The Congress Debates

Reuters Pictures :- 

Cuba's President Raul Castro (front R) reacts next to his brother and former President Fidel Castro during the closing ceremony of Cuban communist congress in Havana April 19, 2011. Cuba's Communist Party chose the old guard to oversee a new economic course for the Caribbean island on Tuesday, selecting President Raul Castro and First Vice President Jose Machado Ventura to lead the country's highest political body. The choice of Castro, who replaces his older brother Fidel Castro as first secretary of the ruling party's Central Committee, was expected.

by Fidel Castro

(April 19, Havana, Sri Lanka Guardian) This morning at 10:00am I listened to the delegates’ debates at the 6th Congress of the Party.

There were so many commissions that, logically, I couldn’t listen to everyone who spoke.

They were meeting in five commissions to discuss a number of issues. Thereafter I, too, took advantage of the breaks to breathe calmly and eat some energy providing food. They surely had more of an appetite given their work and age.

I was impressed by this new generation’s education, with such a high level of cultural development, so different from those learning to read and write precisely in 1961 when the yankee bombers piloted by mercenaries attacked the homeland. The majority of the delegates were children then or had not been born.

I wasn’t so focused on what they said, but in the way that they said it. They were so well prepared and their vocabulary was so rich that I almost didn’t understand them. They discussed every word, and even the presence or absence of a comma in the paragraph under discussion.

Their task is even more difficult than the one assumed by our generation when socialism was proclaimed 90 miles from the United States.

In my opinion, therefore, the principal legacy which we can leave to them is our commitment to revolutionary principles. There is no margin for error at this moment in human history. No one is unaware of that reality.

The Party leadership must be composed of the best political talents among our people, capable of confronting the politics of the empire which are endangering the human species and creating gangsters like those in NATO, capable of launching more than 4,000 bombing missions against an African nation in only 29 days, since the shameful Odyssey Dawn.

It is the duty of the new generation of revolutionary men and women to be exemplary leaders, modest, studious and unwavering fighters for socialism.

Overcoming, in the barbarous stage of the consumer society, the system of capitalist production which promotes and foments the selfish instincts of human beings constitutes, no doubt, a difficult challenge.

The new generation is called upon to rectify and change without hesitation all that needs to be corrected and changed and continue demonstrating that socialism is also the art of doing the impossible: constructing and making a reality the Revolution of the poor, by the poor and for the poor and defending it for half a century against the most powerful state which has ever existed.