MOSCOW, Russian Federation: "Surely you want us to talk about Cuba; let's talk about Cuba". The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and President of the Republic of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, told about the beloved Island with ease, emotions and objectivity to about a hundred Cubans with whom he shared this Sunday morning, a few hours after his arrival in Moscow.
It was a family united by affection and the common responsibilities of working for the development of the country. There were all the staff of the Cuban mission in Russia, with their respective children, some of them very young, and a representation of the official entities of the Cuban State working in the Eurasian nation.
You, the President told them, are an important part of Cuba and you are in a complex trench, from which we also need many results in order to continue advancing and forging the country's prosperity.
For more than an hour and a half, the Head of State spoke about various issues that converge in the daily life of the Homeland. In a special way, he shared several of the reasons that have supported the realization of this tour, and some of the results that the designed work agenda has already produced.
The tour is not only due to Cuba's interest -the President clarified- but also responds to the invitation made by the four nations included in the tour. In particular, he said, Russia and China requested to receive the visit on specific dates.
In the case of the Russian Federation, said Díaz-Canel, President Vladimir Putin "asked us to come" to the inauguration of the Monument to Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, to be held in the coming days. The People's Republic of China, for its part, had a very significant gesture, and that is that "President Xi Jinping invited Cuba as the first Latin American country to visit China after having held the Party Congress," he stressed.
Regarding the visit to Turkey, the dignitary explained that during the last few years "we have been receiving high-level delegations and we had not been able to reciprocate those gestures". And Algeria, he commented, is a country with which we have a historical relationship that is now also being strengthened.
Emphasizing the political sense of the tour, the Cuban president highlighted the political dialogue at the highest level that Cuba maintains with the four nations, with which "we reach ideas and agreements for international positions".
Regarding the economic sphere, he said that important projects are being developed, especially in the energy field, with these countries.
Broadly speaking, the dignitary commented on some of the main results of the visit to Algeria -where the tour began on November 16-, where issues such as the decision of the Algerian Government to revive the agreement for the supply of hydrocarbons that has been on pause since 2019, due to the fact that the companies that transported them suffered the effects of the intensification of the blockade during the administration of Donald Trump were addressed.
He also explained about the willingness to make joint ventures in any of the modalities of foreign investment, approved in Cuba for renewable energy projects; the expansion of collaboration in Health; as well as making joint projects in production of medicines and biotechnological products.
Particularly on the projects being carried out or planned with the Eurasian giant, Diaz-Canel said that there are several on the agenda, and that when there are results, it is up to "all of you to work together to enhance them".
WORDS ABOUT A CUBA THAT DOES NOT STAND IDLY BY
At the beginning of his speech, President Díaz-Canel Bermúdez reminded his compatriots that there is an imperialist strategy aimed against the Island, and that in the face of such logic we must present and defend the logic of the Cuban Revolution.
Imperialism - denounced the Head of State - has "built a matrix of action in several scenarios": first, he said, there is the economic one, from which they intend to asphyxiate, and that "there be protests, that there be discontent, that there be despair, and that the longed-for social explosion be provoked", as they tried recently and on more than one occasion but without success.
And to this plan of action, as the dignitary pointed out, is added "an enormous strategy of ideological political subversion which is, above all, mounted in a campaign in the social networks, (a campaign) of discrediting the Cuban Revolution".
The President alluded to a recent denunciation made by the Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parilla, who defined the media war against the Revolution as "a major intelligence operation", where there are many actors aligned for the same purpose, and where there is a group of centers, from the United States, "organizing the whole strategy of subversion against Cuba".
In the face of such reality -said the Head of State- "we cannot remain with our arms crossed; we, in the face of the imperialist logic, have to put before the logic of socialist construction".
A detailed dissertation on how much Cuba is affected by the intensified imperialist blockade was shared by the President, who also described the saga of a small country whose scientists saved their children by making vaccines that a convulsive and terribly asymmetrical world could not give us. And later he returned to the reflective question about what would have happened in the Island, hit these days by disasters of great proportions, if the experts had not already cleared the scourge of COVID-19 from everyday life.
Controlling the pandemic," said the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, "was an imperative need," while demonstrating how much potential there is in the people, and how much heroism there is in that youth who, without being summoned, marched to the red zones, at the risk of being infected with a disease that is much feared at the planetary level.
Díaz-Canel spoke of "creative resistance" as a formula for the present, and commented on the need for Cubans to be able to overcome difficulties with their own effort and talent, overcoming problems but "creating and not only resisting".
According to such philosophy, he stressed, the country has a strategy: "what happens, he said, is that the solutions are not immediate, they are not short term". He then referred to the search for all possible formulas, always ready to value all useful ideas and without forgetting one essence: it would be unforgivable "to condemn what is the project, what is the future".
For this reason, the dignitary referred to the value of finding a balance that contains "what is necessary, what is possible, and what is desired for the future". He spoke of finding coherence in a strategy that seeks prosperity from which people can interweave their life projects with the socialist construction, where the premises of socialist democracy -which are included in Fidel's thought- such as participation and popular control are not lacking.
Those who work representing Cuba in the Eurasian country spoke about the consular attention provided to Cubans in Russia, especially those who are in an irregular situation. In addition, the president heard about the study programs that the island has agreed with the Russian Federation, and on account of which there are more than 200 students overcoming in 30 universities in seven regions of the country.