Fidel on the U.S. hegemon

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Speech given by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, at
the public rally held at the "Abel Santamaría Cuadrado" Revolution Square in
Ciego de Avila on the occasion of the 49th anniversary of the attacks on the
Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks. July 26, 2002. "Year of the
Heroic Prisoners of the Empire."

Fellow Cubans:

History has proved that nothing could defeat our people in its noble
endeavors and that weapons are no more powerful than ideas.

Gomez and Maceo, their tenacity and heroism, ride today like invincible
horsemen through our fields; Céspedes and Agramonte bear with them the
constitution and the justice for which they shed their blood in the free and
sovereign republic they proclaimed in 1868. Martí's ideals live on in the
nation of workers that we are today, as nothing could prevent that, from the
proletarian spirit of a country built over centuries with the blood and
sweat of slaves and workers, the deepest yearning for freedom and justice
that our national hero demanded would flow with inextinguishable strength,
that is, our socialism. What we are today we have defended with honor and a
sense of humanism and justice that will live on like an eternal flame.

Glory be especially to this July 26 and to those who on the same date
forty-nine years ago shed their blood and gave their lives to resume with
ever growing conscience the march down the road opened by their
predecessors!

Glory be to the people that, educated in just ideas and heroic traditions,
has stayed true to them until today and will stay true tomorrow and ever
onwards to victory!

What are we, what shall we be if not one single history, one single idea,
one single will for all times?

Ciego de Avila and Morón, yesterday a line of barricades that the enemy
tried to use to divide the country the East from the West, what are they
this July 26? They are an indestructible path linking the thought, the
heroism and the will to struggle of that imperishable bulwark with whose
independence Martí wanted to prevent and did prevent the powerful and
expansionist neighbor to the North from spreading through the Antilles and
falling with that additional force on our American lands.

People of Ciego de Avila and fellow Cubans from the former province of
Camagüey, without the memory of your sacrifices of yesterday, our dreams of
today would be impossible.

Hardly twelve years ago, many in the world expected to see Cuba, the last
socialist state in the West, crumble. Not much time has gone by and today,
instead, quite a number of us on this earth are waiting to see how the
developed capitalist world led by the United States disengages from the
colossal and chaotic economic mess in which it is enmeshed. Those who
yesterday talked so much about the end of history might be wondering if this
profound crisis is not the beginning of the end of the political, economic
and social system it represents.

Nevertheless, being aware of the disaster affecting that system does not
necessarily mean to be unrealistic, to indulge in excessive optimism or to
see mirages in the midst of what is still an arid desert.

The men who to some degree foresaw a fragment of the future, as a rule
perceived the demise of their era's tragedies as closer and imminent.
However, one would have to be really blind to fail to understand that the
barbaric and cruel world order that humanity endures today cannot last much
longer.

History has shown that new eras have always arisen from the profound crises
of any dominant system.

The 21st century will not be like the century that just ended when the human
population grew four times more that it had grown in the hundreds of
thousands of years that man wandered through the woods, groves, rivers and
lakes of the earth, seeking sustenance in obscure corners of the planet
which are today threatened with pre-emptive and surprise attacks. Today, one
could almost envy those noble barbaric predecessors!

When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, it seemed that almost the
only limit to the inexhaustible fount of riches that would make possible a
truly just and worthy social system for human beings was the exploitative
and merciless capitalist system born from the bourgeois revolution. Not even
his wondrous genius could imagine how much damage capitalism was yet to
bring on humanity.

Lenin discovered and analyzed its imperialist phase.

Today, almost one hundred years later, humanity is suffering under the
horrors of its neoliberal globalization.

New and enormous challenges have surfaced in each of these stages that lead
it closer to its end.

Hardly 30 years ago, few people in the world discussed the environment.
Ideas or themes linked to the destruction of the forests, soil erosion and
salinity, climate change, the disappearing ozone layer, melting icecaps,
whole cities and nations doomed to fatally disappear beneath the sea,
polluted air and water; overexploited oceans seemed to be inventions of
doomsday scientists and not pressing realities.

What does it mean for the overwhelming majority of humanity the spectacular
breakthroughs of science, space flights, the possible colonization of Mars
and suchlike things?

What is it they promise to the billions of starving and diseased people,
total or functional illiterates, who live on this planet?

And what does the alleged existence of the United Nations Organization and
the General Assembly mean to them, when the only thing that counts there is
the Security Council, where five countries have veto power, and the real
tyranny on any matter exerted by the dominant hegemonic superpower?

Rest at: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/julio02-4/30discurso-i.html



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