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