In building up a democratic model I think that Cuba's contribution, little by little, has contributed to getting closer to the ideals of those philosophers, of those Greeks who thought about how a society could be fairer, how a society could really represent the interests of the people. We have tried to get closer to that from a Latin-American perspective and from the Cuban perspective.
In Cuba we had the most ferocious form of capitalism for 60 years. It dominated every sphere of life.
It is important to eliminate the stigma created by American imperialism and its allies regarding the Cuban political system. That stigma must be eliminated. You may think that there are no direct elections in Cuba. I am going to tell that they are direct and you can compare our process with any other country including the United States.
The great financial capital is not in one country, it is transnational, that is why it answers to power elites and that is why when I talk about the imperial power of United States I am in no way referring to the American people, who are a noble people that have always been moved by humane concerns.
There is no one more talkative than Cubans, Cubans express their feelings, there's nobody more rebellious and revolutionary than a Cuban and I say that without chauvinism.
America did not need to be discovered because quite simply America had the American-Indians. There were whole groups of people that already lived there including very developed societies such as the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans. But then came the European vision that saw the conquest as a source of advanced growth away from medieval Europe. The new revolutionary bourgeois trend formed a new perspective on what was democracy that they saw as an improvement to the democracy of ancient Greece.
Can we say that the constitutional monarchies in Spain, Belgium or England are democratic? Those with superior chambers like the House of Lords in England, that still represent the English feudal nobility in terms of positions above regional representatives, who are in the end the representatives supposedly elected by the population. Many mechanisms exist, but they are mechanisms to preserve the power of the wealthy classes, of the bourgeois classes that hold the power and rights above the rest of the society.
The future of Cuba is one earned by a country that has resisted for over 50 years against the most powerful empire on Earth. The resilience of its people made this triumph materialize.
To apply communism is an aspiration, in fact it has never been applied anywhere, it is really still a utopia.
Cuba has not accepted the domain and imposition of an empire that has wanted to dominate us for over half a century [America].
Under communism, no one would be living in marginal conditions as they do under capitalism today and where the greatest part of humanity lives.
Today China is a first world economy, in terms of development. The U.S. may still be in first in GDP but it is a broken economy in reality.
The United States turned to repression when its prominence started to slip in Latin America through establishing military dictatorships.
Cubans are a people who suffered from capitalism in the cruelest way, in the social order, the economic order and the political order.
Socialism is overcoming certain difficulties, it is working in order to try to achieve social advances, to really achieve a society where everybody improves, not where just the elite improve and the others get worse.
In Cuba we are building a socialist society and we could say we are on the verge of a communist society which is hard to achieve, very hard to achieve, but is a longing worth fighting for.
True medicine is to defend human life in any circumstances and not for political reasons or for reasons of any other kind, it is really to help, that is true solidarity.
As you know Cuba has progressed a lot regarding all the indicators of social development and those rates can be compared favorably with the first world in several aspects. We think that without the heavy burden of the blockade that we can move forward a lot more in building prosperous and sustainable socialism to which we aspire.
The Cuban people along with international solidarity defeated this imperial position [America] in the middle of the 21st century and have demonstrated the potential of a nation that has lived under an iron handed blockade and permanent aggression including state sponsored terrorism and yet has survived. In the new circumstances we have the absolute conviction that we will move forward even more than we already have.
There is us living the Cuban experience that we believe is ours. We do not believe that it is perfect, but it has been above all counting truly on the people, which is where the origins of true democracy lie.
The American people have on many occasions been willing to shed their own blood for a noble cause, like when hundreds of thousands of Americans participated in the fight against fascism in Europe, and other causes. There are many good people there, and the Cuban people know the American people, we have many examples of solidarity from the American people in every stage of the Cuban people's fight for independence.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.
In Cuba, we have a democracy that represents the humble, the dispossessed, those who make up the vast majority of the population. It is for those who carry the main weight of society's load in matters of the production of goods and services. These are not the ones that live from financial speculation.
If we are going to talk about the most recent of the "Indignados" movements in several countries of the world, including Europe, those are social movements but eventually they will evolve into political movements. This will happen because the traditional bourgeois parties have lost credibility after being the main political influence in most countries of Latin-America and Europe in the last 50 or 60 years.
How is it possible that a process can be democratic when it comes by way of money? If there is money then it can be elected a senator, it can be elected a representative. Do you know how much it cost to be elected president of the United States? The amount has reached, billions of dollars, 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion dollars, that's how much a presidential campaign costs. How much does a senatorial campaign cost? It costs 80 to 90 million dollars; or the campaign of a representative, 40 to 50 million. Is that really a democracy?
