BY FIDEL CASTRO
Below are excerpts of the speech given by Cuban president Fidel Castro at the Seventh Ibero-American Summit November 7-9 in Margarita, Venezuela. Translation is by the Militant.

At the first summit, Mexico invited Cuba. Apparently it was already time for an end to arbitrary and outrageous exclusions of a small country that has defended its right to exist with great dignity and through a solitary and heroic struggle...

We have never renounced our political, economic, and social system, a true democracy with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and not of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. In these times of so many inequalities and injustices, we have struggled more than anyone to defend the most sacred rights of every human being.

Let it be said by our children, who have the lowest mortality rates in the entire Third World; by our fully literate population; by the millions of mothers who have given birth with fewer deaths than in any other country in Latin America; or our elderly, who live more than 75 years [on the average], just to cite a few examples. Let it be said by our extraordinary people, who for almost 40 years have resisted the longest and most criminal economic blockade ever...

Let others yield to lies and deceit, to the illusions and the interests of the powerful of this world. We shall continue to defend the ideas for which we have struggled all our lives alongside the poor; the ill who lack doctors and medicine; the parents without work, the hundreds of millions of boys and girls abandoned to their fate or are forced to work or to prostitute themselves in order to live, the hungry, the oppressed and exploited of the whole world, who constitute the immense majority of humanity.

A total change of course - even if few statesmen understand this today - is the most moral, democratic, and revolutionary action that must take place in the world today. If there is a desire to discuss this subject, let it be discussed, and let each one, according to their conscience, confront the irrefutable figures and concrete facts that demonstrate the accelerating growth of universal and unsustainable financial speculation; the increasing vulnerability of the economy; the destruction of the environment; the uncertain future and bottomless abyss to which they are leading us; the blind and uncontrollable neoliberalism and crushing and brutal globalism that exists under the aegis of the most powerful and selfish power in history. It is not necessary to wait for currencies to lose their value and stock markets to crash.

Thank you.  
 
 
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