A message from Fidel Castro to Cuba’s TV program The Round Table
Dear
Randy:
listened to the entire Round Table program on
Thursday the 13th, without missing one single second of it. The news
about the Bali Conference, commented on by Rogelio Polanco, the
Director of the newspaper "Juventud Rebelde", confirms the
importance of the international agreements and the necessity of
taking them very seriously.
In that small island of Indonesia,
there was a meeting of many Heads of Government of countries of the
so-called Third World; they are fighting for their development and
they demand fair treatment, financial resources and transferals of
technology from the representatives of industrialized nations which
are also being represented there.
The UN Secretary General,
faced with the tenacious obstruction by the United States in the
midst of the 190 representatives meeting there, and after twelve days
of negotiations, stated on Friday the 14th, Cuban time, when it was
already Saturday in Bali, that the human species could disappear as a
result of climate change. And then he went off to East Timor.
That
declaration transformed the conference into a shouting match. On the
twelfth day of pointless persuasive efforts, the American
representative Paula Dobriansky, after sighing deeply, said: "We
join the consensus." It is obvious that the United States made
moves to get around its isolated position, even though it didn’t
change the empire’s dismal intentions one iota.
The grand show
began: Canada and Japan attached themselves immediately to the
American coat-tails, facing the rest of the countries that were
demanding serious compromises on the emissions of gases that are
causing the climatic change. Everything had been foreseen ahead of
time between the NATO allies and the powerful empire which, in one
fell swoop of deceit, agreed to negotiate during 2008 in Hawaii, U.S.
territory, for a new convention project that
would be presented
and approved at the Copenhagen Conference in Denmark in 2009; this
would take the place of the Kyoto Protocol which is due to expire in
2012.
The theatrical solution was reserved for Europe in the
role of savior of the world. Brown spoke, as did Merkel and other
leaders of the European countries, requesting international
gratitude. What an excellent present for Christmas and the New Year!
None of the eulogists mentioned the tens of millions of poor people
who go on dying of diseases and hunger each year given the complex
realities of the present, just as if we were living in the best of
all worlds.
The Group of 77, which includes 132 countries that
are struggling to develop themselves had achieved consensus to demand
from the industrialized countries a reduction of the gases that cause
climatic change, for the year 2020, from 20 to 40% lower than the
level attained in 1990, and from 60 to 70% in the year 2050,
something which is technically possible. Furthermore, they were
demanding the assigning of sufficient funds for the transferral of
technology to the Third World.
We cannot forget that those
gases give way to heat waves, desertification, the melting of the
glaciers and the increase of the levels of the seas which could cover
entire countries or a large part of them. The industrialized nations
share with the United States the idea of converting foods into fuels
for luxury cars and the other wasteful practices of the consumer
societies.
All of this that I am stating was demonstrated when
on that very Saturday, December 15th, at 10:06 Washington time, it
was announced that the President of the United States had asked the
Senate, which had then approved it, for 696 billion dollars for the
military budget for the 2008 fiscal year; in this amount, 189 billion
was ear-marked for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A feeling
of sound pride came over me as I remembered the dignified and calm
way in which I responded to the hurtful proposals directed to me in
1998 by the then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. I
harbor no illusions.
My most profound conviction is that the
answers to the current problems of Cuban society which possesses an
average educational level close to Grade 12, almost a million
university graduates and the real possibility for its citizens to
become educated with no discrimination whatsoever, require more
varieties of answers for each concrete problem than those contained
on a chess board. We cannot ignore one single detail, and we are not
dealing with an easy path, if the intelligence of a human being in a
revolutionary society truly needs to prevail over instinct.
My
fundamental duty is not to cling to positions, much less to stand in
the way of younger persons, but it is to bring experience and ideas
whose modest value comes from the exceptional era that I had the
privilege of living in.
Like Niemeyer, I believe that one has
to be consistent right up to the end.
Fidel
Castro Ruz
Havana,
December 17, 2007
