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Reflections of Fidel
Finding out the truth in time
(Taken from CubaDebate)
WHEN I was writing one of my
previous reflections, as a disaster for humanity was
rapidly approaching, my greatest concern was to
fulfill the elemental duty of informing our people.
Today I feel calmer than 26 days
ago. As things continue happening in the short term,
I can reiterate and enrich information to national
and international public opinion.
Obama promised to attend the quarter-final
game on July 2 if his country won in the second
round. He must know, more than anybody, that those
quarter finals could not take place if extremely
grave events should happen beforehand, or at least
he should know that.
Last Friday, June 25, an
international news agency of known attention to
detail in the information that it provides,
published statements from "…the naval commander of
the elite corps of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards,
General Ali Fadavi…" warning that "… if the United
States and its allies inspect Iranian ships in
international waters ‘they will receive a response
in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.’"
The information was taken from the
national Mehr news agency of Iran.
That agency, according to the cable,
communicated: "Fadawi added that ‘the Navy of the
Revolutionary Guard currently has hundreds of
vessels fitted with missile launchers.’"
The information, written almost at
the same time as the one published in Granma,
or perhaps before, seemed at certain points a carbon
copy of the paragraphs of the Reflection written on
Thursday, June 24 and published in that newspaper on
Friday 25th.
The coincidence can be explained by
the elemental use of logical reasoning that I always
apply. I was not aware of one word of what was
published by the national Iranian agency.
I do not harbor the slightest doubt
that as soon as the warships of the United States
and Israel take up their positions – together with
the rest of the U.S. military vessels located in the
vicinity of the Iranian coasts – and attempt to
inspect that country’s first merchant ship, a rain
of missiles will be unleashed in both directions.
That will be the precise moment when that terrible
war will begin. It is not possible to foresee how
many ships will be sunk nor of what ensign.
Finding out the truth in time is the
most important thing for our people.
It doesn’t matter that by natural
instinct, almost everybody; it could be said 99.9%
or more of my compatriots, are conserving hope and
agreeing with me with the sincere desire of being
wrong. I have talked with people in my closest
circles and, at the same time, have received news
from so many noble, altruistic and conscientious
citizens who, on reading my Reflections, do not
contest my considerations in the least, but
assimilate, believe and instantly swallow the
reasoning that I expound but who, nevertheless,
immediately give their attention to fulfilling their
work to which they devote their energies.
That is precisely what we desire of
our compatriots. The worst things is to suddenly
become aware of news of extremely grave events,
without having heard any news whatsoever of such a
possibility beforehand; then confusion and panic
spreads, something that would be unworthy of a
heroic people like the Cubans, who were at the point
of being the target of a massive nuclear attack in
October 1962, and did not hesitate for an instant to
fulfill their duty.
During their undertaking of heroic
internationalist missions, valiant combatants and
chiefs of our Revolutionary Armed Forces were at the
point of becoming the victims of nuclear attacks on
the Cuban troops who were approaching the southern
border with Angola, from where the racist South
African forces had been evicted after the battle of
Cuito Cuanavale, entrenching themselves on the
border with Namibia.
With the knowledge of the U.S.
president, the Pentagon supplied the South African
racists via Israel with approximately 14 nuclear
weapons, more powerful than those launched on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as we
have explained in other reflections.
I am not a prophet or a fortune
teller. Nobody said a single word to me about what
was going to happen; all of it is the fruit of what
today I am describing as logical reasoning.
We are not novices nor are we
interfering in this complicated subject.
In the nuclear post-crisis, it can
be augured what will occur in the rest of Ibero-American
speaking America.
In such circumstances, one cannot
talk of capitalism or socialism. Only that a stage
of the administration of goods and services
available in this part of the continent will open
up. Inevitably, each country will continue to be
governed by those who are currently leading the
government, a number of them very close to socialism
and others full of euphoria at the prospect of a
world market now opening for fuel, uranium, copper,
lithium, aluminum, iron and other metals that are
currently being sent to the developed and rich
countries in that world market, which will suddenly
disappear.
Abundant foodstuffs currently being
exported to that world market will also abruptly
disappear.
In such circumstances, the most
basic products required in order to live: foodstuffs,
water, fuels and the resources of the hemisphere to
the south of the United States, are there in
abundance for maintaining a little bit of
civilization, the uncontrolled advances of which
have led humanity to such a disaster.
However, some things are still very
unclear at the present moment; can the two most
powerful nuclear powers, the United States and
Russia, abstain from using their nuclear weapons
against one another?
What remains in no doubt whatsoever
is that, from Europe, the nuclear weapons of Britain
and France, allies of the United States and Israel –
and which enthusiastically imposed the resolution
that will inevitably unleash war, and a war that,
given the reasons explained, will immediately become
a nuclear war – are a threat to Russian territory,
although that country, just like China, has tried to
avoid such an outcome as far as the strengths and
possibilities of each one allow.
The economy of the superpower will
collapse like a house of cards. The society of the
United States is one which is the least prepared to
endure a disaster like the one created by the empire
in the very territory from where it set out.
We do not know what might be the
environmental effects of the nuclear weapons that
will inevitably explode in various parts of our
planet, something which, in the less grave variant,
is going to happen in profusion.
To venture any hypothesis would be
pure science fiction on my part.

Fidel Castro Ruz
June 27, 2010
2:15 p.m.
Translated by Granma International
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