The following speech by Cuban President Raúl Castro was given at the closing session of the 9th congress of the Union of Young Communists, Havana, April 4. The following text is taken from Granma International. The subheadings have been added by
PSLweb.org.
Compañeras, compañeros, delegates and guests,
It has been a good Congress, which actually began last
October with the open meetings attended by hundreds of thousands of young
people and continued with the evaluation meetings conducted by organizations
from the rank and file as well as the municipal and provincial committees where
the agreements were shaped that would be adopted in these final sessions.
 Raul Castro addressing congress |
If there is one thing we’ve had plenty of during the little
over five years that have passed since Fidel made the closing speech at the
Eighth Young Communist League (YCL) Congress, on December 5, 2004, it’s been
work and challenges.
This Congress has been held in the midst of one of the most
vicious and concerted media campaigns launched against the Cuban Revolution in
its fifty years of existence, an issue to which I will necessarily refer later
on.
Although I was unable to attend the meetings held prior to
the Congress, I have been informed of the essentials of every one of them. I am
aware that there has been little talk about achievements in order to focus on
problems, looking internally and without spending more time than necessary on
the analysis of external factors.
It’s a style that ought to permanently characterize the work of the YCL
in contrast to those who tend to look for the mote in their neighbor’s eye
instead of expending such an effort on their own tasks.
It has been rewarding to listen to many young people
directly linked to productive activities proudly and simply explaining the work
they’re doing, barely mentioning the material difficulties and bureaucratic
obstacles that affect them.
Many of the shortcomings analyzed are not new; they have
accompanied the organization for quite some time. The previous congresses
adopted corresponding agreements and yet they’ve been reiterated to a greater
or lesser degree, which proves the lack of a systematic and thorough control of
their completion.
In this sense, it is fair and necessary to repeat something
reiterated by comrades Machado and Lazo, who chaired many of the assemblies:
the Party feels equally responsible for every flaw in the work of the YCL, most
especially for the problems concerning the policy with cadres.
We cannot permit that, once again, approved documents become
dead letters or shelved like memoirs. They should be a guide for the everyday
work of the National Bureau and for every member of the organization. You have
already agreed on the basics, now you should act on them.
Some are very critical about the youth of today while
forgetting that once they themselves were young. It would be naïve to pretend
that new generations are the same as those of the past. A wise proverb says: A
man resembles his own time more than that of his parents.
Cuban youth have always been willing to meet challenges.
They have proven it in the recovery from damages caused by hurricanes,
confronting the enemy’s provocations and defense-related tasks; I might mention
many more examples.
The average age of Congressional delegates is twenty-eight.
All of them have grown up during these hard years of the Special Period and
have participated in our people’s efforts to preserve the main achievements of
socialism in the midst of a very complex economic situation.
It is precisely because of the importance of fully informing
the vanguard of our youth about our economic situation, that in consideration
of the positive experience resulting from the analysis of this same issue by
the members of the National Assembly [of People’s Power], the Politburo
Commission decided to offer the YCL municipal assemblies a report describing
the present situation and its prospects, in all its crude reality. Over thirty
thousand members of the YCL received this information, as well as the main
leaders of the Party, the mass organizations and the government at various
levels.
The economic battle is the main task and focus
Today, more than ever before, the economic battle is the
main task and focus of the ideological work of the cadres, because the
sustainability and the preservation of our social system rest upon this work.
Without a sound and dynamic economy and without the removal
of superfluous expenses and waste, it will neither be possible to improve the
living standard of the population nor to preserve and improve the high levels
of education and health care ensured to every citizen free of charge.
Without an efficient and robust agriculture that we can
develop with the resources available to us, — without even dreaming of the
large allocations of times past — we can’t hope to sustain and increase the
amount of food provided to the population, that still depend so much on the
import of products that might be cultivated in Cuba.
If people do not feel the need to work for a living because
they are covered by excessively paternalistic and irrational state regulations,
we will never be able to stimulate a love for work nor will we resolve the
chronic lack of construction, farming and industrial workers; teachers, police
and other indispensable trades that have steadily been disappearing.
If we do not build a firm and systematic social rejection of
illegal activities and different manifestations of corruption, more than a few
will continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the labor of the majority,
while spreading attitudes that directly attack the essence of socialism.
If we maintain inflated payrolls in nearly every sector of
national life and pay salaries that fail to correspond to results achieved,
thus raising the amount of money in circulation, we cannot expect prices to
cease climbing constantly or prevent the deterioration of people’s purchasing
power. We know that the budgeted and business sectors have hundreds of
thousands of excess workers; some analysts estimate that the surplus of people
in work positions exceeds one million. This is an extremely sensitive issue
that we must confront firmly and with political common sense.
The Revolution will not leave anyone without shelter. It
will strive to create the necessary conditions for every Cuban to have a
dignified job, but this does not mean that the State will be responsible for
giving work to everyone after providing several job offers. Citizens themselves
should be the ones most interested in finding socially useful work.
In summary, to continue spending beyond our income is
tantamount to consuming our future and jeopardizing the very survival of the
Revolution.
We are facing really unpleasant realities, but we do not
close our eyes to them. We are convinced that we need to break away from dogma
and assume the ongoing upgrading of our economic model with firmness and
confidence, in order to set the foundations for the irreversibility and
development of Cuban socialism, which we know constitutes the guarantee of our
national sovereignty and independence.
I know that some comrades sometimes get impatient and wish
for immediate changes in many areas. Or course, I’m referring now to those who
want this without intending to play the enemy’s game. We understand such
concerns that generally stem from ignorance of the magnitude of the work ahead
of us, of its depth and of the complexity of the interrelations between
different elements in the functioning of society that will be modified.
Those who are asking us to go faster should bear in mind the
list of issues that we are studying, of which I have mentioned only a few
today. We cannot allow haste or improvisation in the resolution of a problem to
cause a still greater one. With issues of strategic magnitude in the life of
the entire nation we cannot let ourselves be driven by emotion and act without
the requisite integration. As we have said, that is the only reason we decided
to postpone a few more months the celebration of the Party Congress and the
National Conference that will precede it.
This is the greatest and most important challenge we face:
to ensure the continuity of the work built in these five decades, the same that
our youth have assumed with full responsibility and conviction. The slogan for
this Congress is “Everything for the Revolution,” and that means, first and
foremost, strengthening and consolidating the national economy.
A convincing and mobilizing vanguard is required
Cuban youth are destined to take over from the generation
that founded the Revolution, and in order to lead the masses with great
strength, a convincing and mobilizing vanguard is required, for mobilization
through personal example; a vanguard headed by firm, capable and prestigious
managers, true leaders, not improvised ones; leaders who have passed through
the irreplaceable forge of the working class where the most genuine values of a
revolutionary are bred. Life has eloquently shown us the dangers that come with
the violation of that principle.
Fidel said it clearly in his closing remarks at the Second
YCL Congress, on April 4, 1972, and I quote:
“No one will
learn to swim on the ground, and no one will walk on the sea. A man is shaped
by his environment; a man is made by his own life, by his own activity.”
And he concluded: “It is by creating that we will learn to
respect what work creates. We will teach respect for those goods as we teach
how to create them.”
This idea that he stated thirty-eight years ago, and that
was surely received with an ovation by that Congress, is another clear example
of agreements that we reach and then do not fulfill.
Today more than ever we need cadres capable of carrying out
effective ideological work that cannot be a dialogue of the deaf nor a
mechanical repetition of slogans. We need managers who reason with sound
arguments, without considering themselves the absolute owners of the truth; who
know how to listen even if they don’t like what some people say; who are
capable of examining other peoples’ views with an open mind, which does not
exclude the need to energetically refute with sound arguments those views
considered unacceptable.
Absolute unanimity is fictitious and therefore harmful
Such leaders should foster open discussions and not consider
discrepancy a problem but rather, the source of the best solutions. In general,
absolute unanimity is fictitious and therefore, harmful. When contradictions
are not antagonistic, as in our case, they can become the driving force of
development. We should deliberately suppress anything that feeds pretense and
opportunism. We should learn to
work collegially, to encourage unity and to strengthen collective leadership;
these features should characterize the future leaders of the Revolution.
There are youth all over the island with the necessary
disposition and capacity to take on leading positions. The challenge is to find them, to train
them and to gradually assign them greater responsibilities. The masses will
take it upon themselves to confirm whether the selection was right.
We observe that progress is being made in the ethnic and
gender composition of the organization. In this sense, we can neither afford
regression nor superficiality; the YCL should always work on this. By the way,
I recall that this was another thing that we agreed upon thirty-five years ago,
in the First Party Congress; but we left its accomplishment to spontaneity and
did not follow up on it as we should have, even when this was one of Fidel’s
first statements since the victory of the Revolution and one he repeated a
number of times.
A huge smear campaign against Cuba
As I told you at the beginning, this Congress has coincided
with a huge smear campaign against Cuba, a campaign orchestrated, directed and
financed by the centers of imperial power in the United States and Europe,
hypocritically waving the banner of human rights.
They have cynically and shamefully manipulated the death of
an inmate sentenced to jail on fourteen counts of common crimes, who by design
and thanks to a repeated lie and an interest in receiving economic support from
overseas was turned into a “political dissident,” a man who was incited to go
on a hunger strike with absurd demands.
Despite our doctors’ efforts he died, something we also
regretted at the time, and we denounced the only beneficiaries of this event,
the same who are currently encouraging another individual to persist on a
similar path of unacceptable blackmail. The latter is not in prison, despite
all the slander. He is a free person who has already served his sentence for
common crimes, specifically for assault and battery against a woman who is a
doctor and director of a hospital, who he also threatened to kill, and later an
old woman, nearly seventy years old, who as a consequence had to be subjected
to surgery to remove her spleen.
Just as in the previous case, everything is being done to save his life;
but if he does not modify his self-destructive behavior, he will be
responsible, together with his sponsors, for the outcome we also do not wish to
see.
It is disgusting to see the double standard of those in
Europe who keep a complicit silence about tortures in the so-called war on
terrorism; who allowed clandestine CIA flights carrying prisoners, and even
permitted the use of their territory for the establishment of secret prison
centers.
What would they say if in breach of ethical standards, we
had forcibly fed these people, as they have done habitually in many torture
centers, including the one they have at the Naval Base at Guantánamo? By the
way, these are the same who in their own countries, as we see on television
almost on a daily basis, use police agents to charge on horseback against
demonstrators, to beat them and shoot at them with tear-gas and even
bullets. What do they say about
the frequent abuse and humiliation to which they subject their immigrants?
The major Western press not only attacks Cuba; it has also
initiated a new modality of implacable media terror against political leaders,
intellectuals, artists and other personalities all over the world who speak out
against fallacy and hypocrisy, and simply examine events with objectivity.
Meanwhile, it would seem that the standard-bearers of the
highly vaunted freedom of the press have forgotten that the commercial and
economic blockade against Cuba and all of its inhumane effects on our people is
in full force and even reinforced; that the current U.S. Administration has not
ceased in the slightest the support for subversion; that the unfair,
discriminatory and interventionist Common Position adopted by the European
Union, sponsored from the inception by the U.S. government and the Spanish far
right-wing remains in place, calling for a regime change in our country, or to
put it bluntly, for the destruction of the Revolution.
More than half a century of permanent combat has taught our
people that hesitation is synonymous with defeat.
We will never yield to blackmail
We will never yield to blackmail from any country or group
of countries, no matter how powerful they might be, and regardless of the
consequences. We have the right to defend ourselves. If they try to corner us,
they should know that we will defend ourselves, first of all with truth and
principles. Once again we shall keep ourselves firm, calm and patient. Our
history is rich in such examples!
That’s how our heroic mambises fought in our independence
wars of the nineteenth century.
That’s how we defeated the last offensive of ten thousand
fully armed troops sent against us by [Batista’s] tyranny, initially confronted
by barely 200 rebel fighters who under the direct leadership of Commander in
Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, and for seventy-five days, — from May 24 through August
6, 1958 – waged more than a hundred war actions, including four battles in a
small territory of between 406 and 437 square miles, that is, a smaller area
than that of the City of Havana. That great operation determined the course of
the war and just a little more than four months later the Revolution was
victorious. This inspired Commander Ernesto Che Guevara to write in his war
diary, and I quote: “Batista’s army ended this final offensive over the Sierra
Maestra with its backbone shattered.”
Nor were we frightened by the Yankee fleet facing the coasts
of Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs] in 1961. It was under their very nose that we
annihilated their mercenary army in what would be the first defeat of a U.S.
military expedition on this continent.
And we did it again in 1962, during the October [Missile]
Crisis. We did not give an inch despite the brutal threats of an enemy aiming
their nuclear weapons at us and gearing for action to invade the island; nor
did we flinch when the leaders of the Soviet Union — our main ally at that
extremely difficult juncture, and upon whose support the fate of the Revolution
depended — negotiated a solution to the crisis behind our backs. They respectfully tried to persuade us
to accept inspection, on our national territory, of the withdrawal of their
nuclear weapons, and we responded that such inspection could eventually take
place on board their ships in international waters, but never in Cuba.
We are sure that it would be very difficult for worse
circumstances than those to repeat themselves.
More recently, the Cuban people offered an everlasting
example of their capacity for resistance and their self confidence when, as a
result of the demise of the socialist camp and the dismemberment of the Soviet
Union, Cuba suffered a 35% drop in its GDP; the reduction of its foreign trade
by 85%; the loss of markets for its main export items such as sugar, nickel,
citrus and others whose prices plummeted by half; the loss of soft credits with
the subsequent interruption of numerous crucial investments like our first
nuclear power station and the Cienfuegos refinery; the collapse of
transportation, construction and agriculture as we abruptly lost the supply of
spare parts for equipment, fertilizer, animal food and raw industrial
materials, causing hundreds and hundreds of factories to be paralyzed and the
sudden quantitative and qualitative deterioration of food supplies for our
people to levels below those recommended for adequate nutrition.
We all suffered those warm summers of the first half of the
1990’s, when blackouts exceeded twelve hours a day due to the lack of fuel for
electricity generation. And, while
all this was happening, scores of Western press agencies, some of them without
bothering to conceal their jubilation, were sending their correspondents to
Cuba with the intention of being the first to report the final defeat of the
Revolution.
Amidst this dramatic situation, no one was left to their own
fate; this gave further evidence of the strength stemming from the unity of a
people when they defend just ideas and a work built with so much sacrifice.
Only a socialist regime, despite its deficiencies, can successfully pass such a
huge test.
Therefore, we’re not losing any sleep over the current
skirmishes in the offensive by international reactionaries, coordinated as
usual, by those who can’t bring themselves to understand that this country will
never be crushed, in one way or another, and that we would prefer to disappear,
as we demonstrated in 1962.
This Revolution started only 142 years ago, on October 10,
1868. At the time, it was a fight against a decadent European colonialism, but
always under the boycott of emerging U.S. imperialism that did not want our
independence and waited for the “ripe fruit” to fall in its hands by
“geographic gravity.” It finally happened after more than three decades of war
and enormous sacrifices made by the Cuban people.
Now the external actors have exchanged roles. For over half
a century we have been attacked and continuously harassed by the now modern and
most powerful empire on the planet, assisted by the boycott implied in the
insulting Common Position, which remains intact thanks to the pressure of some
countries and reactionary political forces in the European Union with various
unacceptable conditions.
We ask ourselves, “why?” And, we believe simply that it is
because essentially the actors remain the same and they do not renounce their
old aspirations of domination.
Many more years of struggle and sacrifices ahead
The young Cuban revolutionaries understand perfectly well
that to preserve the Revolution and socialism, and to continue being dignified
and free, they have many more years of struggle and sacrifices ahead of them.
At the same time, great challenges hang over humanity and it
is up to the youth, in the first place, to tackle them. They should defend the
survival of the human species, threatened like never before by climate change, a
situation accelerated by the reckless production and consumption patterns
engendered by capitalism.
Today, we are seven billion people on earth. Half of these
are poor, while 1.02 billion are going hungry. It is worthwhile to ask oneself
what will happen by the year 2050 when the world population climbs to nine
billion and the living conditions on the planet have deteriorated even further?
The farce that concluded the most recent climate summit, in
the Danish capital last December, proves that capitalism with its blind
adherence to market laws will never solve this nor many other problems. Only
conscience and the mobilization of the people, the political will of
governments and the advancement of scientific and technological knowledge can
prevent man’s extinction.
To conclude, I’d like to refer to the fact that on April
next year it will be half a century since the proclamation of the socialist
nature of the Revolution and of the crushing victory over the mercenary
invasion at Playa Girón. We will
celebrate these extraordinary events in every corner of our country, from
Baracoa where they tried to land a battalion, up to the western-most end of the
nation. In the capital, we will have a people’s march and a military parade,
activities in which all workers, intellectuals and youth will be the principal
protagonists.
On May 1, another resounding response
Within a few days, on May 1st, our revolutionary people
throughout the country, in public squares and in the streets that belong to
them by right, will give another resounding response to this new international
escalation of aggression.
Cuba does not fear lies nor does it kneel to pressure,
conditions or impositions, from whichever direction. It defends itself with the
truth, which always, sooner rather than later, ends up being known.
The Young Communist League was born on a day like this,
forty-eight years ago. That historical April 4, 1962, Fidel said:
“Believing in youth is seeing in them not only enthusiasm
but capacity; not only energy but responsibility; not only youth, but purity,
heroism, character, willpower, love for their homeland, faith in their
homeland! Love for the Revolution, faith in the Revolution, and confidence in
themselves! It is the deep conviction that youth are competent, that youth are
capable; the deep conviction that great tasks can be placed on their
shoulders.”
That’s how it was yesterday, how it is today and how it will
continue to be in the future.
Thank
you very much.
