By Stella Calloni on August 25, 2024
photos: Bill Hackwell
Commander Fidel Castro Ruz was born in Cuba 98 years ago and is no longer physically among us since November 2016 but he continues to be born and reborn in those who resist and fight on all fronts of battles in these times when we are living a process of enormous changes and great threats.
It is the chaos of resurrection and the eternal value of its legacy that is our march towards a future of dignity for humanity. Cuba shows us the meaning of this legacy that opens and illuminates the paths of liberation for the peoples of the world.
It is a historical period where the destiny, the future and the possibility or not of the survival of humanity is at stake, and the decision of the government and the people of Cuba, in one of its most difficult moments, was to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of the leader of the Cuban Revolution in Biran, Holguin, on August 13, 1926, with cultural events that showed the world the resistance of a living culture, defiant, before the dark labyrinths of colonialism that tries to return to Our America.
It is this revolution of culture that worries the hegemonic power, and is one of the greatest legacies of Fidel, which encourages the creative imagination of our peoples, capable of awakening zombified societies, victims of the project of domination and cultural colonialism of which we continue to be victims in our region, thanks to the dependence, which continues in this XXI century.
A dependence that is no longer sufficient for imperial needs in the face of the new reality of a world in accelerated change, confronting the United States and its associates with powers such as China, the Russian Federation and a number of countries where 60 percent of the world’s population lives in enormous and rich territories.
The hegemonic power, increasingly worn out, advances violating everything in its path because it needs to ensure control of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and moves its power cards to silence us, confuse us, accelerate the colonial domination of our territories. Throughout their imperial history they have considered us as their “backyard”.
Destroying our culture, our identity, is an indispensable step. To erase our past of resistance to imperial expansion is to rob us of our future as independent and free countries at last. The Cuban people also showed us the way, threatened as never before, celebrating life under the terrorisms of hegemonic power.
Subjugation can only be achieved if they sink us into poverty, hunger, ignorance, if they erase our identities and cultures, for which they need to destroy any government that legislates and acts in favor of the people, that rescues the glories of the past and the present to build a future of peace and justice.
For that, it is necessary to uproot ignorance and everything that ties the hands of the peoples and to achieve that the human being recovers his humanity, understanding it as dignity. It is very difficult now when survival alone seems an unattainable dream, but not impossible. They no longer dominate us with colored mirrors, they need the tools of new and sophisticated technologies, which they manage and which change the axis of our societies.
They have succeeded, with the control of the mass media, among them the social networks, which they use massively as a very well oiled weapon, paralyzing sectors of our societies. The owners of these new technologies have become the great tycoons only comparable to the manufacturers of weapons of unimaginable sophistication.
At this time, as never before, we are missing Commander Fidel Castro, although his far-reaching vision allows us, as a powerful refuge, to turn to his thought that rides through the world, his speeches, writings and his voice that are ahead of all times.
We are facing the possibility of a war with the use of nuclear weapons. Many years ago, Fidel already warned in 2007. “Today the world has tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, 50 times more powerful with carriers several times faster than sound and of absolute precision, with which our sophisticated species can destroy itself”, something that the Cuban leader had been denouncing for years.
He did the same when addressing the issue of global warming, which he warned “as the terrible sword of Damocles that hangs over the life of the species”, which was not known “by the vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet and, even today, there is great ignorance and confusion on these issues”. If we listen to the spokespersons of the transnationals and their apparatus of dissemination, “we live in the best of all worlds” wrote Fidel with irony and analyzed what the empire’s publicity sold and sells us with all that language of colonizing seduction destined to confuse, since the population cannot have access to other voices silenced by the media dictatorship.
The power of the media, the social networks, the transmitting devices that invade every corner of our peoples, are under the command of media generals, with great firepower, so they assemble with military power, terrorizing, corrupting and confusing.
Fidel warned about it and we listened to him with that passion in his voice, with the precision of his language and the conviction with which he showed us and shows us the other face of a world, now unlivable and uncertain, and pointed out to us the course towards “another possible world” and necessary to save humanity.
There was not a single historical period in which Fidel Castro lost his strategic vision, the necessary warning, and if we had not lost the most important possibility we had at the beginning of the 21st century, when we had managed to overcome differences, diversities and asymmetries to begin another path of unity in November 2011, when the Community of South American and Caribbean Nations (CELAC) was launched in Caracas, Venezuela, we would be in a different situation today.
The unity of that time alerted the United States in its current geostrategic project of recolonization of Latin America and the Caribbean in this century. A unity that was the eternal and so many times solitary dream of Fidel that was rekindled when he met with the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, protected by the shadows of Jose Marti and Simon Bolivar and all the heroes of each country in Our America. There are still embers of that fire, which must be recovered.
Fidel’s letter to UNCTAD
In view of all this, the letter sent by Fidel to the 11th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) on June 13, 2004 is very enlightening, highlighting the hopes raised by the creation of this UN organization, and warning with figures and details that it was “almost impossible to measure the damage caused” to our countries by the type of trade relations that… “through the winding paths of the United Nations, we have been able to achieve a new type of trade relations with our countries, through the winding paths of the WTO and free trade agreements, are imposed on poor countries” unable to compete with the sophisticated technology, the almost total monopoly of intellectual property and the immense financial resources of the rich countries. He described the labyrinths of plunder, exploitation, theft or the most brutal transfer of financial resources from poor countries to rich countries.
But he also warned that “the imperialist system that reigns today, towards which developed capitalist society has inevitably evolved, has already arrived at a global and neoliberal economic order so ruthlessly irrational and unjust that it is unsustainable. The peoples will rebel against it. They have already begun to rebel.
the author: Stella Calloni
He considered that “those who claim that this is the result of subversive and destabilizing parties, ideologies or agents from Cuba and Venezuela are stupid. Among other things this evolution brought with it, in an equally inevitable way within the bases and norms that govern the prevailing system, the so-called consumer societies(..) with them, their wasteful and irresponsible tendencies have poisoned the minds of a great number of people in the world, who in the midst of a generalized political and economic ignorance are manipulated by commercial and political publicity through the fabulous mass media that science has created”.
He then referred to the 60th (now 80th) anniversary of the day on which the first nuclear bomb exploded over Hiroshima, stating that “today (2004) there are tens of thousands of such weapons in the world, which are tens of times more powerful and precise (…) and which continue to be produced and perfected. Even in space, nuclear projectile bases are being programmed. New deadly and sophisticated weapons systems are emerging. For the first time in history, man has created the technical capacity for his total self-destruction (…) theories are even applied regarding the preventive and surprise use of the most sophisticated weapons to be applied in any dark corner of the world that make the barbarism proclaimed in the dark days of Nazism pale in comparison”.
“We have already witnessed wars of conquest and sadistic methods of torture reminiscent of the images disseminated in the final days of World War II. The prestige of the United Nations is being undermined to its foundations. Far from being perfected and democratized, the institution has been left as an instrument that the superpower and its allies intend to use only to co-sponsor war adventures and appalling crimes against the most sacred rights of peoples,” he says.
“These are not fantasies or figments of the imagination. It is a very real fact that, in barely half a century, two great and deadly dangers have arisen for the very survival of the species: the one emanating from the technological development of weapons, and the one coming from the systematic and accelerated destruction of the natural conditions for life on the planet.”
He also refers to the fact that, faced with the dilemma to which society has been led, “there is no alternative for humanity: either the current world situation changes, or the species runs the real risk of extinction (…) there are no repressive methods, tortures, disappearances or mass murders that can prevent it. And in the struggle for survival, that of their children and their children’s children, there will be not only the starving of the Third World; there will also be all the conscious people of the rich world, whether they are manual workers or intellectual workers” and he maintains that the peoples will be ungovernable.
In the face of this “inevitable crisis, and much sooner rather than later, thinkers, guides, social and political organizations of the most diverse nature will emerge who will do their utmost to preserve the species. All the waters will unite in a single direction to sweep away obstacles” to which he suggests the sowing of ‘ideas and all the weapons that this barbaric civilization has created will be left over; let us sow ideas, and the irremediable destruction of our natural means of life can be prevented’.
What Fidel wrote 20 years ago is extraordinarily valid in these times of attempted colonial returns and when the clamp of unilateralism is over and the necessary balance is recovered for a New World Order that is being born, among changes that must find us prepared and alert, without ambiguities or weaknesses, as Cuba continues to do. And as we are seeing today in Venezuela.
Source: Cuba en Resumen