Articles of Fidel Castro Ruz

For the past months and ending yesterday on March 5th, La Hojilla, a Venezolana de Televisión programme, took on the task of selecting facts and sentences that exactly reveal the imperialist scheme of doing to Chavez what was done to Milosevi? after the genocidal Kosovo Conflict: to have him tried by the International Criminal Tribunal.

I remember when he visited us, months before the electoral campaign when he was thinking of running as a candidate for the Presidency of Ecuador. He had been the Minister of the Economy in the government of Alfredo Palacio, a surgeon with professional prestige who had also visited us as Vice President, before becoming the President in an unexpected situation that took place in Ecuador. He had been receptive to a program of ophthalmologic operations that we offered him as a form of cooperation. There were good relations between our two governments.

Our doctors and all the other Cuban health professionals and technicians are an exceptional powerhouse. No other country has anything like it; just like our island’s internationalist soldiers, they were trained in combat. Their missions overseas abide by strict ethical standards. Their services are offered free of charge, or they are commercialized according to the host country’s circumstances. They are not exportable.

Sergio has left us. A little while ago I heard the news about his cremation on television. He was much younger than I. If we had more knowledge about health, perhaps he wouldn’t have gone so soon. I learned from him when visiting the lovely mountains in the centre of the island. I was an admirer of his principles. I am certain that he wouldn’t have wanted his ashes to lie in the capital’s cemetery. I hope that his relatives, or whoever else has the right to do so, decide to place them in some Escambray forest where a tree can grow together with his memory. I shall accept any decision with sincere honesty.

These words will be published tomorrow, on February 29th. A great many tasks lie immediately ahead of us. The 10th International Meeting of Economists on Globalization and Development Problems, a conference I had always attended and in which I had always expressed different points of view, will begin on Monday the 3rd. Judging from the international developments we’ve witnessed, this conference will doubtless be of great importance, owing to the presence of prestigious economists, some Nobel Prize Laureates and two eminent heads of State.

Today, by mere chance, I remembered that the OAS still exists, when I read a cable posted on the Internet which contained an article by Georgina Saldierna, published in La Jornada, titled “Insulza rules out the possibility of re-admitting Cuba into the OAS”. No one even remembered the OAS. Note how retrograde this line of reasoning is.

That Tuesday there was no fresh international news. The modest message I wrote to the Cuban people on Monday, February 18, was widely and easily disseminated. As from 11 o’clock in the morning I started to receive concrete news. The previous night I had slept like never before. I had a clear conscience and I had promised myself a vacation. The days of tension, awaiting the proximity of February 24, had left me exhausted.

More than two weeks ago, on January 27, 2008, the digital publication Tom Dispatch reproduced an article translated for Rebelión by Germán Leyens: Why The Debt Crisis is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic, by Chalmers Johnson. This American author has not been awarded the Nobel Prize, as has Joseph Stiglitz, the famous and well-known economist and writer, or even Milton Friedman himself, who inspired neoliberalism and led many countries down that disastrous path, including the United States.

When in the previous reflection I asked McCain what he thought of the Five antiterrorist Cuban Heroes, I did so because I remembered what he had published on page 206 of his book Faith of My Fathers, co-written with his assistant Mark Salter:

Yesterday, I said that while Bush was speaking to Congress, McCain was being honored at the Versailles Restaurant of Little Havana.