Archive | Reflections of Fidel

TO give some idea of the potential of the USSR in its efforts to maintain parity with the United States in this sphere, suffice it to note that when its disintegration came about in 1991, there were 81 nuclear warheads in Byelorussia, 1,400 in Kazakhstan, and approximately 5,000 in Ukraine, which were passed on to […]

No sane person, especially someone who has had access to the elementary knowledge acquired in primary school, would agree that our species, especially those who are children, teenagers or youth, should be deprived of the right to live, today, tomorrow and forever. Never have human beings, throughout their eventful history, as persons endowed with intelligence, […]

ON Sunday, November 6, 72 hours ago, there was a general election in which Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and the FSLN won an overwhelming victory. Perhaps by chance, the following day was the 94th anniversary of the glorious Soviet Socialist Revolution. Indelible pages of history were written by Russian workers, peasants and soldiers, and the name […]

Tomorrow the G-20 Meeting begins, that is the meeting of the most developed and wealthy countries on the planet: the United States, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy and the European Union as a separate entity but with the right to participate; they are the fundamental bastions of NATO plus its allies Japan, South Korea, […]

On March 9th this year, under the title of “NATO, War, Lies and Business”, I published a new Reflection about the role of that warlike organization. I am selecting some fundamental paragraphs from that Reflection: “As some may be aware, in September of 1969, Muammar al-Gaddafi, an Arab Bedouin soldier of a peculiar character and […]

On March 2nd, under the title of “NATO’s Inevitable War” I wrote: “In contrast with what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya occupies the first spot on the Human Development Index for Africa and it has the highest life expectancy on the continent. Education and health receive special attention from the State. The cultural […]

ON February 23, under the title “Cynicism’s danse macabre,” I stated: “The politics of plunder imposed by the United States and its NATO allies in the Middle East is in crisis.” “Thanks to Sadat’s betrayal at Camp David, the Palestinian Arab State has not come into existence, despite the United Nations agreements of November 1947, […]

A little over eight months ago, on February 21st of this year, I stated with complete conviction: “The NATO plan is to occupy Libya”. With that title I dealt with the subject for the first time in a Reflection whose content seemed to be the product of a fantasy. I include in these lines the […]

That brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind. NATO took on that global repressive role as soon as the USSR, which had served the United States as an excuse for its creation, ceased to exist. Its criminal purpose became obvious in Serbia, a Slavic country, […]

Yesterday I spoke about the time when Venezuela was an ally of the US empire and the country where Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch carried out their plans for the brutal in-flight bombing of a Cuban plane that caused the death and disappearance of all people aboard, including the youth fencing team that had just […]

A will of iron   (Part 2) WHEN, in 1976, the most serious terrorist acts were committed against Cuba, in particular the in-flight sabotage of a Cuban airliner which had departed from Barbados with 73 persons aboard – among them pilots, flight attendants and auxiliary personnel offering their services to the airline, the complete juvenile fencing […]

THE WILL OF STEEL (Part One) Two days ago on Friday October 14th, Granma and Juventud Rebelde, the Communist Party and Youth League newspapers, published a brave and energetic message from Rene Gonzalez, Hero of the Republic, to the people of Cuba, after the odious and unfair 13-year punishment had finished, separately, like the other […]

Not because it was brutal or clumsy or anticipated was there any less indignation about the Yankee judge from the South Florida District denying René González, the Cuban anti-terrorist hero, the right to return to the heart of his family in Cuba after having served the unfair sentence imposed on him.… After a cruel and undeserved 13-year prison sentence, the United States government—that gave birth to monsters such as Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch who, as CIA agents had a hand in the exploding of a Cuban airliner full of passengers in mid-flight—forces René to remain in that nation, where he shall be at the mercy of unpunished murderers for three long years, under a regime described as supervised “freedom”. Still unfairly and vengefully imprisoned for long terms of confinement, are another three Cuban heroes, and another one sentenced to two life terms. That is how the empire responds to the growing world clamor for the freedom of these men.

If our Nobel Prize [Obama] winner is deceiving himself—something that has yet to be established—that perhaps explains the incredible contradictions in his reasoning and the confusion sowed among his listeners.… There is not a drop of morality, not even of politics, in his attempt to justify his announced decision to veto any resolution approved supporting the recognition of Palestine as an independent state and a member of the United Nations. Even politicians who in no way share socialist ideas and lead parties which were closely allied with Augusto Pinochet support Palestine’s right to full membership in the UN.

I take a break from the tasks that are occupying all of my time these days to dedicate a few words to the unique opportunity presented by the political science of the sixtieth session of the United Nations General Assembly.… The yearly event demands singular effort from those taking on the greatest of political responsibilities in many countries. For them, it constitutes a tough test; for the fans of that art, and there are many since it vitally affects everybody, it is difficult to remove oneself from the temptation of observing the interminable but educational show.

Attending to other matters that are now top priority, I momentarily strayed from the frequency with which I had been writing reflections in the year 2010; however, Hugo Chávez Frías’ proclamation last Thursday the 30th, obliges me to write these lines.… The president of Venezuela is one of the men who has done the most for the health and education of his people; since these are subjects where the Cuban Revolution has accumulated the most experience, we gladly collaborate to the maximum with this sister country in both areas.

No one can be sure that, in its agony, the empire might not drag humanity into a catastrophe.… As is known, as long as human life exists, everyone has the sacred responsibility to be optimistic. Ethically, any other type of behavior would be inadmissible. I remember well a day, almost 20 years ago, when I said that one species was in danger of extinction: the human race.

The men who executed Bin Laden did not act on their own: they were following orders from the US Government. They had gone through a rigorous selection process and were trained to accomplish special missions. It is known that the US President can even communicate with a soldier in combat.… A few hours after accomplishing that mission in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, home to the most prestigious military academy of that country as well as important combat units, the White House offered the world’s public opinion a carefully drafted version about the death of Osama Bin Laden, the chief of Al Qaeda.… Of course, the world and the international media focused their attention on the issue, thus pushing all other public news into the background.

Those persons who deal with these issues know that on September 11 of 2001 our people expressed its solidarity to the US people and offered the modest cooperation that in the area of health we could have offered to the victims of the brutal attack against the Twin Towers in New York.… We also immediately opened our country’s airports to the American airplanes that were unable to land anywhere, given the chaos that came about soon after the strike.… Although we resolutely supported the armed struggle against Batista’s tyranny, we were, on principle, opposed to any terrorist action that could cause the death of innocent people. Such behavior, which has been maintained for more than half a century, gives us the right to express our views about such a sensitive matter.

You may agree or not with Gaddafi’s political ideas, but no one has the right to question the existence of Libya as an independent state and member of the United Nations. The world has not yet reached the point which, in my view, is an essential condition for the survival of our human species: access by all the peoples to the material resources of this planet. There is no other in the Solar System that we know that has the most elemental conditions for life.