Re: Hutton's declaration of war 2

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 20 May 2002 22:32:27 +0100, Chris Burford wrote:
>If once the United States personified the
>future, increasingly the EU is demonstrating how
> inter-dependence can be managed and nurtured.

This must be some kind of joke. Anti-immigrant violence is spreading
across Europe while the "third way" politicians are doing everything
they can to placate xenophobia. Cuba personifies the future, not
these sleazy politicians of the spineless social democracy and the
Thatcherite right.

=====

Remarks by Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba,
during former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's visit to the Latin
American Medical School, May 13, 2002

Distinguished former president of the United States, James Carter,
Mrs. Carter and other members of his delegation:

Greetings, also, to the other guests, and to the dear students of
this medical school:

I was not sure if I should speak or not. Among other things, I did
not want to endanger all of you here (Laughter) with a speech that
might go on a bit longer than it should. But there was a complete
hush, and so I felt obliged (Laughter), really I did, to come up to
this podium for a few minutes.

I saw a program that read, "Finally, the keynote speech is
introduced." That is what they usually say in these public
ceremonies, the open forums and so on. But I would say that in any
case, if I were to say something, it would be the closing remarks,
since the keynote speech was given by President Carter. Just to
explain this thing about former president and president, it is a
matter of courtesy. In the United States, in friendly and informal
settings, anyone who has been a President, even if he no longer is,
continues to be called President, and that is the friendly manner in
which we are speaking to him today.

I was thinking to myself, what is it really that we are doing here?
Is this a medical school, or is it something else? One thinks in
terms of numbers, percentages and so on. I was also calculating, for
example, how many doctors we had at the time of the triumph of the
Revolution, and it turns out that the number of students at this
school today is greater than the number of doctors in Cuba at that
time. And two or three years later only half of those doctors stayed
inn our country. Only 40% of our professors of medicine stayed too.

The results that I could present here today -and I do not say show
because we do not show anything off, we present things- have been
achieved with a tremendous effort, a 43 years effort.

With the doctors who stayed in our country, we were able to create
what we have today, and what we have today is 22 doctors for every
doctor they left us, a little over 22. And the number of students
enrolled in medical studies in our universities today is two and a
half times the number of doctors who stayed in our country.

Yes, we faced a situation that posed a tremendous challenge. We
either remained without doctors, or we would make the effort required
to have all the doctors we needed.

Among our greatest hopes, when we thought about the future, when we
dreamed of the future, was the hope that our country would have a
good medical system.

I will never forget that when I was a grammar school student in grade
five or six, and I went home to the farming estate where I lived, I
would sometimes find that a third of the children had died. Nobody
heard anything about it; it was not published in the newspapers. And
what did they die of? Acidosis. And to this you would have to add, of
course, all those who regularly died of tetanus, or any of the many
other diseases that regularly afflicted the people in the countryside
here.

We also dreamed of schools, because we observed the world around us,
and realized that almost all of the young people and adults were
illiterate. I remember that some of the few who could read and write
made a living by writing letters for others who wanted to write to a
girlfriend or a girl they wanted to court. But they did not dictate
these letters, they had to ask from the letter writers to produce the
content of the letter as well. They would ask them to say in the
letter what they thought they would have to say to win over the girl
- because in those days, it was the boys who courted the girls
(Laughter and applause), there was not as much equality as today
(Laughter).

Those were two pillars we fought for, but they were not the two
fundamental pillars. The fundamental pillar was something else:
justice, equality of opportunities, true brotherhood among human
beings. And what is a society without justice? What is a society of
illiterates? What is a society where a small few have everything, and
the rest have nothing? What freedom can be born of inequality and
ignorance? What democracy? What human rights?

There are very profound things that our people hold dear. We are
firmly convinced that there are many words and many concepts that
must be redefined, if we truly want to advance towards a worthy
future. The past cannot be the future, and to conceive of a future
society genuinely requires rethinking many concepts that are
prehistoric.

We all know, or many of us know, that the word democracy first
originated in Greece. When we were young we were told, "There was a
model of democracy, the citizens ran the government gathered in a
public square," which must have been quiet small. In those days,
Athens, for example, had about 20,000 free citizens -there must have
been a bit fewer, because if they met in a square, and there were not
even microphones back then, they all had to fit in what was actually
a small park. Without these microphones, I could not be heard at the
back of this group of people gathered here. And in addition to the
15,000 or 20,000 free citizens there were 50,000 or 60,000 people who
had no rights whatsoever and around 80,000 human beings who were
slaves.

When we look around the world today and we see that there are
billions of human beings who live in conditions of inconceivable
poverty, billions and billions of human beings who live in that Third
World, we might ask ourselves what kind of world we are living in.
When we see that there are countries where 90% of the people are
illiterate and have no schools, and that their numbers grow larger
every day; when we hear reports of the number of children who could
be saved yet who die before the age of one, and we compare the
countries where these deaths account for 5, 6, 7 or 8 children out of
every 1000 born alive, while that figure is over 150 in other
countries, we ask ourselves what kind of world we are living in.

We often ask ourselves, in what century, in what millennium shall we
be able to say that all human beings born into this world are truly
born into it with an equality of opportunities in life?

We have made tremendous efforts to ensure that at least on this
island, there can be an equality of opportunities for all human
beings, and we still have not completely achieved this goal. You can
imagine how difficult it is, and how much more difficult still when
you are starting out from a situation of poverty, which is how our
own country had to start out, and how over 140 countries are starting
out today, to a greater or lesser extent. And if there is any
satisfaction, as a reward for the efforts of so many compatriots who
struggled, and many who fell in the battle or devoted all of their
lives' energies to an ideal of justice, to a noble dream, it is the
fact that our country is moving ever closer to a society where all
human beings have an equality of opportunities, but not just in
theory, because only in theory can we speak about equality in the
world today.

Only in theory, when you know, for example, that a country like
Mozambique has a per capita gross domestic product of 80 dollars a
year, while others have an annual GDP of 45,000 dollars. And I am not
referring only to the difference between nations, but rather to the
differences between individuals within the same nation, and our Latin
American countries are Olympic champions in this regard.

We Latin Americans come from the region with the widest gap between
the rich and the poor. We know that in many of them, the richest 10%
of the population possesses 50% of the wealth and goods produced in
these nations, while the poorest 10% have access to only 4% or 5%, or
sometimes even less, of the gross domestic product.

When you walk through the streets you see them full of children
cleaning windshields, shining shoes or working for a pittance in
order to help support their families. You see children who do not go
to school, because there are no schools, or children who do not even
make it past fifth grade, because if I remember correctly, only 52%
reach fifth grade, much less sixth grade or ninth grade. And we could
ask ourselves why, and what degree of justice there is, what the
future holds for some and what it holds for others.

And that is why, while many recognize the tremendous advances that
our country has made in health care, education and sports, as if
these were the only objectives, or the final objectives of our
struggles or our lives, we would have to add: We are striving for
something much more noble, we are striving for justice for all.

How can there be justice when people do not know how to read and
write? How can there be freedom without justice or equality? How can
there be a democracy like the democracy in Athens we mentioned
earlier? How can we speak of human rights, and what kind of world are
we living in, when the very country that in this era and in the face
of unimaginable difficulties is moving closer, and at an ever faster
rate, to this level, this dream of justice, true freedom, true
democracy and true human rights, is condemned in Geneva as a violator
of those rights?

I should not address such a thorny subject at a gathering like this,
where I was not planning on speaking, but now that I have been
obliged to speak... When someone speaks, it should be to say
something. I will add that today this is perhaps the most united
country in the world, and the one with the deepest political
conscience. Today this is perhaps the country that is most excited
and full of hope for the future.

You all know that just a few days ago a million residents of Havana
gathered together in Revolution Square. Yes, just a few days after
that condemnation, they gathered infuriated by that colossal offense.
And the most incredible thing of all is that those who condemned us
can show no other image but that of hell, because those countries
-and I am referring specifically to the countries of Latin America-
are the complete antithesis of the rights we were talking about.
Therefore, there is no reason to be upset. There will be a judge
whose verdict cannot be appealed, and that judge will be history.
(Applause)

That is why I was saying that as I looked at all of you here, I asked
myself, Is this only a medical school? And what good would it do if
you all went back to your countries to become part of institutions
where, sadly, financial concerns, commercialism and selfishness
prevail? What good would it do if no one was willing to go work in
the mountains, the plains, the remote corners of the countryside or
marginal neighborhoods of the cities to practice the noble profession
of medicine? More than a medical school, our most fervent hope is
that this will be a school of solidarity, brotherhood and justice.

full: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y5CC217E

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/20/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org