Cubadebate (English)

On an individual basis, their rivals could be as good as or even better than many of our players, considering the technical and economic resources of countries like the United States, Canada, Japan, among others. What makes Cuban athletes to be different is the strong motivation they feel over the values they represent.

“He remembered that ‘many emerging countries have been turned into innocent victims of the crisis. The irony is that while the U.S. government was giving lessons on rules and institutions in the emerging countries, its policies were a total disaster’.

Last Monday the 9th, like all the rest, was a marvellous day of contradictions for developed capitalism in the midst of its incurable crisis. That day, the British news agency Reuters, not suspected of being anti-capitalist, printed: “Latin America will grow substantially less this year, hit by a strong deceleration or even by recessions in some of its main economies, after years of bonanzas distinguished by rises in the prices of raw materials.

As we all could see, that game could have been won by a knock-out in the seventh inning, with 6 home-runs, two of them by Cepeda, a record in the Classics. That would have enhanced the well-deserved prestige of Cuban sport.

If someone were to take this summary and carry it in his pocket, reading it from time to time or memorizing it like a small Bible, he will be better informed about what is happening in the world than 99% of the population that lives besieged by hundreds of advertisements and is saturated by thousands of hours of news, soap-operas and fiction or real movies.

Unfortunately, what I know about Pichirilo is of great human interest, but dreadfully little, and that requires anyone writing about him to make a special effort to pull together the pertinent information about the person I came to know during a very short period of his life.

Suddenly, he remembers the culture of the Mayan people with pride. He tells me that the length of years in that culture was more exact than the years used by western Christianity. “Nowadays the world uses the decimal system; the Mayas had a system based on twenty, twice as exact”. Truly, it was the first time in my life that I had heard about that detail, the advantage of using two plus zero instead of one plus zero.

I had met him in the Dominican Republic when he was elected for the first time as president. He was especially courteous to me. He spoke of his first efforts to increase the capacity for generating electricity with much less consumption of fuel oil whose prices were rapidly growing.

The new ministers who have just been appointed were consulted with me, even though there is no rule saying that the people doing the proposing should do so since I gave up the prerogatives of power a while ago. They acted simply like genuine revolutionaries who bear their loyalty to principles.

I shall be spending the 15th following the news about the Popular Referendum, which should say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the right of the Bolivarian leader, Hugo Chavez Frias, to run again for President of our sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.