Nobel Peace Laureate

I shall talk very little about the Cuban people, who once rid their homeland of U.S. domination at a time when the imperialist system was at the height of its powers.

Men and women of all ages have taken to the streets in May Day marches in the most emblematic plazas of every province in the country.

Our revolution came about in the place where the empire least expected it, in a hemisphere where it used to behave with absolute impunity.

Cuba went from being the last country to free itself from the yoke of Spanish colonialism to the first to shake off the loathsome tutelage of imperialists.

Today, I am thinking mainly about our sister republic, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and its heroic struggle against the ruthless plundering of natural resources bestowed on this noble and unselfish people, which once sent its soldiers to the farthest corners of this continent in order to bring Spanish military might to its knees.

Cuba has no need to explain why we have shown solidarity with many countries in Africa and other world regions, as well as with countries in this hemisphere.

The Bolivarian Revolution has likewise shown solidarity with our homeland, and its support for our country was of great significance during the years of the Special Period.* That cooperation, however, was not solicited, nor did Cuba set any conditions on the educational and medical aid we provided to other countries that were in need of them. Whatever the circumstances, we would have offered Venezuela as much aid as we were able.

Cuban revolutionaries have always considered cooperation with other impoverished and exploited peoples a political principle and a duty to humanity.

It gives me enormous satisfaction to witness, as I did yesterday on Venezuelan State Television and TeleSur,** the profound impact that the Labor Law, enacted by Bolivarian leader and President of the Republic, Hugo Chavez Frias, has had on our brothers and sisters in Venezuela. I have never seen anything like it in the political landscape of our hemisphere.

I watched the enormous crowds assembled in the plazas and streets of Caracas, and I paid particular attention to the spontaneous comments made by the citizens interviewed. I have rarely, perhaps never, seen such emotion and hope as in these people’s statements. It was clear that the vast majority of the population is made up of ordinary working people. A real battle of ideas is being vigorously fought.

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, bravely declared that, rather than an era of change, we are living through a change of eras. Both Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez are Christians. But what is Obama, what does he believe in?

On the first anniversary of bin Laden’s assassination, Obama is competing with rival Mitt Romney in an attempt to justify that act, perpetrated in a compound close to the Military Academy in Pakistan, a Muslim country and U.S. ally.

Marx and Engels never spoke of murdering the bourgeoisie. In the old bourgeois notion of justice, judges passed judgment and executioners carried out the executions.

Certainly Obama was at one time a Christian; his skill as a pulpit-style orator was learned in the Christian church and served him well in his meteoric rise through the ranks of his party.

Philadelphia’s Declaration of Independence in July 1776 stated that all men were born free and equal and that their creator had endowed them all with certain rights. But we know that, three quarters of a century after independence, black slaves were still being sold in the marketplaces with their women and children, and that, nearly two centuries later, Nobel Peace laureate Martin Luther King had a dream, but was assassinated.

The Oslo Committee awarded Obama his Nobel Prize and he nearly become a legend. Yet, millions of people must have seen the footage. Nobel Peace laureate Barack Obama made a lightning visit to Afghanistan, as if the world knew nothing about the mass killings, the burning of books sacred to the Muslims and the outrages committed on the corpses of murdered people.

No honest person can ever support acts of terrorism, but does that give the President of the United States the right to pass judgment and to kill, to become both judge and executioner and perpetrate such crimes against a country and a people situated on the opposite side of the globe?

We watched the president of the United States, in his shirtsleeves, take the steep steps at a trot, waltz quickly and nimbly across the dais, then stop and foist a lengthy discourse on a large military contingent who reluctantly applauded their illustrious president’s words. Not all those men were born U.S. citizens. I thought about the colossal expenditure involved and that the world is paying for it – just who is footing the bill for this huge outlay now in excess of $15 trillion? That is what the illustrious Nobel Peace laureate is offering to humanity.

*Translator’s note: the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 had a crippling effect on the Cuban economy and ushered in the so-called Special Period, a time of economic crisis that lasted through the decade and was relieved to some extent by cooperation with Venezuela after the election of socialist President Chavez in 1998.

**Translator’s note: this is an alternative television network sponsored by seven Latin American governments, among them Venezuela and Cuba.