We do not have elections. But the great majority of the Cuban people supports its government.
I understand that the American people has a right and especially the press, which is not very friendly to us, to make all suppositions and ideas about this fact [suicide by Augusto Martinez] - this disgraced fact.
The fact of the attempted suicide by Augusto Martinez was explained in a concise and exact form by our government in a communique. There is absolutely nothing else to add.
We have denounced in all assemblies, in all places where we have had the opportunity to speak, the illegality of flights and the fact that there is a base against the will of the Cuban people.
We know the power of the U.S.. We do not fool ourselves about this power. We say that the U.S. government wants us to pay a very high price for this unstable peace we enjoy today. And the price we are in a position to pay is only - comes only to the frontiers of dignity, not beyond.
If we had to kneel in order to live in peace, [ U.S. government] will have to kill us before.
We have to dedicate our efforts to better the life, the time passed by the worker in the industrial plant. That will be one of our main efforts during the next year.
We have taken plants from the capitalist system where the most important thing was to produce, especially in Cuba.
I do not imply that in the U.S plants, industrial plants, are places of exploitation where man is oppressed. 1 know that there are a great number of advantages here for too American worker.
I am being bombed by questions of all kinds. I will try to be very concise and try to explain to the American people. We had a great number of mistakes in the economic fleld, naturally. I am not the critic. It is Fidel Castro, the one who has criticized repeatedly the mistakes we have made, and he explained why we have made them. We did not have a previous preparation. We made mistakes in agriculture. We made mistakes in industry. All these mistakes are being settled now.
In industry, we are now concentrating our best effort in trying to make plants work at a maximum capacity, trying to replace the equipment which is in bad conditions due to lack of spare parts from the U.S.., that we cannot get from the U.S.; to extend our industry later on the basis of our primary resources. And to lessen our dependence on external markets and dedicate our efforts in 1965 to the aspect of security and hygiene of work, to make our plants better for the worker: that the worker may feel really a man there.
With a military American base in our territory, where there could be any sort of weapons, where we have to endure every kind of provocations, we have to support and endure the flights over our territory.
The problem of peaceful transition to socialism, we do not discuss it as a theoretical question. But in America it is very difficult, and it is nearly impossible. That is why specifically in America we say that the road to the liberation of peoples, which will be the road of socialism will go through bullets in almost all countries.
We feel that there is a necessity to strengthen unity and that it will be strengthened and the bloc, the monolithic bloc of socialist countries will be formed again.
I am not the representative of guerrilla in this hemisphere. I would say that the representative would be Fidel Castro which was the leader of our revolution and who had the most outstanding role in the direction of the revolutionary struggle and directs the strategy of the Cuban government.
Always we argue that unity is necessity because disunity goes in favor of the U.S. , which are our enemy, and everything that goes in favor of the enemy must be eliminated. That is why we are in favor of unity.
Our attitude is very clear. In effect there is the conflict, ideological conflict which we all know. We have stated our position in the sense of unity among socialist states - unity as a first measure.
We have a lot of friends, but not among the governments - the friends are in the peoples. And in the last instance the peoples will be the rulers of those states.
If you ask me the image of Latin America, there are sorne countries which oppress their peoples much more, and among the less - least oppressive, among those with which we could have perfectly normal relations without any difficulties - we could have Uruguay, Chile, maybe Costa Rica. But the U.S.. do not permit us.
What we consider is that the Venezuelan government is not a leftist government, has nothing of a leftist government. It is an oppressor, an oppressive government, it is a murderer - he murders them - the peasant fights in the region of Falcon, for example, where there are military advisers of the U.S.
There is one government with which we keep diplomatic relations, the government of Mexico, with which we have good relations. Our systems are different. We respect their system.
We are not the ones who create revolutions. It is the imperialist system and its allies, internal allies, the ones who create revolution.
Revolutions are not exportable: revolutions are created by oppressive conditions which Latin American countries exercise against their peoples.
Let's liquidate all the atomic bases in Cuba and in the U.S. and we are in complete agreement with that.
We put no condition of any kind to the U.S., we don't want it to change its system, we don't want racial discrimination to cease in the U.S., we put no conditions to the establishment of relations.
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