*Message to the Participants at the 17th World Festival of Youth and
Students in South Africa*
*by Fidel Castro*
*13 December 2010*
*Comrades:*
It is a great pleasure and honour for me to agree to the request that
you made for me to send a message to the 17th World Festival of Youth
and Students that is taking place in the Homeland of Nelson Mandela, the
living symbol of the struggle against the odious apartheid system.
Cuba hosted two world festivals: the 11th in 1978 and the 14th in 1997.
For the first time, the Festival ceased to be held in Europe and took
place in a country in this hemisphere.
The decision was made by the 9th Assembly of the World Federation of
Democratic Youth which was held in Varna, Bulgaria at the end of 1974.
Those were different times: the world was facing serious problems, but
ones that were less dramatic.The more progressive youth was fighting for
the right of all human beings to a decent life; the old dream of the
greatest thinkers of our species when it was clear that science,
technology, the productivity of labour and the development of
consciousness was making it possible.
In a brief lapse of time, globalization accelerated, communications
reached unsuspected levels, the means to promote education, health and
culture multiplied.Our dreams were not without foundation. In that
spirit, the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students took place and our
people also took part in it.
At the General Council of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, held
precisely in heroic South Africa at the beginning of October in 1995, it
was approved to hold the 14th Festival in Havana; 12,000 delegates from
132 countries would be taking part.Our country at that time had been
struggling for almost 37 years in the political and ideological battle
against the empire and its brutal economic blockade.
Until the decade of the 1980s, not only were the Peoples' Republic of
China, the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Laos and
Kampuchea in existence who had been withstanding genocidal wars and the
crimes of the Yankees, but also the socialist bloc in Europe and the
Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, an enormous multinational State
with 22,402,200 square kilometres, enormous resources of agricultural
lands, forests, oil, gas, minerals and more.Face to face with the
imperialist superpower, with its more than 800 military bases deployed
throughout the planet, the socialist superpower was surging.
The dissolution of the USSR, whatever the errors may have been at one or
another moment in history, constituted a rough blow to the world's
progressive movement.
The Yankees moved quickly and spread their military bases and the use of
facilities constructed by the USSR in order to encircle more tightly,
with their war machinery the Russian Federation which continued to be a
great power.
The military bravado of the United States and its NATO allies increased
in Europe and Asia.They unleashed the Kosovo War and disintegrated Serbia.
Within the area of our hemisphere, even before the collapse of the USSR,
they invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965; they bombed and intervened
in Nicaragua with mercenaries; their regular troops invaded Grenada,
Panama and Haiti; they promoted bloody military coups in Chile,
Argentina and Uruguay and supported Stroessner's brutal repression in
Paraguay.
They created the School of the Americas where they were not only
training thousands of Latin American officers in conspiracies and coups
d'état, but they were also familiarizing many with doctrines of hate and
sophisticated torture practices while they were presenting themselves to
the world as champions of "human rights and democracy".
In the first decade of this century, the imperialist superpower appears
to be overflowing its own riverbanks.
The bloody events of September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers of New
York City were destroyed -a dramatic episode where around 3,000 persons
lost their lives- and the subsequent attack on the Pentagon, fit like a
glove on the hand of that unscrupulous adventurer George W. Bush for him
to orchestrate the so-called war on terrorism that constitutes, simply,
a dangerous escalation of the brutal policy that the US has been
applying on our planet.
There has been more than sufficient proof of the embarrassing complicity
of the NATO countries in such a reproachable war.That warmongering
organization has just proclaimed its aim to intervene in any country in
the world, wherever it feels that its interests, that is, US interests,
are being threatened.
The monopoly on the mass media, in the hands of the huge capitalist
transnationals, has been used by imperialism to sow lies, create
conditioned reflexes and to develop egoistical instincts.
While the youth and students were travelling to South Africa to fight
for a world in peace, with dignity and justice, in Great Britain
university students and their professors were waging a pitched battle
against the considerable and well-equipped repressive police who, on
their spirited horses, were attacking them.There have been few times,
and perhaps never, that we have seen such a show of capitalist
"democracy".The neoliberal governing parties, exercising their role of
the police force of the oligarchy, betraying their electoral promises,
passed measures in Parliament that raised the yearly fees for university
students to $14,000.The worst of it all was the nerve with which the
neoliberal parliamentarians stated that the "market was resolving that
problem".Only the rich had the right to a university degree.
A few days ago, the present US Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
commenting on the secrets divulged by WikiLeaks stated: "The fact is,
governments deal with the United States because it's in their interest,
not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because
they believe we can keep secrets.[...] some governments deal with us
because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they
need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the
indispensable nation".
Not a few intelligent and well-informed people harbour the conviction
that the Yankee Empire, like all those coming before it, has entered its
final phase and that the signs are irrefutable.
An article published on the TomDispatch website, translated from English
by the Rebelión website presents four hypotheses about the probable
course of events in the United States, and in all of them, world war
appears as one of the possibilities even though it does not exclude that
there may be another option.It adds that definitely that country will
lose its dominant role in world exports of goods and in less than 15
years it will lose its dominant role in innovative technology and the
privileged function of the dollar as the reserve currency.It quotes that
already this year China has reached 12% in comparison to the US 11% in
world exports of goods and it mentioned the presentation in October of
this year by the Chinese Minister of Defence of the Tianhe-1ª
super-computer, something so powerful that, in the words of an American
expert, "it wipes out the No. 1 machine" existing in the United States.
Our dear compatriots, upon arriving in South Africa, among their first
activities, paid fully-deserved tribute to the internationalist
combatants who gave their lives fighting for Africa.
Fort the last 12 years, in neighbouring Haiti, our medical mission
provides its services to the Haitian people; today, with the cooperation
of the internationalist doctors graduated from ELAM (the Latin American
School of Medicine).They also fight there for Africa by doing battle
against the cholera epidemic, the disease of poverty, to prevent its
spreading to that continent where, just like in Latin America, there is
a lot of poverty.With their acquired experience, our doctors have
extraordinarily lowered the death rate.Very near to South Africa, in
Zimbabwe, in August of 2008, that epidemic broke out "explosively",
according to the Harare "Herald".Robert Mugabe accused the governments
of the United States and Great Britain of introducing the disease.
As proof of the total lack of Yankee scruples, it is necessary to
remember that the government of the United States delivered nuclear
weapons to the apartheid regime; the racists were at the point of using
them against Cuban and Angolan troops which, after the victory at Cuito
Cuanavale, were advancing southward, where the Cuban command, having
suspicions about that danger, adopted the pertinent measures and tactics
to give them total control of the air space.If they should try to use
such weapons, they wouldn't have obtained victory.But it is legitimate
to wonder: what would have happened if the South African racists had
used nuclear weapons against the Cuban and Angolan troops?What would the
international reaction have been? How would such a barbaric act have
been justified?How would the USSR have reacted?These are questions we
must ask ourselves.
When the racists handed over the government to Nelson Mandela, they
didn't say a single word to him, nor did they say what they did with
those weapons.Investigation and the denunciation of such events would be
of great service to the world, at this time.Dear compatriots, I urge you
to present this topic at the World Festival of Youth and Students.
Patria o Muerte!
Venceremos!
*Fidel Castro Ruz*
**
*December 13, 2010*
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