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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2007 11:22 am Post subject: fidel castro thread |
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i've posted up bits before on casto now and then and thought i'd start this thread to keep them all in in future
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REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
DELIBERATE LIES, STRANGE DEATHS AND AGRESSION TO THE WORLD ECONOMY
In one of my reflections I made reference to gold bars deposited in the basements of the Twin Towers. This time the subject is quite a bit more complicated and hard to believe. Almost four decades ago, scientists living in the United States discovered the Internet, the same way that Albert Einstein, born in Germany, discovered in his own time the formula to measure atomic energy.
Einstein was a great scientist and humanist. He contradicted Newton's laws of physics, held sacred until then. However, apples continued to fall due to the laws of gravity that had been defined by Newton. These were two different ways of observing and interpreting nature, with very little information on this in Newton's day. I remember what I read more than 50 years ago about the famous theory of relativity elaborated by Einstein: energy is equal to mass times the speed of light, called C, squared: E MC2. The United States money existed and the resources necessary for such expensive research. The political climate resulting from the generalized hatred against the brutalities of Nazism in the richest and most productive nation in the world destroyed by the war, transformed that fabulous energy into bombs that were dropped over the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and a similar number of people who were exposed to radiation and subsequently died in the following years.
A clear example of the use of science and technology with the same hegemonic goals is described in an article written by the former official of United States National Security, Gus W. Weiss; it originally appeared in the magazine Studies in Intelligence, in 1996, even though it was more widely distributed in 2002 under the title of Deceiving the Soviets. There, Weiss claims the idea of sending the USSR software that they needed for their industries, but already contaminated, with the aim of making that country's economy collapse.
According to notes taken from Chapter 17 of the book At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War, by Thomas C. Reed, former Secretary of the United States Air Force, Leonid Brezhnev told a group of senior Party officials in 1972: "We Communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their credits, their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs, and by the mid-1980s we will be in a position to return to an aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper hand with the West." This information was confirmed by the Defense Department in hearings before the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1974.
In the early '70s, the Nixon's government advanced the idea of détente. Henry Kissinger hoped that "over time, trade and investment may leaven the autarkic tendencies of the Soviet system", he considered that détente might "invite gradual association of the Soviet economy with the world economy, and foster a degree of interdependence that adds an element of stability to the political relations".
Reagan tended to ignore Kissinger's theories about détente and to take President Brezhnev's word, but all doubts were removed on July 19, 1981 when the new U.S. President met with President Francois Mitterand, of France, at the economic G-7 summit in Ottawa. In a conversation off to the side, Mitterand informed Reagan about the success his intelligence services had in recruiting a KGB agent. The man belonged to a section that was evaluating the achievements of Soviet efforts to acquire western technology. Reagan expressed great interest in Mitterand's delicate revelations and also thanked him for his offer to have the material sent to the United States government.
The dossier, under the name of Farewell, reached the CIA in August 1981. It made it quite clear that the Soviets had been spending years carrying out their research and development activities. Given the enormous transfer of technology by radar, computers, machine-tools and semi-conductors from the United States to the Soviet Union, one could say that the Pentagon was in an arms race with itself.
The Farewell Dossier also identified hundreds of case officials, agents at their posts and other suppliers of information through the West and Japan. During the first years of détente, the United States and the Soviet Union had established working groups in agriculture, civil aviation, nuclear energy, oceanography, computers and the environment. The aim was to begin to construct "bridges of peace" between the superpowers. The members of the working groups had to exchange visits to their centers.
Besides identifying agents, the most useful information brought by the Dossier consisted of the "shopping list" and its aims in terms of acquisition of technology in the coming years. When the Farewell Dossier reached Washington, Reagan asked Bill Casey, the CIA Director, to come up with a secret operative use for the material.
The production and transportation of oil and gas was one of the Soviet priorities. A new trans-Siberian gas pipeline was to carry natural gas from the gas fields of Urengoi in Siberia, through Kazakhstan, Russia and Eastern Europe towards the western dollar markets. In order to automate the operation of valves, compressors and storage installations of such an immense enterprise, the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems. They bought some of the first computers on the open market, but when the authorities of the gas pipeline took off for the United States to buy the necessary software, they were turned down. Undaunted, the Soviets searched elsewhere; a KGB operative was sent to penetrate a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to acquire the necessary codes. The United States intelligence, warned by the agent in the Farewell Dossier, answered and manipulated the software before sending it.
Once, in the Soviet Union, computers and software worked in unison and they made the gas pipeline work splendidly. But this tranquility was misleading. Inside the software that was operating the gas pipeline, there was a Trojan horse, a term used to describe software lines hidden in the normal operative system which make that system lose control in the future, or whenever it would receive an order from abroad.
In order to affect the dollar profits coming in from the West and the domestic Russian economy, the software for the gas pipeline which was to operate the pumps, turbines and valves had been programmed to breakdown after a prudent interval and reset -that's how it was described- the speeds of the pumps and the valve adjustments so that they would work at pressures much higher than those that were suitable for the pipeline's gaskets and welding seams.
"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was the detonation of a small nuclear device…They (the satellites) had detected no electromagnetic pulse, characteristic of nuclear detonations. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry", affirmed Thomas C. Reed in his book.
The campaign of countermeasures based on Farewell Dossier was an economic war. Even though there were no casualties in terms of lives lost because of the gas pipeline explosion, significant damage was made to the Soviet economy.
As a grand finale, between 1984 and 1985, the United States and its NATO allies put an end to this operation which ended with efficacy the capacity of the USSR to capture technology at a time when Moscow was caught between a defective economy, on one side, and a US President determined to prevail and end the cold war on the other.
In the above cited article by Weiss, it is stated that:
"In 1985, the case took a bizarre turn when information on the Farewell Dossier surfaced in France. Mitterand came to suspect that Vetrov had all along been a CIA plant set up to test him to see if the material would be handed over to the Americans or kept by the French. Acting on this mistaken belief, Mitterand fired the chief of the French service, Yves Bonnet."
Gus W. Weiss is the one who claimed, as already said, the evil plan to have the defective software taken to the USSR, when the United States had the Farewell Dossier in its possession. He died on November 25, 2003 at the age of 72. The Washington Post did not report his death until December 7, that is, 12 days later. They said that Weiss "had fallen" from his apartment building, the Watergate, in Washington, and that a forensic doctor from the US capital had declared his death a "suicide". His hometown newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean, published the death notice a week after the Washington Post and advised that at that time all they were able to say was that "the circumstances surrounding his death have not yet been confirmed."
Before dying, he left some unpublished notes titled "The Farewell Dossier": the strategic deception and the economic war in the Cold War.
Weiss had graduated from Vanderbilt University. He had postgraduate degrees from Harvard and New York University.
His work for the government concentrated on matters of National Security, intelligence organizations and concerns dealing with the transfer of technology to Communist countries. He worked with the CIA, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board and with the Signals Intelligence Committee of the Intelligence Board of the United States.
He was decorated with the CIA Medal of Merit and the "Cipher" Medal from the National Security Council. The French gave him the "Légion d'Honneur" in 1975.
He had no surviving relatives.
Weiss had declared himself to be against the war in Iraq a short while before his "suicide". It is interesting to note that 18 days before Weiss' death, another Bush government analyst also committed suicide -John J. Kokal (58 years old) on November 7, 2003. This man leapt to his death from an office in the State Department where he worked. Kokal was an intelligence analyst for the Department of State in matters dealing with Iraq.
It is recorded in already published documents that Mikhail Gorbachev became furious when arrests and deportations of Soviet agents began in various countries, since he was unaware that the contents of the Farewell Dossier were in the hands of the main heads of NATO governments. In a meeting of the Politburo on October 22, 1986, called to inform colleagues about the Reykjavik Summit, he alleged that the Americans were "acting very discourteously and behaving like bandits". Even though he showed a complacent face to the public, privately Gorbachev would refer to Reagan as "a liar".
During the final days of the Soviet Union, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR had to work blind. Gorbachev had no idea about what was happening in the laboratories and high technology industries in the United States; he was totally unaware that Soviet laboratories and industries had been compromised and to what point.
The White House pragmatists were also blind about these occurrences.
President Ronald Reagan played his trump card: Star Wars The Strategic Defense Initiative. He knew that the Soviets could not compete in that league, because they couldn't suspect that their electronics industry was infected with virus and Trojan horses placed there by the United States intelligence community.
The former British Prime Minister, in her memoirs, published by an important English publisher in 1993 under the title of Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, states that the whole Reagan plan related to Star Wars and the intent to make the Soviet Union collapse economically was the most brilliant plan of that administration, and it lead definitively to the collapse of socialism in Europe.
In Chapter XVI of her book, she explains the participation of her government in the Strategic Defense Initiative.
To carry that out, in Thatcher's opinion, was Reagan's "most important decision", and it "was to prove central to the West's victory in the Cold War". It "imposed more economic tension and greater austerity" on Soviet society, and finally, its "technological and financial implications for the USSR were devastating".
Under the subtitle of "Reassessing the Soviet Union", she describes a series of concepts whose essence is contained in the paragraphs taken literally from that long passage, where she records the brutal plot.
"As 1983 drew on, the Soviets must have begun to realize that their game of manipulation and intimidation would soon be up. European governments were not prepared to fall into the trap opened by the Soviet proposal of a 'nuclear-free zone' for Europe. Preparations for the development of Cruise and Pershing missiles went ahead. In March President Reagan announced American plans for a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) whose technological and financial implications for the USSR were devastating."
"…I had no doubt about the rightness of his commitment to press ahead with the program. Looking back, it is now clear to me that Ronald Reagan's original decision on SDI was the single most important of his presidency".
"In formulating our approach to SDI, there were four distinct elements which I bore in mind. The first was the science itself. The American aim in SDI was to develop a new and much more effective defense against ballistic missiles."
"This concept of defense rested on the ability to attack incoming ballistic missiles at all stages of their flight, from the boost phase when the missile and all its warheads and decoys were together -the best moment- right up to the point of re-entry of the earth's atmosphere on its way to the target."
"The second element to be considered was the existing international agreements limiting the deployment of weapons in space and ABM systems. The 1972 ABM Treaty, as amended by a 1974 Protocol, allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to deploy one static ABM system with up to one hundred launchers in defense either of either an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo field or the national capital."
"The Foreign Office of the Ministry of Defense always sought to urge the narrowest possible interpretation, which the Americans --rightly in my view-- believed would have meant that SDI was stillborn. I always tried to steer away from this phraseology and made it clear in private and public that research on whether a system was viable could not be said to have been completed until it had been successfully tested. Underneath the jargon, this apparently technical point was really a matter of straight common sense. But it was to become the issue dividing the United States and the USSR at the Reykjavik summit and so assumed great importance.
"The third element in the calculation was the relative strength of the two sides in Ballistic Missile Defense. Only the Soviet Union possessed a working ABM system (known as GALOSH) around Moscow, which they were currently up-grading. The Americans had never had an equivalent system".
"Also the Soviets were further advanced in anti-satellite weapons. There was, therefore, a strong argument that the Soviets had already acquired an unacceptable advantage in this whole area.
"The fourth element was the implications of SDI for deterrence. I started off with a good deal of sympathy for the thinking behind the ABM Treaty. This was the most sophisticated and effective the defense against nuclear missiles, the greater the pressure to seek hugely expensive advances in nuclear weapons technology. I was always a believer in a slightly qualified version of the doctrine known as MAD- 'mutually assured destruction'. The threat of (what I preferred to call) 'unacceptable destruction' which would follow from a nuclear exchange was such that nuclear weapons were an effective deterrent against not just nuclear but also conventional war."
"But I soon began to see that SDI would strengthen not weaken the nuclear deterrent. Unlike President Reagan and some other members of his Administration I never believed that SDI could offer one hundred percent protection, but it would allow sufficient United States missiles to survive a first strike by the Soviets."
"It was the subject of SDI which dominated my talks with President Reagan and members of his Administration when I went to Camp David on Saturday 22 December 1984 to brief the Americans on my earlier talks with Mr. Gorbachev. This was the first occasion on which I had heard President Reagan speaking about SDI. He did so with passion. He was at his most idealistic. He stressed that SDI would be a defensive system and that it was not his intention to obtain for the United States a unilateral advantage. Indeed, he said that if SDI succeeded he would be ready to internationalize it so that it was at the service of all countries, and that he told Mr. Gromyko as much. He reaffirmed his long-term goal of getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely.
"These remarks made me nervous. I was horrified to think that the United States would be prepared to throw away a hard-won lead in technology by making it internationally available."
"What I heard, now that we got down to discussion of the likely reality rather than the grand vision, was reassuring. President Reagan did not pretend that they yet knew where the research could finally lead. But he emphasized that --in addition to his earlier arguments in favor of SDI-- keeping up with the United States would impose an economic strain on the Soviet Union. He argued that there had to be a practical limit as to how far the Soviet Union could push their people down the road of austerity."
"I now jotted down, while talking to National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, the four points which seemed to me to be crucial.
"My officials then filled in the details. The President and I agreed a text which set out the policy.
"The main section of my statement reads:
"I told the President of my firm conviction that the SDI research programme should go ahead. Research is, of course, permitted under existing US Soviet treaties; and we, of course, know that the Russians already have their research programme and, in the US view, have already gone beyond research. We agreed on four points: (1) the US, and western, aim was not to achieve superiority, but to maintain balance, taking account of Soviet developments; (2) SDI-related deployment would, in view of treaty obligations, have to be a matter for negotiation; (3) the overall aim is to enhance, not undercut, deterrence; (4) East-West negotiation should aim to achieve security with reduced levels of offensive systems on both sides. This will be the purpose of the resumed US-Soviet negotiations on arms control, which warmly welcome.
"I subsequently learnt that George Schultz thought that I had secured too great a concession on the American's part in the wording; but in fact it gave them and us a clear and defensible line and helped reassure the European members of NATO. A good day's work."
Later on, under the subtitle of "Visit to Washington: February 1985", Margaret Thatcher states:
"I again visited Washington in February 1985. Arms talks between the Americans and the Soviet Union had now resumed, but SDI remained a source of contention. I was to address a joint meeting of Congress on the morning of Wednesday 20 February and I brought with me from London as a gift a bronze statue of Winston Churchill, who had also many years before been honoured with such an invitation. I worked especially hard on this speech. I would use the Autocue for its delivery. I knew that Congress would have seen the 'Great Communicator' himself delivering faultless speeches and I would have a discriminating audience. So I resolved to practise speaking the text until I had got every intonation and emphasis right. (Speaking to Autocue, I should add, is a totally different technique to speaking from notes.) In fact, I borrowed President Reagan's own Autocue and had it brought back to the British Embassy where I was staying. Harvey Thomas, who accompanied me, fixed it up and, ignoring any jetlag, I practised until 4 a.m. I did not go to bed, beginning the new working day with my usual black coffee and vitamin pills, then gave television interviews from 6:45 a.m., had my hair done and was ready at 10:30 to leave from the Capitol. I used my speech, which ranged widely over international issues, to give strong support for SDI. I had a terrific reception."
"The following month (March 1985) saw the death of Mr. Chernenko and, with remarkably little delay, the succession of Mr. Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership. Once again I attended a Moscow funeral: the weather was, if anything, even colder than at Yuri Andropov's. Mr. Gorbachev had a large number of foreign dignitaries to see. But I had almost an hour's talk with him that evening in St. Katherine's Hall in the Kremlin. The atmosphere was more formal than at Chequers (the official country residence of British prime ministers since 1921) and the silent, sardonic presence of Mr. Gromyko did not help. But I was able to explain them the implications of the policy I had agreed with President Reagan the previously December at Camp David. It was clear that SDI was now the main preoccupation of the Soviets in arms control."
"Mr. Gorbachev brought, as we had expected, a new style to the Soviet Government. He spoke openly of the terrible state of the Soviet economy, though at this stage he was still relying on the methods associated with Mr. Andropov's drive for greater efficiency rather than radical reform. An example of this was the draconian measures he took against alcoholism. As the year wore on, however, there was no evidence of improvement in conditions in the Soviet Union. Indeed, as our new -and first class- ambassador to Moscow, Brian Cartledge, who had been my foreign affairs private secretary when I first became Prime Minister, pointed out in one of his first dispatches, it was a matter of, 'jam tomorrow and, meanwhile, no vodka today'."
"A distinct chill entered into Britain's relations with the Soviet Union as a result of expulsions authorized of Soviet officials who had been spying."
"In November President Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev had their first meeting in Geneva. Not much of substance came out of it --the Soviets insisted on linking cuts in strategic nuclear weapons to an end to SDI research-- but a good personal rapport quickly developed between the two leaders. But he was not, which I found not at all surprising. For Ronald Reagan had had plenty of practice in his early years as President of the Screen Actors Guild in dealing with hard-headed trade union negotiation, and no one was more hard-headed than Mr. Gorbachev."
"During 1986 Mr. Gorbachev showed great subtlety in playing on western public opinion by bringing forward tempting, but unacceptable, proposals on arms control. Relatively little was said by the Soviets on the link between SDI and cuts in nuclear weapons. But they were given no reasons to believe that the Americans were prepared to suspend or stop SDI research. Late in the year it was agreed that President Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev- with their Foreign Ministers- should meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to discuss substantive proposals."
"It was that you could not ultimately hold back research on SDI any more than you could prevent research into new kinds of offensive weapons. We had to be the first to get it. Science is unstoppable; it will not be stopped for being ignored. "
"In retrospect, the Reykjavik summit on that weekend of 11 and 12 October (1986) can be seen to have a quite different significance than most of the commentators at the time realized. A trap had been prepared for the Americans. Ever greater Soviet concessions were made during the summit: they agreed for the first time that the British and French deterrents should be excluded from the INF negotiations; an that cuts in strategic nuclear weapons should leave each side with equal numbers- rather than a straight percentage cut, which would have led the Soviets well ahead. They also made significant concessions on INF numbers. As the summit drew to an end President Reagan was proposing an agreement by which the whole arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons- bombers, long-range Cruise and ballistic missiles- would be halved within five years and the most powerful of these weapons, strategic ballistic missiles, eliminated altogether within ten. Mr. Gorbachev was even more ambitious: he wanted the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons by the end of the ten-year period."
"But then suddenly, at the very end, the trap was sprung. President Reagan had conceded that during the ten-year period both sides would agree not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, though development and testing compatible with the Treaty would be allowed."
But Reagan suffered a strange amnesia about the triggering of the brutal military competition that had been forced on the USSR, with its extraordinary economic cost. His famous diary doesn't say one word about the Farewell Dossier. In his daily notes which were published this year, Ronald Reagan speaks of his sojourn in Montebello, Canada:
"Sunday, July 19 (1981)
"The hotel is a marvelous piece of engineering, totally made up of logs.
"Had a one on one with Chancellor Schmidt. He was really down and in a pessimistic mood about the world.
"Following --met with Pres. Miterrand-- explained our ec. program and that high interest rates were not of our doing.
"Dinner that night was just the 8 of us. The 7 heads of State and the Pres. (Thorn) of the European Community. It became a really free wheeling discussion of ec. issues, trade etc. due to a suggestion by P.M. Thatcher."
The final result of the great conspiracy against the Soviet Union and the crazy expensive arms race that was imposed, when it was mortally wounded in an economic sense is described in the introduction of the book by Thomas C. Reed, written by George H. W. Bush, the first President in the Bush Dynasty, who participated in a very real way in World War II. Literally, he writes:
"The Cold War was a struggle for the very soul of the mankind. It was a struggle for a way of life defined by freedom on one side and repression on the other. Already I think we have forgotten what a long and arduous struggle it was, and how close to nuclear disaster we came a number of times. The fact that it did not happen is a testimony to the honorable men and women, both sides who kept their cool and did what was right-as they saw it-in times of crisis."
"This conflict between the surviving superpowers of World War II began as I came home from that war. In 1948, the year of my graduation from Yale, the Soviets tried to cut off Western access to Berlin. That blockade led to the formation of NATO, was followed by the first Soviet A-bomb test, and turned bloody with the invasion of South Korea. Four decades of nuclear confrontation, proxy wars, and economic privation followed."
"I was privileged to be President of the United States when it all came to an end. In fall of 1989 the satellite states of Eastern Europe began to break free, and mostly peaceful revolution swept through Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. When the Berlin Wall fell, we knew the end was near."
"It took another two years to close down the empire of Lenin and Stalin. I received that good news in two telephone calls. The first came on December 8, 1991, when Boris Yeltsin called me from a hunting lodge near Brest, in Belarus. Only recently elected President of the Russian Republic, Yeltsin had been meeting with Leonid Kravchuk, President of Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushchevik, President of Belarus. "Today a very important event took place in our country," Yeltsin said. "I wanted to inform you myself before you learned about it from the press" Then he told me the news: The President of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine has decided to dissolve the Soviet Union.
"Two weeks later a second call confirmed that the former Soviet Union would disappear. Mikhail Gorbachev contacted me at Camp David on Christmas Morning of 1991. He wished Barbara and me a Merry Christmas, and then he went on to sum up what had happened in his country: the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. He had just been on national TV to confirm the fact, and he had transferred control of Soviet nuclear weapons to the President of Russia. 'You can have a very quiet Christmas evening,' he said. And so it was over."
It is recorded in an article published in The New York Times that the operation used almost all of the weapons within the CIA's reach --psychological warfare, sabotage, economic warfare, strategic deception, counterintelligence, cybernetic warfare-- all collaborating with the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the FBI. It destroyed the burgeoning Soviet espionage machinery, it damaged the economy and destabilized the State in that country. It was a complete success. If the opposite had happened (the Soviets doing it to the Americans), it would have been viewed as an act of terrorism.
There is another book which deals with this topic; it is called Legacy of Ashes and it has just been published. On the book's dust cover we can read that: Tim Weiner is a reporter for The New York Times. He has written on American intelligence for twenty years, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the secret national security programs. He has traveled to Afghanistan and other nations to investigate CIA covert operations firsthand. This is his third book.
Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50 thousand documents basically coming from the very archives of the CIA, and hundreds of interviews with veterans of that agency, including ten directors. He reveals to us a panorama of the CIA from the days of its creation after World War II, going through its battles during the Cold War and the war against terrorism begun on September 11, 2001.
The article by Jeremy Allison, published in Rebelión in June 2006, and the articles by Rosa Miriam Elizalde which were published this year on the September 3 and 10, denounce these events emphasizing the idea of one of the founders of free software who pointed out that: "as technologies grow more complex, it will be more difficult to detect actions of this kind".
Rosa Miriam published two straightforward opinion articles, each one only 5 pages in length. If she wants to, she could write a book with many pages. I remember her well from that day when, a young journalist, she nervously asked me, in the middle of a press conference 15 years ago no less, whether I thought we could survive the Special Period that had befallen us with the demise of the Socialist bloc.
The USSR collapsed with a crash. Since then we have graduated hundreds of thousands of young people from the higher levels of education. What better ideological weapon do we have than the higher level of conscience! We had it when we were a largely illiterate and semi-illiterate people. If you really want to see wild animals, then let instincts prevail in the human being. We could say a lot on this subject.
In the present day, the world is threatened by a devastating economic crisis. The United States government is using unimaginable economic means to defend a right that violates the sovereignty of all the other countries: to keep on buying raw materials, energy, advanced technology industries, the most productive lands and the most modern buildings on the face of our planet with paper money.
Fidel Castro Ruz |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 3:19 pm Post subject: |
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Conversations with Castro
Aged 81, the world's longest-serving leader is turning his thoughts to his legacy and the succession. In an exclusive extract from his autobiography, Fidel Castro talks to Ignacio Ramonet about vanity and cruelty - and reveals his salary and plans for retirement
Those who criticise the revolution blame you entirely - they talk about "Castro's Cuba".
Those people tend to personalise, to make me the representative, as though the people didn't exist. The millions of people who have struggled, who have defended the revolution; the hundreds of thousands of doctors, of professional people; those who farm, produce, study - those people don't exist. All that exists is this evil guy named Castro.
The number of times I have to sign autographs - you can't imagine. When I meet Americans who come here and talk to me ... sometimes there are 50 people at a meeting, they give me a bouquet of flowers or something, and the number of books, cards, things I have to sign, the number of pictures I have to let them take and so many flashbulbs that you can hardly see, it's hardly to be believed. So I guess I'm some kind of strange, unreal figure ...
A star?
Yes, somebody you have to get quick, so you can say, "Look, I got a picture with so-and-so."
But I'm very self-critical. When I say too much or something comes out of my mouth that might sound a little vain, I'm hard on myself, really hard. You have to keep a watch on yourself.
Throughout the years, influence, power, rather than gradually making me conceited, vain and all that ... every day, I think, I'm less conceited, less pretentious, less self-satisfied. It's a struggle against your instincts, you know. I believe that it's education, or sincere and tenacious self-education, that turns a small animal into a man.
How do you think history will judge you?
That's something it's not worth worrying about. Napoleon talked about la gloire - he was constantly concerned with glory. Well, in lots of countries today, the name Napoleon is known more for the cognac than for all the things done by the real general and emperor. So I say, why worry?
Have you ever thought about retiring?
We know that time passes and that human energies fade. But I'm going to tell you what I told our compañeros in the national assembly in 2003, when they elected me president of the council of state. I told them: "Now I see that my fate was not to come into the world and rest at the end of my life." And I promised them to be with them, if they wished, as long as necessary - so long as I knew myself to be useful. Not a minute less, or a second more.
Every year, I devote more time to the revolution, I think; I give it more of my attention, because one has more experience, one has meditated more, thought more. Plato said in The Republic that the ideal age for occupying ruling positions is after 55. In my opinion, according to him, that ideal age should be 60. And I imagine that 60 in Plato's day would be somewhere around 80 today ...
How is your health?
Well, I'm fine. Generally speaking, I feel fine; above all, I feel full of energy, I have great enthusiasm for things. I feel quite, quite well both physically and mentally. I'm sure the habit of exercise has contributed to that; in my opinion, physical exercise helps not just the muscles, it also helps the mind, because exercise has an effect on blood circulation, on the delivery of oxygen to all the cells, including the brain cells.
In 2005 the CIA announced that you have Parkinson's disease. What comment do you have about that?
It must be a confession of what they haven't been able to do for so long: assassinate me. If I were a vain man, I might even be filled with pride by the fact that those morons now say they'll have to wait until I die. Every day they invite some new story - Castro's got this, Castro's got that. The latest thing they've come up with is that I have Parkinson's. Well, it just doesn't matter if I get Parkinson's. Pope John Paul II had Parkinson's and he travelled all over the world for I don't know how many years.
If for some reason you should die, your brother Raul would be your undisputed successor?
If something happened to me tomorrow, the National Assembly would meet and elect him - there's not the slightest doubt. But he's catching up to me in years, so it's also a generational problem. We've been fortunate that we who made the revolution have brought up three generations. There have always been close ties with young people and students.
I have a great deal of hope, because I see clearly that these people I call the fourth generation are going to have three or four times the knowledge that we in the first generation had.
So you think the baton can be passed on without trouble?
Right now there wouldn't be any problem of any kind, and there won't be later, either. Because the revolution is not based on the cult of personality. It's inconceivable in modern society - people doing things just because they have blind faith in the leader. The revolution is based on principles. And the ideas that we defend have been, for quite some time, ideas shared by the entire nation.
You're a man who's admired, but others accuse you of being a cruel dictator ...
I don't understand why I'm called a dictator. What is a dictator? It's someone who makes arbitrary, unilateral decisions, who acts over and above institutions, over and above the laws, who is under no restraint but his own desires and whims. And in that case, Pope John Paul II, who always opposed war, could be accused of being a dictator, and President Bush considered the most democratic of rulers. That's the way the industrialised countries in Europe treat him, without realising that Bush can make terrible decisions without consulting the Senate or the House of Representatives, or even his cabinet. Not even the Roman emperors had the power of the president of the United States!
I don't make unilateral decisions. This isn't even a presidential government. We have a council of state, and my functions as leader exist within a collective. I have authority, of course, I have influence, for historical reasons, but I don't give orders or rule by decree.
What about the charge of cruelty?
I really think that a man who has devoted his entire life to fighting injustice, oppression of every kind, to serving others, to fighting for others, to preaching and practising solidarity, I think all of that is totally incompatible with cruelty.
All that propaganda is based on hate and on lies. How can people say that even one man has been tortured in Cuba? Or that I've ordered a man tortured? Here, no one has ever been imprisoned for being a dissident or because they see things differently from the way the revolution does. Our courts sentence people to prison on the basis of laws, and they judge counter-revolutionary acts. Down through history, in all times, actions by people who put themselves at the service of a foreign power against their own nation have always been seen as extremely serious.
The idea that in Cuba we send people to prison for having a belief that's different from the revolution's is ridiculous. Here, we punish acts, not ideas.
Do you agree that terrorism is the biggest threat to the world today?
Cuba condemned the crime committed on September 11 in no uncertain terms. And we have reiterated our condemnation of terrorism in all its shapes and forms. The US has cynically included Cuba among the countries sponsoring terrorism, but Cuba will never allow its territory to be used for terrorist actions against the people of the US or any other country.
I agree that terrorism is a serious threat to the world today, but I believe humanity is facing other threats of equal or greater seriousness: the accelerating destruction of the environment; the deepening of poverty; the lack of health care. To all of which one would have to add the hegemonic designs of the only superpower that aspires to become the ruler of the planet, and its arrogant policy of domination.
In 2005 you declared an "all-out war" on certain problems Cuba was facing - theft from the state, the misappropriation of funds.
That's right. We've invited the entire nation to take part in a great battle against any and all offences, whether petty theft or grand larceny. Because we have several tens of thousands of parasites that don't produce anything yet are getting rich. You should see how deep-rooted some of these vices are, how much pilfering was going on, how people were diverting resources, the way things were being stolen.
Don't you think Cuba's one-party structure is ill-adapted to an increasingly complex society?
In many countries, the classical, traditional electoral system with multiple parties becomes a popularity contest and not, really, a competency contest. People wind up electing the most likable person, the person who communicates best with the masses, even the person who has the most pleasant appearance, the best advertising on television, or in the press or on radio. Or, in the end, and this is practically a rule, the person who has the most money to spend on advertising.
Is there corruption among the Cuban leadership?
It's happened with some officials who were negotiating with powerful foreign businesses, and we've had to take measures. But it's not easy to fix.
As for me, I honestly don't own a thing. I have a few pesos, because after you've paid the amounts that have been in place since the first year of the revolution for each service, which are pretty reasonable, you may have some left over. I'm paid the same salary I always was, and out of that I have to pay the Party dues, so much per cent for housing, you pay that every month ... I lack for nothing, materially speaking. I have what I need. But I don't need much.
My salary, at the exchange rate of 25 pesos per dollar, is $30 a month. But I've been put on that list of the world's richest people twice now. I have no idea why they do it, what they're trying to achieve; it's ridiculous. I don't have a cent of my own.
And I'll have the glory of dying without a penny of convertible currency. I've been offered millions to write memoirs and books, but I've never done it.
Castro on ...
Cigars
It was my own father who gave me my first cigar; I must have been 14 or 15. And I remember that I smoked that first puro, and I didn't know how it was done. Fortunately, I didn't inhale the smoke. Although you always absorb a little of the nicotine, even if you don't inhale at all. I've smoked too much in my life. Until one day, over 20 years ago, I decided to stop. Nobody made me. I just decided to make myself stop smoking. I believed that giving up that habit was a necessary sacrifice, for the good of the country's and the people's health.
Listening to people talk so much about the necessity of a collective fight against obesity, the sedentary lifestyle, smoking, I became convinced that the ultimate sacrifice I should make on behalf of public health in Cuba was to quit smoking.
Teach by example. I gave up tobacco, and I've never missed it.
Tony Blair
I saw Blair one time, in Geneva at a meeting of the World Health Organisation.
He had a swagger, he was haughty, as though he were looking down his nose at people. We had a few words - brief but sharp. He had been talking about child labour and I said to him, "Listen, I saw that you were talking about child labour throughout the world, but I understand that in England there are 2 million children who are working."
I said it very calmly. I think he thought it was a piece of insolence from a nobody, a nit, a third-world know-nothing.
Wearing uniform
More than anything, I wear it for practical reasons, because with the uniform I don't have to put on a tie every day ... It avoids the problem of what suit to wear, what shirt, what socks, so everything goes together. I only put on a suit for very special circumstances, some international conference, or when the Pope came, or a meeting with some head of state.
My usual uniform is very simple. I also have another, more formal uniform that I wear for some occasions, with a shirt and tie.
Carrying a gun
Since those people in the CIA are always thinking things up - assassination attempts and so on - you can imagine that I carry a weapon, and a weapon ready to be used. I have a 15-shot Browning. I've shot a lot in my life. I've always been a good shot - it was just luck - and I still am.
The Third Way
I read Anthony Giddens' book, which contains the theory out of which arose the so-called "Third Way". There's nothing of a third way in it - it's the "way" taken by every turncoat in this world. Oh, I could see that it was aimed against the social-security state achieved by the Europeans: fewer resources for the retired, less aid to the unemployed, because [aid] turns [the unemployed] into a bunch of lazy bums - according to this theory - who then won't work, you have to force them in some way. Well, I admit that you have to educate people, but you don't have to force them.
The assassination of JFK
It's all very strange. With the expertise I acquired in sharpshooting, I can't imagine that with a rifle with a telescopic sight such as Lee Harvey Oswald had, you can fire, load and fire again in a matter of seconds. Because when you shoot with a telescopic sight, if the weapon moves a fraction of an inch you lose your target. Firing three times in a row, so accurately, for somebody who almost certainly didn't have much experience - that's very difficult. What the official version says is quite simply not possible - not just like that, bang bang bang.
The other thing that is just incomprehensible to me is that once Oswald was a prisoner, this charitable, noble soul, Jack Ruby, was so consumed with grief that right there in front of the police and the TV cameras he killed Oswald. I don't know if anything like that has ever happened anywhere else.
Mao
I'd like to have met Mao. That wasn't possible because of all those problems and differences that came up because of Sino-Soviet conflict. Among the great political strategists, great military leaders of any era, one would have to include Mao Zedong. I can't forget the posthumous letter from Mao asking China and the USSR to put their rivalries aside and join forces.
This is an edited extract from My Life by Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, published by Allen Lane on November 1 at £25. © Ignacio Ramonet and Random House Mondadori, 2006, 2007. Translation © Andrew Hurley 2007. To order a copy for £23 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875 |
when i was looking for a pic of fidel for this, i checked amazon for the book cover with nelson mandela and castro - the american amazon doesn't show the cover but the english amazon does ... i guess you have to hide from the american people that mandela on leaving prison went first to cuba to meet castro - i mean, what would that nice mandela be doing with that evil casto  
Long live the Cuban Revolution. Long live comrade Fidel Castro... Cuban internationalists have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious imperialist campaign designed to destroy the advances of the Cuban revolution. We too want to control our destiny... There can be no surrender. It is a case of freedom or death. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people. |
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