President Fidel Castro to Bush:
'Your troops would face thousands of armies here!'
On May 1, Fidel Castro ended his address with the
following words, which are all the more telling now that the
Iraqi resistance has shown what kind of obstacle U.S.
imperialism faces in its attempt to use military power to
conquer the world's resources.
A shameless scoundrel with the poorly chosen
first name Lincoln, and the last name Díaz-Balart, an
intimate friend and adviser of President Bush, has made this
enigmatic statement to a Miami TV station: "I can't go into
details, but we're trying to break this vicious cycle."
What methods are they considering to deal with this vicious
cycle? Physically eliminating me with the sophisticated modern
means they have developed, as Mr. Bush promised them in Texas
before the elections? Or attacking Cuba the way they attacked
Iraq?
If it were the former, it does not worry me in the least.
The ideas for which I have fought all my life will not die, and
they will live on for a long time.
If the solution were to attack Cuba like Iraq, I would
suffer greatly because of the cost in lives and the enormous
destruction it would bring on Cuba. But, it might turn out to
be the last of this administration's fascist attacks, because
the struggle would last a very long time.
The aggressors would not merely be facing an army, but
rather thousands of armies that would constantly reproduce
themselves and make the enemy pay such a high cost in
casualties that it would far exceed the cost in lives of its
sons and daughters that the Amer can people would be willing to
pay for the adventures and ideas of President Bush. Today, he
enjoys majority support, but it is dropping, and tomorrow it
could be reduced to zero.
The American people, the millions of highly cultivated
individuals who reason and think, their basic ethical
principles, the tens of millions of computers with which to
communicate, hundreds of times more than at the end of the
Vietnam war, will show that you cannot fool all of the people,
and perhaps not even part of the people, all of the time. One
day they will put a straightjacket on those who need it before
they manage to annihilate life on the planet.
On behalf of the one million people gathered here this May
Day, I want to convey a message to the world and the American
people:
We do not want the blood of Cubans and Americans to be shed
in a war. We do not want a countless number of lives of people
who could be friends to be lost in an armed conflict. But never
has a people had such sacred things to defend, or such profound
convictions to fight for, to such a degree that they would
rather be obliterated from the face of the Earth than abandon
the noble and generous work for which so many generations of
Cubans have paid the high cost of the lives of many of their
finest sons and daughters.
We are sustained by the deepest conviction that ideas are
worth more than weapons, no matter how sophisticated and
powerful those weapons may be.
Let us say like Che Guevara when he bid us farewell:
Ever onward to victory!
Reprinted from the Aug. 7, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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