Trapped By History

Daniel’s appearance on the National Television Round Table program went as I hoped. He spoke eloquently and he was persuasive, calm and irrefutable.

He gave no offence nor did he wish to offend any other Latin American country; he held firmly to the truth in every moment of his appearance: Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, as ALBA spokesmen, rejected the idea that the Final Declaration was submitted as a matter of consensual
agreement, in no uncertain terms.

Through Daniel we learned that Obama himself acknowledged that he hadn’t even read that document which snuck through as the Official Summit Declaration. Telesur also broadcast the appearance live. It had wide coverage.

Daniel pronounced categorical concepts. “It was the censorship meeting. ‘Stop the blockade against Cuba!’: this was a unanimous outcry, with different nuances, but unanimous all the same.” He stated that: “There was a very good speech by President Rafael Correa when he
explained: “Elections do not mean democracy because a multiparty system is nothing other than a way to disintegrate a nation.” Daniel added that: “Cuba has a model where the people are not split up between green, red, yellow and orange. It’s simply the Cuban people, the citizens,
without those campaigns where the interests of big capital are at work.

It’s the Cuban people who elect their authorities without the stridency of elections in the bourgeois democracies imposed by the west.

“Courtesy does not erase ideological and political differences; it doesn’t erase reality. I wish to emphasize this because I observed a lot of star-struck attitudes among some of the heads of state and government just because they were shaking President Obama’s hand.” Alluding to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he stated: “With his little flute and all the rats behind him, we are headed for the cliff. But Obama didn’t have the effect he wanted.”

“The United States hasn’t changed, as Raúl reminded us in Cumaná. It was a Republican administration that prepared the Bay of Pigs invasion and it was a Democratic administration that carried it out.

“We have a president of the United States who says we should forget about the past, but he is trapped in the past! Of 50 years of blockading Cuba! In 2004, when he was running for senator, he said that the blockade was terrible and that it had to be called off. They asked him the question at the press conference and now he replies that that was eons ago. He is telling us that he lies; it is the answer of a person who lies.

“He is declaring that the blockade of Cuba cannot be lifted. That Cuba should be thankful for the concessions recently made. They want to sell this as a change; it doesn’t even come close to the measures Carter took 30 years ago; it’s more like going backwards. They would like us to
forget about history.

“The OAS is dead. It is an unburied corpse.”

“African Unity has its own instrument. It isn’t France, it isn’t England; the former colonialists of these countries are not there; it’s the peoples of Africa that are there.

“Likewise, here we must be, the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean; and from those positions, from that dialogue, from that unity, we can talk to the North, talk to the United States and Canada, talk to the Europeans; in other words, engage in a dialogue with the countries of the North and defend our positions.

“What is also clear about this Summit is that the United States has not changed and Latin America and the Caribbean, we have indeed changed; we have changed and we are changing grasping tightly onto the roots of our history.”

He finally explains that “the document was dead and the policy of the carrot and the stick is still in effect because President Obama is trapped inside the structure of an empire”.


Fidel Castro Ruz
April 23, 2009
11:23 a.m.