.
The government of this country is unaware of the
fact that the world is changing, and the scorn of
our hemisphere and that of the majority of the
peoples for the oppressors is increasing every day.
The
case of the Malvinas is not the only one. Does
anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan is going
to end? Just a few days ago U.S. soldiers desecrated
the corpses of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO
drone bombings.
Three days ago a European agency reported, “Afghani
President Hamid Karzai has given his backing to a
negotiated peace with the Taliban, emphasizing that
this issue must be resolved by the citizens of his
country.” It went on to add, “…the process of peace
and reconciliation belongs to the Afghani nation and
no country or foreign organization can take away
this right from the Afghanis.
For
its part, a cable published by our press
communicated from Paris, “France today suspended all
its training and aid operations in Afghanistan and
threatened to expedite the withdrawal of its troops,
after an Afghani soldier shot four French soldiers
in the Taghab valley, in Kapisa province… Sarkozy
instructed Defense Minister Gérard Longuet to travel
immediately to Kabul, and indicated the possibility
of an early withdrawal of the contingent.”
After the disappearance of the USSR and the
socialist bloc, the U.S. government imagined that
Cuba would be unable to sustain itself. George W.
Bush had already prepared a counterrevolutionary
government to govern our country. On the very same
day that Bush initiated his criminal war on Iraq, I
asked our country’s authorities to end the tolerance
afforded the counterrevolutionary capos who, in
those days, were hysterically demanding the invasion
of Cuba. In real terms, their attitude constituted
an act of treason against the homeland.
Bush
and his stupidities prevailed for eight years and
the Cuban Revolution has already lasted for more
than half a century. The ripe fruit has not fallen
into the empire’s lap. Cuba will not be one more
possession with which the empire spreads through the
lands of America. Martí’s blood will not have been
spilled in vain.
Tomorrow I will publish another Reflection to
complement this one.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 24, 2012
7:12
p.m.
Translated by Granma International
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