[News] Communism is an Aspiration - The Future of Cuba

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Weekend Edition Feb 27-Mar 01, 201
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/27/the-future-of-cuba/

*Communism is an Aspiration*


  The Future of Cuba

by ALEJANDRO CASTRO ESPIN and LASONAS PIPINIS VELASCO

In this interview Alejandro Castro Espín, Doctor of Political Science 
and social researcher and son of Cuban president Raul Castro and the 
late Vilma Espin, openly shares his thoughts regarding the 
reestablishment of relations between Cuba and the United States. He also 
explains how Cuban participatory democracy works and his perception of 
the future of Cuba.

Castro Espin was in Athens during the first two weeks of January where 
he presented the second edition of his book “Empire of Terror” that was 
originally published in Cuba in 2009. Since that time the book has been 
translated into numerous languages including, Russian, Arabic, and 
Chinese. The book examines the ideology of imperial policy and what 
constitutes the essence of a national security doctrine that is the main 
axis of the aggressive foreign policy of the U.S. The book presentation 
in Greece took place thanks to the Solidarity Movement with Cuba in that 
nation.

The interview was conducted in Acropolis on January 16, 2015 by 
Peruvian-Greek journalist Lasonas Pipinis Velasco.

/*Lasonas Pipinis Velasco:* Is this the first time you have visited 
Acropolis? /

*Alejandro Castro Espín:* Well, it is the first time I have visited 
Greece. It is something I had hoped to do for a long time and it finally 
happened thanks to solidarity here with my people. I was invited without 
having to spend a dime of Cuban resources and it has been an excellent 
visit. We have been able to interact closely with the Greek people, in 
neighborhoods and towns and in that process we have discovered great 
respect and admiration for Fidel and Raul. Our visit has made it 
possible to thank the Greek people for the solidarity they have shown 
Cuba for over 50 years as we faced the American empire. What made this 
trip even more special is the recent circumstances when Barack Obama 
accepted that the policy of the previous 10 presidents had been a 
mistake and had to be changed.

/*LPV:* In Cuba many things are changing, in terms of diplomatic 
relations with the United States. What happened initiates a new stage, 
what does this new day mean for the future of Cuba?/

*Alejandro Castro Espín: *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. The 
Cuban people along with international solidarity defeated this imperial 
position 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. 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.

This is the will of the Cuban people as expressed in the last Congress 
of the Party that was arrived at through a process of popular 
consultation with more than eight million Cubans who spoke and supported 
these guidelines of economic and social policy of the Party and the 
Revolution that were later approved by the National Assembly; the 
highest organ of the power of the Cuban State.

/*LPV:* Many people say that in Latin-America after the death of Hugo 
Chavez a lot of things could change, that is to say, the socialism being 
established in Venezuela and in other countries like Bolivia or Ecuador 
could disappear and that could affect Cuba./

*Alejandro Castro Espín: *Actually our analysis is completely the 
opposite of that one simply because the logic of history teaches us 
that. The countries you mentioned all 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. 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. But in those countries you mentioned, the ones that currently 
compose the core of Alba; Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, 
they have shown that by breaking with the unfair order imposed by the 
neoliberal adjustment policies, promoted by Washington and the western 
powers, that they already have a more favorable economic development, 
and even a better social development. They have made a tremendous leap 
just by rejecting the neoliberal adjustment policies, they are making a 
statement from the social perspective. Capital in these cases has not 
been protected in any way which along with non – interference of the 
state is what neo liberalism stands for. It has gone the other way 
around; they have looked for social policies from the political 
movements and then when they have acquired the power of those political 
movements they have become in charge of the State. Several of these 
countries like Bolivia and Ecuador have implemented social policy with a 
socialist organization.
LPV: Do you think capitalism will ever be re established in Cuba?

Alejandro: No, in Cuba we had the most ferocious form of capitalism for 
60 years. It dominated every sphere of life.

/*LPV:* So you think it would be impossible to apply capitalism in Cuba 
once again?/

*Alejandro Castro Espín:* Totally, because we are a people that lived 
that. Cubans are a people who suffered from capitalism in the cruelest 
way, in the social order, the economic order and the political order. 
The United States turned to repression when its prominence started to 
slip in Latin America through establishing military dictatorships. Then 
there is the case of Henry Kissinger who was a known scholar who later 
became the National Security Advisor to President Nixon and later on 
Secretary of State. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in 
establishing relations between the U.S. and China. At the same time that 
he was doing that he was also encouraging all sorts of covert actions 
against Cuba including political assassinations. This contradiction is 
one that is hard to understand. This is why Cuba cannot go back to 
capitalism; we know all the tragic experience that it has generated for 
Latin America and the world. We also know the positive experiences of 
socialism not only in our geographic environment but also like what we 
are witnessing in China.

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 is the most indebted country in the world. It has almost 
17 billion dollars of debt with the rest of the world while living off 
the world’s savings. Let me finish the point, they are living off the 
savings of the people of Greece, the savings of the people of Spain, 
France etc. All of those countries that save their reserves in the banks 
in dollars are simply financing the American economy, and that is why 
the average American citizen consumes two and a half times more than 
their income. How is that possible to understand that? How can a society 
prosper like that? What the U.S. does is it continues to print money 
when the economic situation gets difficult. This is what happened in the 
last depression during the summer of 2008 when they tried to resolve the 
economic crisis by printing valueless money. This is the business 
privilege given to them at the famous conference of Bretton Woods in 
1944 when the United States emerged as the superpower after Europe and 
the rest of the world, mainly Europe, that had collapsed because of the 
war. Then basically with the financing of the war economy they emerged 
as the great power that developed logically into a superpower. I am not 
going to explain to you the history of the Cold War because you 
certainly know it but what we see now is China as the rising economic 
superpower, one that is certainly moving forward.

/*LPV:* Many politicians in United States say that the blockade against 
Cuba must continue because Cuba does not hold elections./

**Alejandro Castro Espín*:* Repeat the question please.

/*LPV:* Many politicians in United States say that the blockade against 
Cuba must continue./

*Alejandro Castro Espín: *Because Cuba doesn’t hold elections?

/*LPV:* Because they say, the American politicians, that Cuba since 1959 
does not hold elections./

*Alejandro Castro Espín: *It is very interesting that you ask that 
question here in the cradle of western democracy, with the Parthenon as 
the background to our discussion. I am going to stop and reflect on the 
subject because I think it is the appropriate place to ask such a 
question. When we speak of the origin of western democracy it’s 
precisely here, in this territory that the modern definition of 
democracy first emerged in city/states known now as Greece. This was 
coming from a society in which 30 thousand citizens had rights and 300 
thousand were slaves and citizens without rights that lived in this 
territory. So that was the concept of western democracy; some citizens 
had the prerogative of exerting their civil and political rights while 
the others had none. Those were the slaves, who basically did not even 
receive pay, they just simply lived for a plate of food and were also 
subjected to brutal repression from a democracy that imposed itself by 
the force of the economic power of the elites that ultimately decided 
that definition of democracy.

This is very important because after that came the evolution of 
democracy in the world and the democratic experiences that came used the 
Greek experience as their reference point. The evolution of the 
definition of democracy later emerges when the bourgeoisie experiences 
in Europe, mainly after the thinkers like John Locke or Francisco de 
Secundat, outline their new revolutionary political visions and they 
were revolutionary considering the prevailing feudal regimes in Europe 
with its very precarious conditions. People during this period had 
little, for example servants had little more prerogative than slaves. 
The rising bourgeoisie saw feudalism an impediment to progress 
especially for the development of capital. We are talking precisely here 
about Europe after the Age of Enlightenment, the age of the development 
of the sciences, the arts, that begins to take force mainly in the 
fifteenth, sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. This development 
coincides with the discovery of America by the Europeans and the 
conquest of our continent.

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.

Then came the distribution of power of Montesquieu, the guide of powers, 
with the separation of power between executive, legislative and 
judiciary in order to find a balance and the necessary counterparts to 
make the governing bodies exercise effective democracy and to represent 
all of those under one government. So what actually happened? Was the 
popular will what really prevailed in the bourgeois democracy? It can be 
said that in the 21st century they tried to establish American democracy 
as a reference point and defined it as the final and most completed form 
of democracy, coming after the European experiences and being created in 
the territory of the United States. I will tell you what my point of 
view is regarding the democracy we see today in those countries.

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. It is a reality that is expressed in many 
ways. 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?

Then 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. 
It is 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. How is the world economy structured today? What importance 
does the financial speculation have in the economic development of the 
world? What influence does it have in the financial crisis that has been 
unfolding, which each time is more severe than the last and affecting 
most countries of the world? What weight does that carry? 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. They 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.

As I was saying we can say that the great transnational capital in which 
the American capital has a lot of influence because of the sheer volume 
of capital that it handles. And in the end it pays the politicians that 
assume power in the U.S. and the other countries of the West. What 
worker or peasant can pay 80 – 90 million dollars to elect a senator or 
4 billion to elect a president? Only great capital can do that. That is 
why we say that bourgeois democracy has been evolving in the last years 
into dollar democracy, this is not the democracy of sovereignty, and 
only the people can determine that. So when we talk about Cuban 
democracy we are referring to participatory democracy which is big 
difference with representative bourgeois democracy. Our is a democracy 
in which everything is consulted with the people; it is a democracy in 
which every aspect and important decision that has an impact in the life 
and society of the people, is done in consultation.

In Cuba, despite having lived through the most difficult times, there 
has never been a neo liberal adjustment. You know what I am talking 
about because you have lived through that. You are a Peruvian Greek that 
lives in Greece for how long? You were born in Greece but you have 
family there and you keep your Peruvian origins and that is why you told 
me, “I am Greek Peruvian”. How long have you lived in this country, how 
old are you?

/*LPV:* 35/

*Alejandro Castro Espín:* 35 years. You have witnessed the events. I 
have not spoken with one person during my visit here that does not have 
very serious opinions on what they are seeing in the modern day 
capitalism of Europe. They talk about the general crisis that capitalism 
has caused and the precarious social situation and the poverty it has 
generated. Just imagine, more than half of the young people in the 
European Union do not have jobs. How can one explain that? How can one 
explain that to a working family, that produces goods and services, 
those who produce the olive oil that is a a main source of food in any 
European country? They humbly work the land with great effort and then 
the little resources they had saved in banks have now become dust simply 
because they did not have the means to withstand inflation produced by 
the adjustment policies. Everything they have, their simple possessions, 
have become depreciated, they have lost their property, and they have 
lost their homes.

/*LPV:* One question…/

*Alejandro Castro Espín:* Let me finish the idea, I am going to answer 
all of your questions but I want you to listen so that I can finish my 
main idea about why I tell you that we have a lot of faith and 
confidence in Cuban democracy. I want to repeat our experiment is not 
the best democracy and should not be a reference to anybody elses, it is 
ours. It has worked for us and the clearest evidence that our democracy 
has worked is that there is a revolution that has continued after a half 
century of facing down the most powerful empire. This has not happened 
many times in history. It has to be said like that, we have a complete 
respect for history, we respect the experiences of other countries and 
we have our own, but the truth is that if the Cuban revolution had not 
been a democracy it would not have survived, not even a day under those 
circumstances I mentioned. It is only through popular consultation and 
exchange with the people about social and economic policies that we were 
going to define the strategic direction of the country in the next 
years. To reach prosperous and sustainable socialism, which is our 
aspiration, we discussed that with the entire population. The most 
recent example of this process was the discussion that took place in the 
congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. There are 11 million Cubans and 
around 8.7 million Cubans who participated in the conversations 
regarding those projections, gave opinions that were analyzed and taken 
into account.

/*LPV: *The question is about the elections? That is, if elections are 
held will the blockade against Cuba end? Could there be elections held 
in Cuba? Because it is said that there are no elections in Cuba and that 
is why the blockade against Cuba continues. The question is if you think 
Communism has been applied in Cuba or not?/

**Alejandro Castro Espín*:* Do you realize that does not make any sense? 
That is an argument used to attack a country, to impose a different 
political system on it that besides being ineffective has had no 
results. That does not make sense. So, the argument is that they impose 
a blockade because we do not have direct elections. I am telling you 
that our elections could not be more direct, and I am going to explain 
it to you so you can learn about it and also because 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 don’t have the direct knowledge about this and 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.

In Cuba the elections for the powers of the State comes from the people, 
first it comes from meetings of the citizens at the base. In Cuba we 
call them blocks, the divisions of a city that is the term we use. 
Several blocks of neighborhoods that live in the same area gather in 
assemblies that are stipulated by law. In those assemblies the people 
choose freely among themselves who will represent them. The criteria 
takes into account the candidates characteristics, including if they are 
hardworking, If they are good people, if they have a clean past, and 
money has no bearing on who is nominated.

This is how a candidate comes about and I want to emphasize and 
important thin first and that is they are not nominated by a party, the 
people nominates them. This is not the same process that happens today 
in bourgeois society, where political parties prepare a nomination list. 
No, in Cuba it is the people at the base level in neighborhood 
assemblies, without any influence of money. The one chosen is based on 
the one who represents that neighborhood the best. There always has to 
be at least two candidates but there can be many more. After the popular 
election, we chose one and we call him a local delegate and then all of 
them meet to form a Municipal Assembly; let us call it a superior 
political administrative level. The Municipal Assembly of the People’s 
Power, and those elected by the people, form that Assembly and that 
Assembly chooses in the same way the power at the municipal level. Among 
those elected by the people select who can represent them at the 
municipal level and the same happens at the provincial and national 
level, when they reach the national level the National Assembly is 
formed, in a popular election where they nominate all those people they 
think have the right attributes, prestige and authority to govern them.

The National Assembly chooses the superior powers of the State that is 
the Council of State, the Council of State then chooses those who direct 
the society; the President of the Council of State and the Council of 
Ministers, the Vice-presidents of the Council of State and Ministers, 
that is the highest power of the State and then the highest power of the 
State defines a Government and after that Government is defined. The 
Government is formed with those elected by the people who have been 
elected at various levels, because all off those positions elected at 
the national level come from the base.

The President of the country must be nominated at the base, in the 
municipality. It is not like here in Greece where the parties are listed 
at the top level and they can list anyone. We are not like bourgeois 
democracy the ones you say that imposes the blockade to make Cuba 
change. We have direct elections. Here they put people on a list and 
then tell the people supposedly what they have done so they can be 
elected. That is the difference and why we say our democracy is truly 
participatory and popular.

It is important you understand this because we need to eliminate that 
stigma I was mentioning, because its intention is to maintain the 
aggression against my country. These attacks have been going on for over 
50 years against a people who only decided to choose its own destiny, to 
be sovereign and independent. Cuba has not accepted the domain and 
imposition of an empire that has wanted to dominate us for over half a 
century.

When we arrived in this country we found your citizens admiring us for 
our stand. We have spoken with people from the right, from the left, 
from the center. We have talked with people at the street level, but 
also in localities, several mayors, and governors from regions like 
Lamia. And it has been very interactive, we talked with them about how 
we are perfecting our democracy and exercising the process of peoples’ 
power, because we understand that everything can be improved. What we do 
not accept is the comparison of our participatory democracy with 
bourgeois democracy which has not solved anything for humanity. The only 
thing it has done is to take humanity towards a precarious point. They 
have created the environmental crisis, the food crisis, the water crisis 
and the pandemics all over the world. The reason for that is because 
they have taken the majority of the resources and given it to militarism 
paid for by the western powers because it is a great business for them; 
this is the real truth. We have to talk about all of this and make it 
available for people everywhere so they can draw their own conclusions.

/*LPV:* You said that communism had never been applied in Cuba or I did 
not understand?/

*Alejandro Castro Espín:* No, I was saying, Velasco, that to apply 
communism is an aspiration, in fact it has never been applied anywhere, 
it is really still a utopia. Communism is something that comes from the 
classics of Marxism that talked of a modern society we should aspire to. 
One that is truly fair where relations of monetary exchange are not the 
priority but rather one where peoples’ needs could be satisfied. The 
classics of Marxism talked of communism as a society to which a modern 
society should aspire, a society truly fair, where the relations of 
monetary exchange were not the priority but one wher the people’s needs 
could be satisfied, and where people would not be worth more according 
to how much monetary wealth they acquired. Instead their value would be 
based on their contribution to society as a whole. It would be a society 
without class that would accept people based on their capabilities and 
their potential to contribute to that society. No one would be living in 
marginal conditions as they do under capitalism today and where the 
greatest part of humanity lives. In the southern countries and in the 
regions and continents like Africa, which is where the origin of life on 
earth began, there is tremendous debt on humanity, it is one of the most 
underdeveloped areas and where the worst pandemics exist. In many 
incidents the European powers that colonized them are now not even 
capable of helping them. How else do we explain for example the Ebola 
epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea Conakry? Those very powers 
that swindled and occupied them, in the face of the serious situation of 
social emergency, have not even had the capacity to send doctors there. 
In some cases they have sent in militaries instead because that is what 
they are compelled to do. They have had to send military to do it 
because they do not even have any doctors with the willingness to risk 
their lives in order to help those people that are precisely paying for 
the consequences of years of colonization.

Why is it that those that come to help that situation are countries like 
Cuba who has lived under the difficult situation of the blockade for 50 
years? When we talked about going to help these countries how many 
doctors in Cuba raised their hands to go? 15 thousand. In their homes 
they said, “We are willing to go risk our lives to help other 
countries”. That is true medicine; it is the true observance of the 
Hippocratic Oath that doctors swear to. It 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. It was the 
same thing that happened when Cuba sent soldiers to Angola, to help 
those African countries which neocolonialism would not take their claws 
off of. This is still the case in many countries now in the 21st century.

These are the same countries that had fought and suffered from the 
ignominy of fascism in the Second World War, like France, Spain and 
England, but still maintained their colonies in Africa, not that far 
from educated Europe. How can one understand this? In what kind of 
society, in what kind of democracy are they living or defending?

So, those nations, and I mean the governments not the people, the people 
are solidarity. The governments, almost all right-wing, did not have a 
supportive attitude towards those countries at the time when they were 
emerging from being colonies. It was in those circumstances when the 
internationalist help towards Africa appears. There were 2,077 Cubans 
who died helping to eliminate the remnants of neocolonialism left in 
those nations and they contributed in bringing an end to apartheid. This 
was the racist segregationist regime that held Mandela in prison for 
over 30 years. And this is the same thing that is happening today with 
the governments of Israel. The United States was the one nullifying any 
attempt in the Security Council of the United Nations to sanction those 
fascist governments, really segregationist and racist. The same thing it 
is doing for Israel is what it used to do for South Africa who ended up 
having seven nuclear weapons. Why didn’t they act against them like they 
did against Iraq for the so called weapons of mass destruction during 
Bush that never existed in the first place?

When the nuclear weapons were sent to the racist South African 
government, where a few million white people subjugated more than 13 
million black people, it was so they could use them against the Cuban 
forces that were defending Angola. These things have not been written 
down but they need to be told as part of the reality of history which 
should not be distorted the way the historians connected to the power 
elite tend to do. The role that Cuba played and the lives of those 2,077 
Cubans, whose mothers and families mourn for having lost their children 
in Africa, helped achieve the true security and independence of Angola. 
It was a contribution because in the end the Angolan people were the 
ones who decided that. We also contributed in a definitive way securing 
the independence of Namibia after years that a United Nations resolution 
was being ignored by South Africa and the western powers. With the Cuban 
presence in Namibia it was also possible to achieve the security and 
real freedom of that country and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, 
with the modest contribution of the international military presence in 
Africa.

But back to the initial question; you were asking me about Communism. 
Communism is an aspiration, an aspiration is an ideal, a dream, a 
longing of something that would be perfect, but hard to build because it 
has to clash with human nature and against the egotism of humans and the 
egotism of the elites which usually try to guarantee their own interests 
above those of their nations and of their own people. But they are the 
ones that prevail because they have the economic power, the political 
power and the military power.

That is why communism is still an aspiration, 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. 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.

You know how excluding modern societies are; the income differences in 
the First World, for example in the United States where 2 or 3% percent 
of the population holds 60% of the GDP of that country. You should find 
out about the wealth distribution in the rest of the countries, in 
England, in France, in Spain, in Germany… find out about the 
differences, about how the wealth is distributed.

Let’s not use the term democracy as a play on words which is what people 
commonly do, using human rights as a pretext. Those people that really 
violate human rights, those are the ones I was referring to right now; 
they violate human rights from all perspectives. Typically on the 
subject of human rights regarding the nations from the south and Cuba 
they say, “They are not democratic societies, they do not respect human 
rights, and they do not respect freedom of speech”. 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. I mean, I say so because I am Cuban and it pains me to 
listen to what is said about my people. And I feel the responsibility of 
talking to you clearly and with openness. We are two Latin-Americans in 
Greece who are now in front of this monument, which illustrates what 
humanity aimed to do at a certain moment history. 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.

/*Lasonas Pipinis Velasco* is a Peruvian-Greek journalist./

-- 
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