http://www.granma.cu/ingles/cuba-i/27agosto-Humanity.html
Havana. August 27, 2010 Humanity must preserve itself in order to live for thousands of years (Taken from CubaDebate) "Humanity must preserve itself in order to live for thousands of years," Fidel responded to Russian writer Daniel Estulin, author of the Bilderberg Club trilogy, who is visiting Havana. He stated that in relation to the visitor's belief that in order to solve many of its problems, humanity will have to emigrate to other planets. Fidel emphatically affirmed that however enthusiastic we might feel about survival in other spaces within the solar system, it is better for us not to lose what we have on Earth, because that is the only way not to lose everything that lies beyond this planet. With great difficulty, human beings have landed on the moon, an inhospitable satellite. Beyond that lie Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, Venus and the other planets, which basically equate to dust clouds, incandescent ovens or ice. The conversation between the leader of the Revolution and the writer was a profound, fascinating dialogue that lasted more than 90 minutes, every one of which was of surprising intensity. THE SURVIVAL OF THE HUMAN RACE "The obligation of all human beings is to ensure the survival of the entire human race. The Bilderberg Club wants to exclusively ensure the survival of its own species, an authentic minority," affirmed Daniel Estulin after the formal introductions. "You wrote very beautiful things about your grandfather," Fidel remarked. "I loved my grandfather very much. He was a very special man. He was a well-known doctor, a surgeon, in Lithuania. My grandfather was from Crimea and during World War II, on just one day, the Nazis killed 11 of his siblings, as well as his mother, his father and his 104-year old grandfather. Imagine coming from a large family and the very next day, being left an orphan." He lived through World War I, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. "At some point, in the chaos of the war, he lost track of his family. His wife and three children - aged eight, five and three years old - were captured by the Nazis, sent to a concentration camp and exterminated," he recalled. Estulin explained in detail to Fidel the history of his family, who emigrated to Canada in 1980 - it was there that he and his grandfather were reunited - of his pilgrimage through various countries of the world, and of his Sevillian wife. He has lived in Spain for the last 17 years. Although he was born in Lithuania, he is Russian, as is his mother tongue. The Comandante was impressed with how fluently Estulin spoke Spanish. "I write in English for convenience, because most editors speak that language. My books have been published in more than 50 countries. I've been told that you read in English." "In Spanish with difficulty." Fidel replied jokingly. But he does read many original English language texts translated into Spanish. One example he gave was Lincoln: "A biography by U.S. writer Gore Vidal. It is incredible how one man can reconstruct the whole atmosphere of that time and compare it to what is happening today." MILITARY BASES IN LATIN AMERICA "They're at war with Chávez because, against all odds, Venezuela is still one of the few countries in the world where there are no U.S. military bases. And they hate Cuba for the same reason: its independence. In Cuba, they cannot destroy the concept of 'nation-state', in my opinion the most important concept of the last 600 years," affirmed Estulin. "You left out Ecuador, which had a base in Manta for 10 years and they succeeded in removing it. There are bases in many other countries. Within a matter of hours, they can place troops in any nation," Fidel observed. "As if they were branches of McDonalds," said Estulin, ironically. "With respect to direct bases, they have Guantánamo, they have the Malvinas.And in the other countries, they might seem not to have them but in reality they do. They engage in practices and exercises. They don't have any in Venezuela. Colombia is a country converted into a base. They have them in Honduras. They don't have them in Costa Rica but they do have 40 vessels there, included aircraft carriers, 'nobly' helping in the war on drugs. It's completely cynical." added Fidel. For Estulin, the upcoming elections in Venezuela are crucial. It is not a case of two ideologically exclusive tendencies facing each other at the polls. Sources linked to the U.S. State Department have confirmed that - after the demonizing of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian process - there is a plan to install military bases in that country, which will not be possible with the sovereign and Latin Americanist policies of the Venezuelan leader. The conversation continued on this subject and the challenges facing the new National Assembly that will emerge from the elections on September 26, which will see the return of an opposition that is out of practice in terms of legislating because of the years that it has remained outside of the process in its attempt to boycott the Bolivarian government. Chávez - who recently paid a visit to Havana - is optimistic, confirmed Fidel and is working tirelessly on the peace process with Colombia. "He sleeps a little during the day and works all night long." But the world that Fidel is visualizing - and he says it himself - is not that one, a world of electoral conflicts. "In my opinion, the empire is going to fall. If there is a war, the whole world will fall. Our struggle is for no war, but not at any price. This is not about imposing conditions. There will be no war if nobody pulls the trigger, which is now in the hands of Obama, who is not a warmonger. As Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg says, in his analysis of Bush: 'I don't personally expect Obama to be more Bush than Bush.'" AL QAEDA They commented on the string of attacks in Iraq the previous day. Sixty-two people were killed on the very same day that the U.S. troops officially left Baghdad. Fidel raised the question: "Who is in control there? There is also the situation in Afghanistan; there are some very interesting things related to what you wrote about Bali - the 2002 attack on a nightclub. That attack was attributed to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is another mystery that is being uncovered." The Comandante en Jefe confirmed that he always had his suspicions about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. "Every time that Bush went out to instill fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden appeared saying what he was going to do and making threats. Bush was never lacking in support from Bin Laden. I seemed line a tableau and it was Wikileaks that demonstrated that he was, effectively, a CIA agent. They proved it with documents." Estulin commented that high-ranking U.S. officials and intelligence services in other nations have acknowledged that the last time Bin Laden's voice was heard was on December 21, 2001. "Since then, he has disappeared. Since that date, he has been replaced by a bad actor who dresses like him but doesn't even look like him." RUSSIA IN THE SIGHTS Once again, as in his conference with national colleagues the previous evening, Estulin took up the central thesis of his exposé: "The objective of the Bilderbergs is to destroy Russia as a military power and China as an economic power." And he thanked Fidel again for including excerpts from his books in his recent Reflections, because, "They cannot silence what you say." "It wasn't always like that," clarified the leader of the Revolution. The journalist stated that the world superpowers are aware that the only state capable of militarily standing up the United States and destroying it is Russia, and emphasized that there is a third plan, the Barbarossa - as the Nazi invasion of the USSR was known - against the current Russia. The Russian writer reiterated that the final objective of this whole montage, including a possible nuclear war, is to destroy Russia, the great military enemy of the United States. "Russia has the potential to wipe the USA off the face of the earth. It has much more powerful weapons that those that the U.S. arsenal might possible contain at this moment in time. For example, the P-7000 Granite, an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead of 500 kilotrons. It is launched from a submarine. It flies at a speed of 2,983 kilometers per hour. There is nothing in the world faster than that. The fastest U.S. aircraft flies at around 2,600 kilometers. "There has been no talk about that," Fidel commented. Estulin said, "They are extremely afraid of it. It is a fact that the Kursk nuclear submarine - sunk in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000 - was carrying these weapons." That is one element to take into account when considering that "my country, Russia, is the Number 1 military enemy of the United States. Right now they are building 13 super-secret bases in Afghanistan and each one of these is larger than any other U.S. base in the world, and there are already more than 700. They are not building them to attack Iran but Russia's southern border." Estulin has documented information on the strategic weapons aimed at his country, the plans for Afghanistan, historical precedents, and the collapse of the USSR. Fidel listened to him very closely. "Accumulating more than 25,000 nuclear weapons isn't for sane people. All of that was passing through my mind while you were speaking, and I was asking myself where it's all going to stop. That was exactly what I wanted to discuss with you. I have devoted a lot of time to reading and collecting information. We dedicate all our time to informing ourselves, while those who make decisions than can determine the lives of millions of people are disinformed." ATOMIC MINI-BOMBS The history of small-format atomic weapons dates back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s, for pacific use. Estulin explained, "When engineers wanted to open a pass through a mountain to build a tunnel, for example, they realized that there wasn't a high enough quantity of dynamite to do so. So then they began to use controlled atomic energy. The military industry realized that it would also serve to kill people. Third- and fourth-generation weapons emerged from there. Some of these weapons can be the size of a baseball. But there are two ways of constructing an atomic bomb: with uranium or with plutonium. The difference is the critical mass: that of uranium is more or less 50-52 kilos of the critical mass while of plutonium it is far less. The Hiroshima bomb was uranium and that of Nagaski, plutonium. According to Estulin, terrorists have never had access to uranium bombs because, "we haven't seen an explosion like that of Hiroshima since 1945. Terrorists do not have the technology to produce mini-nukes. Only the United States, Russia, France and Israel can do that." IN THE SIERRA MAESTRA The bombs dropped from Batista's airplanes, Fidel recalled, were sometime of 500 kilograms, and opened a large hole, but did not destroy many houses. "They fell, buried themselves and exploded," Fidel added. "In the case of atomic bombs, the mushroom cloud and fire are two unmistakable signs accompanying them. I don't remember that happening in the Sierra Maestra. "They destroyed, without any doubt, but not in those apocalyptical dimensions of the nuclear bomb. "Once they launched two 500-kilogram bombs on us and I went to see them: they had damaged a little bit more than half a hectare, but there was no fire. We were about 100 meters from the place where they bombarded. They more or less knew where we were, because we had the enemy troops surrounded, there was never any fire. And they dropped bombs on us! That was the first we had to deal with, 20 minutes after starting any combat action." The Batista Army used those weapons very well, because the United States had trained them. "They used B-26s, as well as a kind of fighter plane with 8 machine guns and they had some Hunter Jets, three in all, two of them we used afterward to defend ourselves during the mercenary Bay of Pigs attack (1961). Those Jets were handled by pilots who were taken prisoner for refusing to carry out Batista's orders and had been tried and punished for that." The Comandante en Jefe commented that all the dynamite used by the Rebel Arm in the war was taken from unexploded bombs. "Our people learned to uncover them and pull them out. We made contact mines with a little torch battery. Sometimes we would put in 20 kilograms of TNT and that could turn a light tank upside down; it could completely destroy heavy ones. Fidel's memories traveled back to the fighting methods of the Rebel Army, based on respect for dignity, the humane treatment of prisoners, and ethics in confronting an enemy which totally lacked that values. "No soldier is going to hand himself over if he knows that they are going to kill him. It was the simplest thing in the world for us to put out of action an army trained by the yankis, which came to consider itself invincible." Without abandoning the subject, Fidel asked Estulin what his argument was in response to people who challenge his investigations, specifically in terms of the effect of radiation where mini-nuke explosions had allegedly taken place. According to the journalist, even in the language of those writing about the explosions one can find indications as to what produced them, although the most obvious evidence such as the effects of radiation on the people affected in the short-, mid- or long-term is concealed. "For example, Fidel insisted, "Who is interested in the Oklahoma explosion?" The writer's response prompted him to move on to interests beyond that of the U.S. presidency, which nobody reaches without being approved by those interests. Estulin believes that the plans of the world elite are to exterminate surplus humans on a planet whose population is growing at a faster rate than the availability of resources in many regions. Fidel only noted: "Humanity will have to resolve the issue of renewable energy." and after commenting on the drama provoked by the forest fires in Russia, recommended to the journalist the documentary Home, which focuses on the challenges of human survival." THE BATTLE IS FOR THIS PLANET Estulin posed the question of whether humanity could still be on this planet in 50-100,000 years' time. For him, the response is: No. "There will be too many of us. The only alternative is that, through progress and development, we colonize the moon, Mars, space and assure ourselves that billions of humans can survive, and that for me is immortality." "What you say about human progress is correct," Fidel replied, "But in my view, life is going to unfold here, on this planet. There is no atmosphere on Mars, the Moon and the other planets of the solar system. Your theory is absolutely right in the sense that humanity has to preserve itself in order to live for thousands of years, thanks to progress. "But we have to fight against the forces that are preventing this progress." And Fidel gave one example: "It is calculated that life began on this planet around four billion years ago, more or less. Oil began to be formed more or less 400 million years ago. Humans are wasting in less than 200 years the oil accumulated over 400 million years. The atmosphere cannot resist that consumption." Estulin affirmed his agreement. "I think that all of us have to fight as much as Fidel for the survival of the species." The author commented that many people believe that we have reached the point of no return, and that we have to stop dead. "The dangers are very great," Fidel observed. Estulin gave his books to Fidel and wrote as a dedication: "We shall win the war when the power of love exceeds the love of power." Fidel read it silently and then said out loud: "We will win the war by not waging it." Translated by Granma International
