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Chavez’ Article
It was
2006. I was really very ill but very
much aware of what was happening. During
those days around the middle of September, the XIV NAM
Summit where
Cuba
was elected to the Presidency was ending.
I could barely sit up and take my place at a table.
That’s how I received some important heads of state
or government. The Prime Minister of
India was among them. The highest
ranking visitor I received in that emergency room in the
Presidential Palace was the Ghanaian Kofi Annan, Secretary
General of the United Nations, who a few days later would be
ending his mandate.
Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of
Algeria,
one of the personalities with whom I met, looked me straight
in the eye and said: “If you need my blood Fidel, you have
it”.
I appreciated
it greatly. He had been foreign minister
in the government of our friend Houari Boumediene.
Bouteflika as well had just gone through a health crisis
that had him teetering on the edge of death.
One might say that his recovery was astounding.
His
words constituted a noble and selfless support for our
cause, which was not expected, by our internationalist
spirit that was never exercised in exchange for anything.
His
noble gesture took place years after a despicable traitor to
the history of his self-sacrificing and combative people
coincided, in the city of Monterrey Mexico, with the demands
of the head of the empire that I be thrown out of a Summit
taking place there, after speaking to the people gathered
there, with the exception of Bush who hadn’t touched Mexican
soil while I was setting foot on the same land.
Just
before the minute I left, Hugo Chavez urgently visited me
and, indignant about such high-handed behaviour by the head
of state of the host country, he exclaimed: “Fidel, tell me
how much oil
Cuba
needs to defeat the Yankee blockade”.
The
dialogue seemed unreal. It isn’t easy to
remember, through the mist of emotions, what the exact words
of my response were. Doubtlessly, they
were words negating my acceptance.
Be that
as it may,
Cuba’s
destiny followed its course. The fate of
our people was bound to the legendary memory of Che and the
thinking of Marti and Bolivar.
Our
future cannot be separated from the events happening next
Sunday when the day for approving the Constitutional
Amendment begins.
There is no other alternative
but victory.
The
destinies of the peoples of “Our America” will depend
substantially on that victory and it will be an event which
will have influence on the rest of the planet.
However, what is missing is an acknowledgement to Hugo
Chavez for his contribution to Spanish literature.
His latest article published yesterday on February 12th
under the title of “Chavez’ Lines”, is an inspired document
of exceptional quality, of the kind only great writers can
pull together. It is pure Chavez, body
and soul, reflected in print, the way very few can achieve.
Yesterday’s enthusiastic throng is a spectacle which can
only be accessed by television for an
incalculable number of people in the world.
The
unmasking of the staged self-provocation in the Jewish
synagogue is the antithesis of those moving images that in
1945 Soviet troops showed to the world after they stormed
and took the Auschwitz concentration camp; they showed the
world what had happened to millions of Jews and people from
other occupied countries including children, old people and
women, imprisoned by the Nazis. It
wasn’t Eisenhower’s soldiers making the effort and spilling
their blood to liberate them.
The
monstrous world of injustices that imperialism has imposed
on the planet marks the inexorable end of a system and an
era which cannot have long to survive.
This too shall run out.
We thank our Venezuelan compatriot for his clarion
call.
Fidel Castro Ruz
February 13, 2009
11:30 p.m. |
