Castro Speech to Unions 2

[Jon Flanders <72763.2240@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

   Imperialist hatred of Cuba

 There is hatred and at the same time respect, as I was
 saying. Contempt there cannot be, but there is a hatred for this
 country that they believed would fall a few days after the
 collapse of the socialist bloc and the USSR, but they are seeing
 the years pass by without it collapsing. On the contrary, and
 without exaggeration it is stronger; and on the contrary, and
 without exaggeration, it's beginning to advance and is advancing.
 It must really be unbearable
   They invent legislation and measures: the Torricelli Act, to
 destroy us from within, or to destroy us through hunger, through
 total economic strangulation. There are even lunatics who are
 thinking along the lines of destroying us, in an case, by force,
 without the least sense of responsibility for the implacable and
 unstoppable hornet's nest they would stir up in Cuba, and I am
 sure, on the whole continent if the craziness of a military action
 against our country was one day implemented. They come up with new
 legislation, a more rigorous blockade, new measures, a lot of
 pressure exerted on the world, anything rather than renouncing
 their obsessive idea of eliminating the Revolution.
   Of course, all this makes us think, helps us to explain the
 causes. And now, when they are more haughty and arrogant than
 ever, more irresponsible than ever, they cannot resign themselves
 to what one day they will have to resign themselves to.
   This sentiment of our workers and of our people has been
 expressed here energetically, patriotically, militantly, with a
 willingness to work hard and a very profound comprehension of the
 historical period we are living through, and of the extremely
 difficult battle that has to be waged.
   All of that was expressed in the Congress and in the ideas
 clearly expressed by [CTC general secretary] Pedro Ross with your
 unanimous support, and discussed in the theses and supported in
 the assemblies, to the effect that what we are doing is socialism,
 and what we want is socialism, and what we are defending is
 socialism, [Applause] so that nobody should be left in any doubt.
 [Exclamations of, "Long live socialist Cuba!] That socialist Cuba,
 that power of the people, those achievements of the Revolution are
 what we are defending. I agree with what a woman comrade said this
 afternoon, that the first achievement was precisely the Revolution
 itself; the power of the people. This sentiment was expressed
 today as never before.
   We have recovered so much morally, politically, in terms of
 awareness, from that crushing blow we received five or six years
 ago; it has been demonstrated, in passing -  and making another
 Olympic allusion - that our country as a boxer has a tough, tough
 jaw, it's impossible to knock it out. [Applause] It resisted, it
 withheld the ideological blow and was able to resist heroically
 the tremendous material blow it received. And this can be clearly
 perceived and is palpable in the tone, in the spirit and in the
 dignity of the discussions here, which leads to the primary
 conclusion that the Revolution at this moment is stronger than
 ever. [Applause]

   A new spirit has emerged
   This congress has also been a highly important economic and
 social congress. During this year-long process, and up until
 today, every possible subject has been discussed, including
 problems with major implications, and very significant programs.
 The progress of the renewed effort in the sugar harvest, the
 planting, the weeding, the harvesting have all been discussed
 across the length and breadth of the island. Many ideas have been
 brought out, a great deal of knowledge has been acquired, and a
 new spirit has emerged....
   That battle isn't won in a day! We had to deal with I don't
 know how many machines without parts; harvesters which had gone
 for many years without any repairs; no steel for the repairs; no
 steel for the sugar mills; no resources to buy engines and replace
 engines. The harvest was carried out with the possibilities we
 obtained as we went along, because we have resisted, given that
 the Revolution didn't collapse a few days after the disappearance
 of the socialist block and businesspeople and the world came to
 gain confidence in Cuba, and in Cuba's capacity to fight and to
 resist.
   So, resources began to appear which we couldn't have even
 thought about in the early years: financing for tobacco
 cultivation, or cane, for rice and then for new products,
 significant credits of a notable volume, although, in real terms,
 we have to pay dearly for them, we have to pay them back at higher
 interest rates. No other country has to pay the interest rates
 that we are paying for those credits. That's the blockade, those
 are the pressures, that's the price that we have to pay for every
 one of these measures we've adopted to obtain resources, but we're
 doing it, and in this way we've started to raise production with
 minimal resources.
   But you see what can be done today with a ton of fuel, with a
 ton of steel; we do three times as much as before with the
 machines we have available. We won those spaces and those
 possibilities with our fortitude, with our resistance, and that
 exasperates them.
   In other countries they have spent billions to eradicate
 socialism; they've lent it, donated it and given it away and in
 exchange, production has fallen lower and lower. There was a time
 when our production lacked everything: fuel, raw materials for the
 textile industry and the machine industry, for numerous lines of
 manufacture, for the production of milk, meat, eggs; and the
 animal feed imported by our country.
   Factories were completely paralyzed for lack of electricity,
 and entire thermoelectrical plants; there were neither materials
 to repair them nor sufficient fuel for minimum needs. So many
 factories had to close down.
   And transportation. We had to see how the almost 30,000 daily
 journeys within City of Havana were reduced to 6,000 or 7,000. The
 country has had to acquire or manufacture two million bicycles to
 confront the transportation problems of workers, students, persons
 who needed mobility, two million bicycles! We set about
 improvising bicycle factories - to produce some of them, as you
 heard yesterday - searching for all kinds of solutions.
   The loss of raw materials for footwear, clothing, everything.
 Such a material blow really could not be conceived.
   You've seen how factories that were paralyzed have been made
 operational again, how raw materials have been appearing; how the
 machine industry is recovering; how the nickel industry is
 recovering; how sugar production is recovering; and how food
 production is recovering....
   All those things are visible; however, one thing has a
 stronger claim on my attention: the reaction of the people, how we
 are beginning to observe this heartening and healthy state that
 has been developing since the most critical moments, since the
 time we were in intensive care; what the people have learned and
 how the idea of economic efficiency, one of the most important,
 and most decisive results of this congress, has taken hold.
   Controls, savings, efficiency, loss reduction, increased
 earnings, profitability, the fight for enterprise profitability,
 the tremendous battle to save a factory, to keep it from closing
 because of its economic and social importance, all this can now be
 observed. The spirit of studying every aspect, that process which
 has been referred to as the reordering of the work force and that
 famous phrase you use: the redirecting of enterprises....
   We have confronted the problems. It is the reverse of what
 happens everywhere else and of what is advised everywhere else by
 the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United
 States: all those neoliberal theories that you're familiar with,
 all those practices, throwing out tens of millions of workers onto
 the streets, closing schools, closing hospitals, eliminating
 essential public services, without consulting with anybody,
 without talking with anybody.

   Consulting the workers at every step
   We could say that in this whole process of the special
 period, not a single step was taken without consulting the people,
 especially the workers. It has been a long process; it has been a
 long process to confront, from the previous stage to this moment,
 and we have had to adapt ourselves to unpleasant realities which
 make us suffer like a sick person in an intensive care unit, or in
 a state of severe crisis.
   We also had to resign ourselves to many things that our minds
 didn't accept, our minds educated in a great spirit of equity, of
 equality, of equal possibilities for all, which we were able to
 enjoy for a number of years, in that stage in which the world was
 living.
   Ramo'n [Castro] and others spoke of a mental blockade, but
 the thing is, in our minds we had a number of things, a number of
 good things. This people's spirit of solidarity has no parallel,
 its generosity, its willingness to help and give, its love of
 justice; that communist spirit of our people, because we had a
 communist spirit without an economy which could permit communism,
 and for that reason we always explained that socialism was one
 thing and communism was another....
   The Revolution achieved all the things we have talked about,
 things which no other Third World country has attained and that,
 of course, many peoples have not attained. In social achievements,
 almost no other people in the world attained them.
   At this moment I can't forget Vietnam, I can't forget China,
 countries which made enormous efforts, like we did, under
 difficult conditions. But what capitalist country achieved the
 level of social security, of social justice that our country has
 attained, of respect for the people attained in our country, of
 social security?
   Some very rich people - and they became rich at the expense
 of underdevelopment, as a rule, of the rest of the world -had so
 much money and were so afraid of communism and socialism that they
 tried to implement a better distribution of the resources they
 had. That was before, wasn't it? Now the cold war's over, now the
 socialist bloc has collapsed, and now indeed measures are taken
 without concern for any class, and the capitalists and
 imperialists overdo their neoliberal measures so much that today
 even the International Monetary Fund speaks of social development,
 because it sees that the world is turning into a volcano and the
 situation is unbearable.
   We observe those sentiments when our visitors tell us of
 what's going on; it's clear that the exploiters are starting to
 get afraid again. They're afraid of social upheaval, a raid of
 social explosions, afraid of chaos. They had lost these fears when
 they believed that they could commit injustices in this world with
 more freedom than ever, and now they're afraid again, so much so
 that the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other
 institutions speak about the need to dedicate some resources to
 social development.


  E-mail from: Jonathan E. Flanders, 07-Jun-1996




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