The November 4th Elections

            Tomorrow will be a significant day. The world public will be following the United States elections there. It is the most powerful nation on Earth. Actually, with less than 5% of the world population it swallows every year great amounts of oil and gas, minerals, raw materials, consumer goods and sophisticated products brought from overseas. Many of these, particularly the fuels and those extracted from mines, are non renewable.

          It is the largest arms producer and exporter. Its industrial military complex also has an insatiable domestic market. Its naval and air forces are deployed in scores of military basis located in the territory of other nations. The United States strategic warhead-carrying missiles can reach any place in the world with absolute precision.

          A great number of the cleverest minds in the world are uprooted from their original countries and placed at the service of the system. It is a parasitical and plundering empire.

          It is a known fact that the black population introduced in the US territory throughout centuries of slavery is the victim of a marked racial discrimination.

          The Democratic candidate Obama is partly black; the dark skin and features of that race are predominant in him. He was able to study at a higher education center where he graduated with outstanding results. He is surely more clever, better educated and calm than his Republican adversary.

          I’m analyzing tomorrow’s elections when the world is enduring a serious financial crisis –the worst since the 1930s— among many others which have seriously affected the economy of many nations in the course of over three fourths of a century.

          The international media, the political analysts and commentators are using part of their time to discuss the issue. Obama is considered the best political speaker of the United States in the past decades. His compatriot Toni Morrison, a 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, and the first one from her ethnic group born in the United States who has been awarded such prize --an excellent author-- has called him the future President and poet of that nation.

          I have been watching the struggle between the contenders. The black candidate caused much amazement with his nomination in the face of strong adversaries. He has well articulated ideas which he hammers once and again into the voters’ minds. He does not hesitate to claim that more than Republicans or Democrats they are all Americans, the citizens he qualifies as the most productive in the world. He says he will reduce taxes for the middle class, where he includes practically everybody, while he will completely remove them for the poorest and raise them for the wealthiest. The revenues, he claims, will not the used to bailout banks.

          He insists repeatedly that the ruinous spending on Bush’s war in Iraq will not be paid by the American taxpayers. He will put an end to it and bring the US troops back home. Perhaps he is mindful of the fact that that country had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  However, the blood has been shed of thousands of US troops, injured or killed in battle, and the lives taken of over a million people in that Muslim nation. It was a war of conquest imposed by the empire seeking for oil.

          In light of the current financial crisis and its consequences, the American people are more concerned over the economy than the war in Iraq. They are anguishing over their jobs, the safety of their bank deposits and their retirement funds, and the fear of loosing the purchasing power of their money and the houses where they live with their families. They wish to have the certainty that whatever the circumstances they will receive adequate medical care and that their children will accede to higher education.

          Obama is challenging and I think he has taken and will still take great risks in a country where any extremist can legally purchase a sophisticated modern weapon anywhere, as it was the case in the first half of the 18^th century in the west of the United States. He supports his system and he will be get support from it. The pressing problems of the world are not really a major source of concern to Obama, much less to the candidate who as a war pilot dropped tens of tons of bombs on Hanoi City, that is, more than 9,375 miles away from Washington, ad this with no remorse.

          When last Thursday I addressed a letter to Lula, in addition to what I already mentioned in my Reflections of October 31, I literally wrote: “Racism and discrimination have been present in the American society ever since its birth, over two centuries ago. Latin Americans and blacks have always been discriminated against there. Its citizens have been brought up under consumerism. Humanity is objectively threatened by its mass extermination weapons.”

          “The American people are more concerned over the economy that the Iraq war. McCain is an old, bellicose and uneducated man; he is not very smart and he is in poor health.”

          Finally, I said: “If my estimates were wrong and racism prevailed: if the Republican candidate won the Presidency, the danger of a war would increase and the peoples’ opportunities to progress would be reduced. Nevertheless, we need to fight and to build awareness about this, whoever it is who wins this election.”

          When these views that I sustain are published tomorrow, nobody will have time to say that I wrote something that could be used by any candidate to advance his campaign. I had to be, and I have been, neutral in this electoral competition. It is not “interference in the internal affairs of the United States”, as the State Department would put it, as respectful as it is of other countries’ sovereignty. 

Fidel Castro Ruz
November 3, 2008
4:10 p.m.