Speech delivered by Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, President of the Republic of Cuba, at the cultural political event for the XV Anniversary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the peoples of Our America-Peoples Trade Treaty, on the steps of the University of Havana, on December 14, 2019, “Year 61 of the Revolution”.
(Shorthand Versions - Presidency of the Republic)
Good night.
This act is backwards: Maduro, Ralf and Daniel spoke a little and now I am going to have to speak a little more (Laughter).
Dear Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba;
Dear Heads of State and Government of ALBA-TCP;
Dear heads of delegations and guests:
Students from our universities, present and future of the Cuban nation. We address you and all the youth of Cuba, Latin America and the Caribbean today!
We have come to this, our glorious Staircase, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of ALBA-TCP, because this alliance has its roots in the first meeting of two giants of Our America: the Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, and the then (young) leader of the Bolivarian Movement 200, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías.
That meeting, which changed the history of Latin America and the Caribbean and impacted the world, took place between December 13 and 15, 1994.
As it happens today, we lived complex and uncertain days for the region and the world. And it was near here, in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana, where the analyzes and premonitory proposals of what, over time, the concerted efforts and progress of progressive governments, would crystallize in the year were heard for the first time. 2004 as this paradigm of solidarity integration that we know as ALBA-TCP.
We also choose the Stairway, the door of our University, one of the oldest in America, because here the present and the future of Cuba and much of the rest of the world travels every day, young people from sister nations, students who share classrooms and dreams with our children.
We firmly believe that universities cannot be disconnected from our world and its pressing problems. Here Fidel became a revolutionary, here Hugo Chávez spoke to his Latin American contemporaries, here one studies and thinks for the best possible world that we revolutionaries have set out to conquer.
Sisters and brothers:
Exactly a year ago, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America met with the objective of establishing common positions in the face of the foreseeable intensification of aggression against our nations. The forecasts of that time were not exaggerated.
The United States Government and its allies deployed and insist on a fierce and unscrupulous destabilizing campaign in the region.
They do so by taking up the brutal application of the Monroe Doctrine, to which the current Washington administration has committed itself openly and arrogantly.
Actions against the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela intensify, violating the most elementary principles of International Law. They have reached the height of designating who or who can speak on behalf of Venezuela and deciding the destination of the country's money and property outside its territory. Never before in history has democracy been so offended by speaking for it while being trampled on.
The recent invocation against Venezuela of the obsolete Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) - which never served to safeguard the interests of the region - is another warning that peace, democracy and security remain under threat.
What other objective does the rescue of an institution like the TIAR have that endorsed coups d'état, underpinned military dictatorships and was not able to support one of its members when an extra-regional power occupied territories and sparked a war?
The United States articulated attacks against the homeland of Bolívar and Chávez without understanding that the determination of their people is further strengthened in the face of external aggression. They failed and will continue to fail before the solid civic-military union and the courage of millions of Venezuelans, who have sworn to always be loyal and never traitors (Applause).
Here is our brother Nicolás Maduro representing that victorious and firm union.
Long live the Bolivarian Revolution! (Exclamations of: "Long live!")
We reiterate our solidarity with the Sandinista Popular Revolution, which with its president at the helm, Commander Daniel Ortega Saavedra, resists the imperial attacks against Nicaragua regardless of threats, and strives on its path of reconciliation, peace and fair development for its country.
Long live the Sandinista Revolution! (Exclamations of: "Long live!")
We celebrate the liberation of the leader of the Brazilian workers and former president of that country, comrade Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, and at the same time we call on all to continue demanding their full freedom, the recovery of their innocence and the restitution of all their rights. politicians.
In the face of imperial conspiracies and the politicization of the judicial systems, in the face of corruption and discredit of politics at the hands of agents of imperialism and neoliberalism and of the media, Lula is an example that we will always have the resource of fighting for the truth, dignity and solidarity to overcome the lie.
Bolivia, the absent brother, deserves a separate mention.
The coup d'état against constitutional president Evo Morales Ayma confirmed that the United States and the reactionary forces do not mind crushing the liberties and human rights of the peoples by any means in order to reverse the emancipatory processes in the region. As always, they used their faithful pawn: the Organization of American States (OAS).
It is not surprising that, as the imperial script imposes, the first foreign policy action of the coup plotters in Bolivia was to leave ALBA.
In countries like Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil we see with pain and indignation how the death toll grows and the number of wounded adds up to thousands, while eye injuries to hundreds of young people increase in acts of repression so brutal that they remember the days Dark of military dictatorships. Social activists, journalists and ex-guerrillas are murdered. Cases of violence, torture and rape of detainees already number hundreds.
Several of the military and police chiefs who are the protagonists of the horrible repression today were trained in the defunct School of the Americas. Those who persecute leftist and progressive leaders were trained in the current International Academy for Law Enforcement, also of Yankee invoice.
With admiration, we follow day by day the dramatic course of the resistance of the peoples and their growing mobilization.
From this rostrum, we emphatically condemn the complicit and shameful silence of many, and the manipulation and concealment of the transnational and oligarchic media about what happened in Bolivia.
And here today, Cuba ratifies its support and solidarity with comrade Evo Morales Ayma (Applause). Long live the governments and peoples that worship their dignity and sovereignty by welcoming and supporting persecuted leaders! (Exclamations of: "Long live!")
Our Health personnel who provided services in Bolivia know closely the brutality of the coup plotters, whose repressive forces, led directly by the United States, physically assaulted two collaborators, while 54 of them were unjustly detained, some for several days.
Members of the Cuban Medical Brigade, without any reason, were humiliatingly searched and stripped of their belongings. The coup authorities instigated hatred against the Cubans.
The cowardice of these repressors contrasted with the dignity and courage of our dedicated professionals, who deserve recognition for their unwavering attitude, daughter of the Cuban internationalist tradition (Applause).
They are all back in the homeland, ready to defend it and for a next mission.
The events that occurred in Bolivia, shake the alarms and alert us. Once again "the tiger lurks", as Martí said in his magnificent essay "Our America":
“The colony continued to live in the republic; and our America is being saved from its great mistakes (…) by the superior virtue, paid with necessary blood, of the republic that fights against the colony. The tiger waits, behind each tree, huddled in every corner. "
On our recent visit to Argentina to attend the inauguration of Alberto and Cristina, we had a valuable dialogue with important intellectuals and artists from that country.
From all of them we collected the most formidable criticism of neoliberalism "the lurking tiger" and its serious consequences for the peoples of America that have been destroyed by neoliberal experiments.
The Argentine filmmaker and current Minister of Culture, Tristán Bauer has just documented the serious social costs of neoliberalism in the four years of Macrismo, in a documentary titled: Tierra devastada.
Other attendees recalled that these processes are installed with a powerful media network that progressive projects have to face in an asymmetric battle. And he set out to promote a kind of cultural strategy that solves these asymmetries.
What remains of the colonial mentality in America must disappear before our peoples and their dreams of emancipation and integration disappear, the great debt since Bolívar's time.
It is essential to sow ideas and values to defend our conquests. And it is also necessary to integrate ourselves in the area of communication so that the colonial mentality does not swallow us with its load of false symbols, such as the little mirrors that the conquerors gave to our noble native inhabitants in exchange for the natural wealth with which they have built their power.
The magnificent ideas that in just two hours were unleashed in the meeting with Argentine friends, confirm the enormous potential of the imaginative Latin American intelligentsia, whose best exponents have always been allies in the battles for social justice.
Even in the face of the most brutal US pressure, Cuba achieved a resounding victory at the United Nations, when 187 countries voted in favor of the resolution condemning the end of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the United States.
Those who did not have the courage to resist the Yankee pressures and did not dare to condemn the blockade against Cuba, carry the responsibility to support a policy that no people on this earth approves, because it is criminal, because it violates the human rights of millions. , because it is extraterritorial, illegal and infamous.
And because what they do today against Cuba they will do tomorrow against other nations, as has been proven more than once in recent years. No one is free from the whip of empire, and to allow others to be beaten is to open the way for the blow to all.
We are pleased to know that this attitude does not reflect what the brotherly peoples of Brazil and Colombia really feel.
In triumphs such as the condemnation of the blockade at the UN, ALBA has been and should continue to be a front of unity and resistance to the empire, to coup and to interventionist positions that only motivate the shame of the men and women worthy of our continent.
Likewise, we salute and are encouraged by the progressive triumphs in Mexico and Argentina, whose new governments have already shown, in a very short time, their commitment to peace, democracy, development and social justice of the peoples and to the genuine unity and integration of Our America.
In recent months we have heard ridiculous accusations against the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions, in the vile attempt to justify what they refuse to understand: the deep reasons for the popular rebellions against neoliberalism that continue to take place in various countries in the region. We are not surprised.
The popular protests are the result of the struggles against inequality and social injustices accumulated over the years. And they will remain, and they will grow as long as their causes are not addressed.
Those who repress refuse to read their true causes in these manifestations, because, to settle, neoliberalism tries to prevent us from having historical consciousness, proposing the dehistoricization of time. That is why its ideologues, like Francis Fukuyama, insist that "the story is over."
They try to tell us that capitalism is eternal. So they want to perpetuate social inequality, misery, exclusion. Time is history! And ours is supported by Bolívar, San Martín, Sucre, Martí, Che, Fidel, Chávez, Sandino, the fight against slavery, against Spanish domination, against invasions and against the blockade against Cuba by genocidal imperialism.
Neoliberalism forces the world economy to move from production to speculation. While the world Gross Domestic Product grows at an annual average of 1% to 2%, the financial return grows more than 5% a year. While eight hundred and twenty million people are threatened with death by hunger, tax havens save twenty trillion dollars!
Neoliberalism produces what Marx had prevented: people are no longer worth for being human, but for the value of the merchandise they carry. It is brutal dehumanization.
Neoliberalism does not promote globalization, but it does promote ballooning. Their purpose is to make the world a great market to which only the wealthy have access, the others are excluded, they are disposable beings, condemned to early death.
Neoliberalism is based on competitiveness, socialism on solidarity. Neoliberalism in the private accumulation of wealth, socialism in sharing wealth. Neoliberalism in defending the interests of capital, socialism, human rights and nature.
What the United States and the Latin American oligarchies do not forgive us is that we have built inclusive and committed models with the people, even under the pressure and the walls of sanctions and blockades.
We can give you the formula: we don't build models for the 1%. We do not build exclusion models. We build solidarity models and practice integration (Applause).
And they do not forgive us for associating ourselves jointly between Latin Americans and the Caribbean without imperial guardianships.
They do not forgive us for not only choosing to prevail independence, freedom, sovereignty over our resources and self-determination, but we have shown that we are capable of defending them.
What they do not forgive Cuba is that we defend the philosophy of sharing in solidarity what we have, of carrying health and letters where others carry arms, of teaching to read and write, or to restore sight or save the lives of those who never had the services of worthy health.
Now, when as a result of the imperialist and oligarchic conspiracy in some places the cooperation that Cuba offers has been interrupted, we note with concern that millions of Latin Americans have been stripped of their human right to health. The oligarchies do not care and fold the pathological Yankee campaign.
The only military and security forces that interfere in the internal affairs of the countries and that threaten Latin America and the Caribbean are the United States.
Cuba will resist all threats. We are seasoned in the fight. We have a united people. We have the solidarity of the world, of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean and, especially, of our ALBA brothers.
We will not give up on socialism! We will not give up solidarity! We will not give up friendship! We will not give up dignity! (Applause.)
ALBA colleagues:
I reiterate the embrace of this noble, brave and caring people in the beautiful city that has just completed 500 years of history and struggles and to which you can always return to receive the love of those who do not surrender, will not surrender and continue the Revolution vibrant that brought us here.
Let us finish as the acts always end on this historic Staircase: with the celebration of life, of the future that is formed here to make possible the better world for which so many generations have given their blood and their own lives.
We are Cuba!
And we are also Latin America and the Caribbean, all united by ALBA-TCP!
Ever onward to victory!