A
PROLOGUE FOR OUR BOLIVIAN FRIENDS
The book FIDEL,
BOLIVIA Y ALGO MÁS was given me as gift by President of Bolivia Evo Morales during
his last visit to
Both he and Rafael Dausá, Cuban Ambassador
to Bolivia, who accompanied him for this visit, informed me that the authors
wished to launch a new edition, for the 80th anniversary of Che's birth, which
will be in two weeks, this coming June 14. No sooner had I seen the photos, the
press clippings, the chapter index and a number of paragraphs than I asked Evo
and Dausá to allow me to include an introduction expressing my gratitude to the
editors. “That’s what they want from you, as the book’s author,” they replied.
I read the book in one sitting the following day. I
confirmed that they were my words, quoted verbatim. I was anxious to read what
I had said in 1993, now that the things I had then spoken about were
transpiring. I didn’t even remember how I had answered each of the numerous and
serious questions, some of them very clever, put to me on that occasion,
questions which made me externalize many concepts I had kept inside my head, at
the risk of being misunderstood. It was an extremely difficult journey for me.
Che had died in
I recently saw Che’s evocative effigy, cast in bronze, on
its way to
Today, I am duty-bound to reiterate what I said in that
country at the time of my visit. Then, I told you that our country had 40
thousand medical doctors and expounded on the ideas that inspired our efforts.
I shan’t devote more lines to these, as many are contained in the book and I
could not express them better or with more spontaneity.
Eleven years later, the number of medical doctors had
nearly doubled and the Latin American School of Medicine, created in June 1999,
had an enrolment of over 10 thousand students from the region. We were already
working, as part of cooperative missions, in Third World countries, where
thousands of health specialists laboured, as we had promised the United Nations
in 1979, following the Non-Aligned Movement Summit held in Cuba then.
In August 2005, hurricane Katrina lashed the
I shall limit myself to reproducing what Cuba was forced
to explain, days later, on the occasion of a gathering of the ‘Henry Reeve’
Contingent, on September 4 of that year:
“It was clear to us
that those who faced the greatest danger were these huge numbers of poor,
desperate people, many elderly citizens with health situations, pregnant women,
mothers and children among them, all in urgent need of medical care.
“In such a
situation, regardless of how rich a country may be, the number of scientists it
has or how great its technical breakthroughs have been, what it needs are
young, well-trained and experienced professionals, who have done medical work
in anomalous circumstances, and that, with a minimum of resources, can be
immediately transported by air or any other available means to specific
facilities or sites where the lives of human beings are in danger.
“
“
“Knowing that I
could rely on men and women like you, I took the liberty of reiterating our
offer three days later, promising that in less than 12 hours the first 100
doctors, carrying the necessary medical resources in their backpacks, could be
in Houston; that an additional 500 could be there 10 hours later and that,
within the next 36 hours, 500 more, for a total of 1100, could join them to
save at least one of the many lives at risk from such dramatic events.
“Perhaps those unaware of our people’s sense
of honour and spirit of solidarity thought this was some kind of bluff or a ridiculous exaggeration. But
our country never toys with matters as serious as this, and it has never
dishonoured itself with demagogy or deceit (…) in this hall only three days ago
we observed a minute of silence for the victims of the hurricane which battered
that brotherly people (…) and not with 1100 but 1586 doctors, including 300
additional doctors, in response to the increasingly alarming news that keep
coming in. (…) We’ve already announced that we are willing to send thousands
more if it were necessary. (…) In just 24 hours, all of the doctors summoned to
carry out this mission, coming from all parts of the country, met in the
capital. We have shown the utmost punctuality and precision.
“You bring honour
to the noble medical profession. With your quick, unwavering response to the
call of duty and your willingness to work in uncharted and difficult
conditions, you are writing a new page in the history of solidarity among the
peoples and are showing a course of peace to the suffering and imperilled human
species to which we all belong.
“(…) The average age of these health
professionals is 32 years. Most of them had not yet been born when the revolution
triumphed and some had not even been born 15 years after the triumph of the
revolution, they are the product of these hard years. The average work experience
is of no less than 10 years. (…)
“U.S. Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, presently in
New Orleans, admitted that “doctors and nurses are doing a great job, but the
distribution of medical assistance continues to be a serious problem” and
“scores of people die every day”.
“According to the
Boston Globe, Louisiana and Mississippi are facing the worst public healthcare
disaster the nation has known in decades.
The newspaper
published declarations from Dr. Marshall Boulden, Director for Diabetes and
Metabolism at the University’s Medical Centre in Jackson, Mississippi, who assistance:
“We’re seeing things that we haven’t seen in many years: cholera, typhoid
fever, tetanus, malaria. We hadn’t seen such conditions in 50 years. People are
crammed together and wander around surrounded by excrement”.
“(…)Our doctors’ backpacks contain precisely those
resources needed to address in the field problems relating to dehydration, high
blood pressure, diabetes Mellitus and infections in all parts of the body
—lungs, bones, skin, ears, urinary tract, reproductive system— as they arise.
They also carry (...) painkillers and drugs to lower fever (…) for treating
bronchial asthma and other similar complications, about forty products of
proven efficiency in emergencies such as this one. (…)
“
“The ‘Henry Reeve’
Brigade has been created, and whatever tasks you undertake in any part of the
world or our own homeland, you shall always bear the glorious distinction of
having responded to the call to assist our brothers and sisters in the United
States, and that nation’s humblest children especially, with courage and
dignity.
“Let’s go forward,
generous defenders of health and of life, winners over pain and death itself!”
I concluded.
These were my
words almost four years ago. The pages the ‘Henry Reeve’ Brigade has written in
history wherever it has undertaken or undertakes a mission, have honoured these
words.
Historical events
at times seem handcrafted to illustrate a particular human conviction. Some
days ago, I received a copy of the article the Namibian Minister of Fisheries,
who visited our country recently, published in
"I am a product of the
Cuban Revolution. Namibians are eternally indebted to
“In 1977, I left
“As children, we were
educated by the SWAPO leadership in exile, about why Cuban internationalists
were in Angola. As children, this made us to think deeper.
“The Cubans had volunteered
to assist a nation in need. They were sacrificing their lives in order to save
our lives and maintain peace in
“While we were in Chibia,
apartheid South African invaded
“I left for
“We flew from
“At the time, Comrade Helmuth
Angula was the SWAPO chief representative to
“When I completed food
chemistry in 1981, I was honoured to have been accorded the position of best
student of the school. (…) I returned to
“I owe my current station in
society to the people of
The April 2008 issue (472) of
New African, a magazine on African
issues edited in Europe, recounts that, in the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba sent 350
thousand patriots, including civilians and doctors, to support Africa's wars of
liberation, particularly to Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape
Verde and Sao Tome e Principe. In the end, Cuba’s efforts hastened the demise
of apartheid in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was still in prison when
What should be one of the
objectives of these lines I write for my old Bolivian friends? To unmask the
empire’s perfidious and hypocritical methods.
The enemy is extremely vile.
It rides along on the instincts, ambitions and vanity of those it has never
imbued with even a basic moral sense.
In our country, it committed
all manner of crimes: it organized armed groups, introduced weapons and
explosives into the country on a massive scale, invaded the nation with
mercenaries who reached our coasts, escorted by U.S. aircraft carriers,
warships and infantry transporters, ready to go into action as soon as the
traitors secured a beachhead. It attacked our air bases with bombers marked
with Cuban insignias, so as to fake an uprising of our Air Force. Hundreds of
young revolutionaries lost their lives or were wounded in their heroic struggle
against the mercenaries who arrived by sea or air. Captured en masse, not one
of the invaders was killed or tortured.
Then came a long period of
struggle against the empire’s dirty methods, which included an economic blockade,
the eternal threat of a direct military action, attempts to assassinate the
country's leaders, biological warfare and the terrible menace of a
thermonuclear war between the world's two superpowers, a war which nearly did
break out.
We do not pretend to be a
model for the construction of socialism, but we do hope to set an example in
the defence of the right to construct it.
Consider these concrete
examples of the empire's cynicism:
A terrorist is sent to jail,
the explosives in his possession are confiscated and the needed evidence is
gathered for his trial. He is sentenced to a number of years in prison. He
declares himself physically unable to move. The Central Intelligence Agency is
behind the scheme. They write verses for him, publish a book of poems and
present him to the world as a disabled poet denied medical attention. He is
such a good faker that he manages to deceive even the jail officials. They
confuse and deceive international public opinion through their media, and there
is no special envoy representing “Western democracy” who does not call for the
release of the disabled poet, even though the medical doctors had assured them
there was absolutely nothing wrong with him physically.
Confronted with the truth, a
video recording of his intense, daily exercises in places that had gone
unnoticed by the prison wardens, before the request advanced by a powerful
European country could be replied to, he sprung up and twenty four hours later
caught a plane, and walked, accompanied by the last European emissary to meet
with him, towards the paradise of democracy and abundance. A position as a
public official of the empire, at an international human rights institution,
awaited him. That was the price
Cubans have the privilege of
being born in a country which, thanks to the Revolution, was the first to reach
the Millennium Development Goals in the area of education: everyone knows how
to read and write. There are no children with disabilities, no deaf-mutes,
visually impaired or blind people, who are denied medical assistance.
Educational and health services combine to protect and encourage them to
overcome the challenges with which they were born.
An alleged
counterrevolutionary author with narrative and communication skills need not go
to the trouble of getting books printed or looking for a market. For the
imperialist intelligence agencies, it is enough that he invents any dramatic
thing and blame the Revolution for it. He will have money and fame. His works
will earn him awards and will be divulged ad
libitum. It is a gross insult to our intelligence.
Cuba trains athletes, earns
more gold medals per capita than any other nation in the world, makes sports
accessible to everyone to promote the health of its citizens. Wealthy countries
hunt down these athletes and offer them all the money in the world, to gather
players and fill their teams with naturalized athletes with native, mixed blood
or black skins which in no way recall their supposedly superior races.
When the
Her request to travel abroad was
turned down. We cannot give in to blackmail, that was our decision.
Che was to enrich
revolutionary thought with a strategic principle when, frowning and pointing to
the little finger of his right hand, during a speech before the United Nations,
he stated: "We cannot afford to yield even this little to
imperialism!"
He was about to travel, with
a handful of Cuban internationalists, to the former Belgian Congo, where
Lumumba had been murdered by imperialism under the UN troop's very noses, to be
replaced by a corrupt puppet. His ideas about the world would be put to the
test.
One day, at a mass rally held
at Revolution Square on October 18, 1967 to pay tribute to Che, who had been
wounded in combat and put to death by a murderous charge some days before,
moved by the news, before the people, I expressed a number of key ideas I want
to quote here:
“(…) It was a day in July or
August of 1955 when we first met El Che. And in one night, as tell in his
accounts, he became a future Granma expeditionary. But at that time that
expedition had neither ships, weapons, nor troops. And this was the way El Che,
together with Raul, joined the first two groups on the Granma list.
“(…) he was one of the most
familiar, one of the most admired, one of the most beloved, and, without any
doubt, the most extraordinary of our comrades of revolution (...)
“Che was one of those persons
whom everybody liked immediately because of his simplicity, because of his character,
because of his naturalness, because of his comradeship, because of his
personality, because of his originality (…)
"He was soon to be
impregnated with a profound spirit of hatred and contempt for imperialism…he
had had the opportunity to witness in Guatemala the criminal imperialist
intervention through the mercenary soldiers who overthrew the revolution in
that country.
“(…) The idea that men are of
a relative value in history may have profoundly influenced his conduct; the
idea that causes cannot be defeated when men fall and that the irrepressible
march of history does not stop nor will it stop because the commanders fall.
“(...) I would say that he is
the type of man who is difficult to equal and practically impossible to improve
upon.
“(…) when we think about El
Che, we are not thinking basically about his military virtues. No! For war is a
tool of revolutionaries. What is important is revolution, what is important is
the revolutionary cause, the revolutionary ideas, the revolutionary objectives,
the revolutionary sentiments, the revolutionary virtues.”
“(…) Che was not only an
incomparable man of action, but a man of profound intellect, of visionary
intelligence, a man of profound culture. I mean to say he was a man of ideas
and a man of action.
“(…) he had the virtues which
could be defined as the most full-fledged expression of the virtues of a
revolutionary, and integral man in the fullest sense of the word, a man of
supreme honesty, of absolute sincerity (…) a man in whose conduct practically
no fault can be found.
“(…) A tireless worker in the
years that he was at the service of our country, he did not know one single day
or rest.
“(…) he studied all the
problems. He was a tireless reader. His thirst for knowledge was practically
insatiable, and the hours he did not sleep, he studied. He dedicated regular
days off to volunteer work. He was the inspiration and the top promoter of that
work (...)
“(…) this is the weak side of
the imperialist enemy. Thinking that, along with the physical man, it has
liquidated his virtues; thinking that, along with the physical man, it has
liquidated his example.
“(...) we are absolutely
convinced that the revolutionary cause in this continent will recover from the
blow, that the revolutionary cause in this continent will not be defeated by
that blow.
“(…) from the
hearts, I say that the model, without a single blemish in its conduct, without
a single blemish in its attitude, without a single blemish in its actions –
that model is Che. If we want to know how we want our children to be, we should
say, with all our revolutionary mind and heart: We want them to be like Che.
“No man like him
in these times has raised the spirit of proletarian internationalism to its
highest level.
“In his mind and
in his heart, the flags, the prejudices, the chauvinisms, the egoisms had
disappeared. He was willing to shed generously his blood for the fortune of any
people (...)
“His blood was
shed in
“(...) That is why
we should look to the future with optimism (...)"
After the
memorable night in which I spoke those words, the Cuban Children’s Organization,
grasping their essence, coined a new slogan: "Pioneers for communism, we
shall be like Che!”
Our Rebel Army had
risen from the ashes of the detachment that had arrived on the Granma yatch and won the war with the
weapons it took from the enemy in combat. Che was a privileged witness of and
actor in the counteroffensive that, led by the ‘José Martí’ Column Number
It was as a result
of those first combats, during that unequal battle, that, seeing the enemy
bombs fall on peasant homes, I realized that the struggle against the empire
was to become my true destiny.
I recalled the
martyr of Dos Rios, our national independence hero, José Martí, and I recalled
Che when, in recent days, I read a cable published by the special envoy of
NOTIMEX, dated May 26, which quoted the declarations of a young Cuban who had
requested permission to travel and collect one of the many awards imperialism
hands out to keep the waterwheel turning:
“(…) If Cuban
authorities thought that denying me permission to travel to receive the award
was some kind of punishment, I must say it has been far from dramatic.
“I spent that day
here at home, with my family and friends, who awarded me a symbolic scroll I
had made myself (...)
“I buy an Internet
card, which costs between 5 and 7 dollars, to send out my texts (...)
“I am not in the
opposition, I don’t have a political program, I don’t have a political hair in
my body, and that is a characteristic of my generation and today's world:
people no longer define themselves as left or right. These are increasingly
obsolete concepts.
“I do not belong
nor have I ever belonged to a political organization. I was never a member of
the Young Communists League, I never tried to join the Communist Party. I was a
Pioneer because all of us, until the age of 16, had no choice but to be a
Pioneer (...)
“My blog has a
record of horrifying comments that startle me (…)
“I won’t enjoy
social insurance or a pension when I'm old, but this gives me economic
independence. I give foreigners Spanish lessons and work as a tourist guide in
my city. I speak German very well. That's how I make a living".
Comments of this
nature, which are immediately spread by the imperialist media, are not the true
danger. What's dangerous is to make slogans out of generalizations, or, what's
worse, that there are young Cubans who think this way, special envoys who
weaken Cuba internally, whose journalistic work recalls the neo-colonial press
of the old Spanish metropolis, which today awards these efforts.
Party members are
the ones who have assumed the greatest number of sacrifices, both inside and outside
Further proof of
the confusion and the deceit sown by imperialism was the declaration of a
renowned Brazilian singer, made the same day the above cable was published:
"If we speak
about how rights and the questions of freedom and respect towards individuals
are observed in the two countries, I am one hundred percent on the side of the
A European news agency
reported that the musician justified the inclusion of a new piece, Bahia de Guantánamo, in his live
repertoire, which he performed in
"Were I a
typical pro-Cuban and anti-US leftist, I would feel no disappointment about
what happened in the jails of
In a nutshell: the
Brazilian singer asked the empire to forgive him for criticizing the atrocities
perpetrated in that naval base that operates on occupied Cuban soil.
The month of June
has just begun. Uncertainty and insecurity are in the air.
I ask Bolivian
readers to show the same patience and sense of humour they evinced in those
days, when I spoke to them 15 years ago. To continue impelling their
educational and health programs. You can always rely on our support.
Were it not for
the new edition of this book, this long prologue would have no reason to be.
Thank you.
Fidel Castro Ruz