DRAFT VERSION
THE PARTY OF UNITY, DEMOCRACY AND THE HUMANRIGHTS WE DEFEND

Compatriots:

We are moving toward a new Party Congress, an encounter of all the Cuban people.
In moments as decisive as these, José Martí noted, "...the Party exists, confident that it is in the right, as the visible soul of Cuba."
Martí founded the only party of the patriots of his time, the Cuban Revolutionary Party, in order to achieve Cuba's independence and contribute to the independence of Puerto Rico, to carry out the necessary war against colonial rule, to put an end to the United States' appetite and to create a republic "with all and for the good of all" which would achieve "total justice."
Seven decades later, in the glorious days of the Bay of Pigs invasion, that party's legitimate heir, the Communist Party of Cuba, also confident that it was in the right, emerged.
For Cubans, an independent country, genuine democracy and socialism are permanently linked. Our Party continues the work of Martí's party and resolutely holds high the banners which our forebears passed on to us and for which so many heroes and martyrs have shed their blood.
"Today the Party is the soul of the Revolution," Fidel Castro, its founder and leader, has said.

I. THE CUBAN REVOLUTION IS A SINGLE HISTORICAL EVENT

The Cuban Revolution which began in La Demajagua on October 10, 1868, has continued on as a single historical event until the present day. Within it, the ideals of national independence, social justice and brotherhood and sisterhood are inseparable.
The initiators of our Revolution freed their slaves and fought against a colonial regime based on slavery and a cruel social stratification. From 1868 on, men and women from the poorest strata of society participated in the independence effort. They made up the great mass of fighters and many achieved high military ranks and important leadership positions in the war.
The people shared risks and sacrifices and assumed the leading role in forging their destiny. On the battlefield and in exile, in the classroom and the workshop, they strove for the unity which is indispensable and projected the image of the nation they desired. Guáimaro and Baraguá, Jimaguayú and La Yaya were signposts in this singular process, in the midst of the fiercest battle against Spain.
Diverse factors explain the social radicalization of our struggles for independence, initiated more than half a century after those of the rest of Latin America. In our case, we not only had to tear off the yoke of colonialism, but also confront the United States' expansionist designs. It was also indispensable to defeat a local oligarchy which united with the colonialists or favored annexation.
Cuba was, and still is, one of the pieces of territory most desired by the U.S. ruling class. One of the first presidents of the then nascent empire, Thomas Jefferson, expressed with total clarity at the beginning of the last century his interest in possessing the island.
In 1820, during the presidency of James Monroe, the United States proclaimed the theory that once Cuba was separated from Spain, it would fall into the hands of its neighbor to the North like a ripe apple.
The presidents who followed, up until the military intervention of 1898, reaffirmed that policy. Pressures were applied, offers were made to buy the island and local annexationist elements were utilized.
The U.S. government opposed the proposal to expel Spain from Cuba which Simón Bolívar took to the Panama Congress in 1826, and it managed to have the proposal annulled. It also warned Mexico and Colombia, in no uncertain terms, not to carry out any kind of expedition against colonial rule on the island.
In the mid-19th century, with the goal of achieving their annexationist proposals, the U.S. slaveholding interests financed two armed expeditions headed by Narciso López. Nevertheless, from that time on the United States invariably opposed the expeditions organized by exiled patriots to free Cuba.
The immediate enemy to be overcome was the Spanish metropolis. But the enemy that was most dangerous for our nation was the United States.
Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was able to discover during the initial stage of the War of Independence that "taking over Cuba" was "the secret" of U.S. policy.
Martí appreciated the full dimension of that threat, denounced it, organized patriots to oppose it and offered up his exemplary life in that struggle. In his political testament, shortly before his death in battle, he warned:
"I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty, for I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out - the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our lands of America. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose."
The war of 1895 was leading inexorably toward the end of Spanish colonialism. The westward march led by Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, an extraordinary military feat, extended the war to the whole country and with the campaigns carried out in western and central Cuba, the army of the Spanish crown, demoralized and bankrupt, was dealt a key blow.
In 1898 the suspicious and never clarified explosion of the Maine took place in Havana Bay, and this was the pretext which opened the doors for Washington's military invasion of the colony which Spain had virtually lost.
After the United States declared war against Spain - a war which Lenin called the first imperialist war in modern history - it blockaded and harassed Cuban ports and coasts for three months, aggravating the hardships being suffered by the population since the internment carried out by Valeriano Weyler.
Later the United States focused its efforts on what turned out to be its fundamental actions: the destruction of Admiral Cervera's squadron, anchored in Santiago de Cuba Bay; and the occupation of the city, which was already under siege by the Liberation Army and whose liberation was only a matter of time.
The U.S. occupation, following the surrender of the Spanish troops quartered there, did not permit the troops commanded by Calixto García to enter the city, despite the fact that García's contribution had been decisive in the landing of the U.S. troops and the fighting in Santiago de Cuba.
The United States snatched away from Cuba the independence for which hundreds of thousands of its sons and daughters had been fighting for three decades, machete in hand, after they had spilled rivers of blood and entire families had made enormous sacrifices.
Our nation was the object of the most spurious transaction and was excluded from the arrangements that put an end to the war it had won. Behind its back, the United States and Spain negotiated and conciliated their interests, reflected in the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty.
With Martí and Maceo dead, the dissolution of the Cuban Revolutionary Party by Estrada Palma facilitated the United States' efforts to divide the people. During the first military occupation (1899-1902), the United States achieved the demobilization of the Liberation Army - that is, they completed the political and military disarmament of the independence movement, which made it possible to implant a neocolonial model on the island.
The behavior of the occupiers, from the time of their arrival, followed the most treacherous strategy against Cuba.
More than two months had passed since the end of the fighting and Máximo Gómez described the situation in his diary as follows: "Here there is a whole people hungry and naked. Moreover, the situation is distressing. According to the pact between Spain and the United States, the evacuation of the island by the Spaniards will be carried out slowly and comfortably, and then the Americans will occupy it. Meanwhile, we Cubans have been faced with desolation and have been rewarded for our services and our bloody sacrifice with hunger and nakedness, which would have been more bearable in wartime than in this peace, in which we are not permitted to show off our well-earned laurels."
Our liberation fighters' heroic feat was painfully sealed in 1899, when they turned over their weapons to the foreign occupier in exchange for 75 pesos per fighter.
In a Cuban newspaper of the time, La Discusión, the following opinion appeared:
"To demand that the Cuban soldier, amidst foreign bayonets, turn over his weapons and equipment in exchange for a handful of coins is a humiliation which no one has the right to impose...much less the power which claims to be an ally and expects us to still consider it a friend of the Cuban people."
The Volunteer Corps that had served the Spanish colonial army was not disarmed and the properties of the colonialists and their accomplices were protected by the invader.
The United States, which already had important interests on the island, took advantage of the military occupation in order to totally monopolize sugar exports and control 90 percent of the tobacco exports. Illegally and free of charge, it obtained concessions to all the mineral resources in the country that were known at that time. It acquired large extensions of land by buying it up at ridiculously low prices and by evicting tens of thousands of campesinos, many of them soldiers and officers of the Liberation Army, from their land. It laid the foundation for the growing penetration in public services, production and finances, until it achieved complete control of the neocolony's economy.
Furthermore, through blackmail it imposed the Platt Amendment, which granted the United States the brutal right to intervene in Cuba whenever it chose and to establish the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo.
At the same time, during the military occupation it promoted fraudulent elections in which barely seven percent of the population participated and installed at the head of that fiction of an independent republic a pro-U.S. government, composed of members of the sugar oligarchy, politicians who had collaborated with the Spanish colonialists and the U.S. intervention, and a few renegades who betrayed the cause of liberation.
A long period followed in which the people continued to be alienated from political power, deprived of the most elemental human rights. Discrimination against blacks and women was an integral part of the system, along with oppression, exploitation, poverty, hunger, unemployment, illiteracy, the business of prostitution and gambling.
None of the oligarchic governments did anything truly substantial which benefited the people. Everything was limited to the well-known demagogic promises during electoral campaigns. The political exercise served to reinforce the yoke of foreign domination and facilitate corruption on the part of government officials.
There was only one possibility and one remote hope: to continue the revolution of Céspedes and Martí and bring it to its culmination. The 19th-century ideals of independence and justice were enriched throughout the period of the neocolonial republic with the ideas of other great revolutionaries of the world. Among the men and women with the most advanced thinking, patriotic awareness became synonymous with the most radical anti-imperialism and the need to change the social system from the ground up.
Throughout the present century, successive generations were able to reproduce the heroism and sacrifice of the liberation fighters. Their faith in victory has been based, as Ignacio Agramonte expressed it, on the honor of Cubans.
We finally achieved "the country of brotherhood and justice" that Martí envisioned.
On January 1, 1959, what happened at the end of the last century did not happen again: this time the liberation fighters did enter Santiago de Cuba. At last we Cubans became masters of our nation's destiny. That was the beginning of the difficult bilateral confrontation with Washington, which is still maintained today.
The confrontation began the same day that the Batista dictatorship fell. Its most notorious murderers, torturers and embezzlers found safe refuge in U.S. territory and aid from its government.
At the same time, they spread distortions and lies about the trials before the Cuban courts of those of Batista's henchmen who were unable to escape, having been guilty of the most brutal violations of human rights. Thus the White House's support for the Batista dictatorship continued.
From that time on, there were slander campaigns aimed at creating a false image of our reality. The United States has not stopped carrying out such campaigns and increasing their number, as demonstrated by the radio war comprising some 1500 weekly hours broadcast on the average against our country.
Washington's invariable policy has been to reconquer Cuba by any means or method, without respecting any ethical principle and with absolute contempt for our national sovereignty.
The highest levels of the U.S. government promoted the dirty war against our country shortly after we achieved our definitive freedom. The president of the United States himself had to admit publicly his responsibility for the aggression at the Bay of Pigs. The CIA has been involved in the preparation of numerous assassination attempts on the Revolution's leaders, air incursions and naval piracy, actions by bands and terrorist groups. Furthermore, biological warfare has been employed against Cuba, the most recent example being the appearance of a new blight which seriously damages numerous crops.
In May 1959, the Agrarian Reform unleashed the United States' fury against Cuba. By the next year, the essential elements of the United States' blockade policy had already been clearly elucidated, while preparations for military aggression were being put into effect. In February 1962, the White House completely suspended trade and pressured other countries to do the same, while intensifying its campaign for Cuba's diplomatic isolation in the western hemisphere.
Far from receding in the face of U.S. escalation, the Revolution continued its transformations aimed at recovering the national riches and moving toward greater social justice. Nationalization laws were issued in an exercise of national sovereignty, in line with international law and the unanimous support of our people.
Our people's resoluteness and unity came to the fore during the Missile Crisis, in the face of the United States' nuclear threat.
Thanks to the fair economic exchange with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, and thanks to their solidarity, we managed to significantly diminish the growing effects of the blockade and to prevent the United States from concretizing its plan to paralyze the national economy and submit our people to starvation.
Starting in 1989, events began which ended with the collapse of socialism in Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. All of a sudden, Cuba lost 85 percent of its purchasing power, and its gross domestic product was reduced drastically. In Washington, they thought the moment had come to strengthen the blockade in order to put an end to the Cuban Revolution, which they began to forecast as imminent.
In October 1992, the Torricelli Act, characterized by "Track One and Track Two," was passed.
On one hand, it prohibits our transactions with subsidiaries of U.S. companies in third countries and bans ships docking in Cuba from touching any U.S. port for the next six months; and on the other hand, it utilizes more subtle methods, principally in the spheres related to ideology, with the intention of corrupting us from within and attracting elements which they classify as more "vulnerable," naïve and unaware.
In short, the strengthening of the blockade has been accompanied by a clear subversive intent which, together, embody the invariable strategic objective of destroying the Revolution.
The blockade is also the expression of hegemonic designs which the world rejects. Every year, by an ever increasing vote, the United Nations General Assembly demands that the blockade be halted.
We must understand that the danger of military aggression has not disappeared, although it appears that for the present time this variant has yielded space to others. The United States knows very well that an invasion of Cuba would signify the loss of many U.S. citizens' lives. Historical experience indicates that given the underhanded manner in which our enemy acts, we cannot let down our guard for an instant and we must maintain a solid defense. The very existence of the Cuban Revolution is unacceptable to them.
In the midst of innumerable difficulties, the country has managed in recent years to halt its economy's free-fall and has adopted the necessary measures for initiating its recovery and finding new markets and economic and trading partners.
Faced with the evident failure of its policy, the United States passed the Helms-Burton Act, which strengthens the blockade even more; establishes new punishments for those who invest in Cuba or trade with Cuba; and delineates, without the slightest shame, the steps which should be taken to transform Cuba into a colony belonging to Washington, including plans for internal subversion, plus financing and material support for the small counterrevolutionary groups.
This law lays bare the United States' true goals, since it attempts to dictate Cuba's future, even after having achieved what it will never achieve: the defeat of the Revolution.
It stipulates that the ironclad economic, commercial and financial blockade will remain in place until properties that now belong to the people, including lands, housing units, hospitals, workplaces and schools, are "returned" to the Batista supporters, exploiters, thieves, former U.S. owners and their heirs.
The document issued this past January by U.S. President William Clinton, in accordance with that law, shamelessly confirms those intentions and describes them in detail.
Cuba is now facing the greatest challenge of its history: the most powerful country in the world, its enemy for the last century, has converted its intention to liquidate the Cuban nation and enslave its people into official policy, and proclaims it openly.
This is not just an enormous challenge for Cubans today; it is above all a terrible threat for future generations. In that light, we have the unavoidable obligation to strengthen our unity and will to resist and multiply our efforts in every field.
Today it is clearer than ever that the Revolution, homeland and socialism are one and the same.
There will be no restoration of capitalism in Cuba because the Revolution will never be defeated. The country will continue intact and will continue to be socialist.

• What the Revolution has created

January 1, 1959, put an end to the flagrant, massive and systematic violations of human rights that characterized Batista's pro-U.S. regime and that are so common among the United States' satellite governments in Latin America.
After the triumph of the insurrection, there has not been among us a single political crime, one person tortured, one person disappeared. Workers and students were no longer repressed, campesinos were no longer exploited or evicted from their land.
The Revolution is proud of its record in the field of human rights. It gave Cubans a free, independent and democratic country in which the full dignity of man reigns.
We have achieved the right to life. Infant mortality went from over 60 per 1000 live births to less than eight at the present time, and life expectancy has risen by 20 years, to over 75. These are figures that put us in first place in the Third World and which are comparable to those in highly industrialized countries.
We achieved the right to education, going from a country with over 40 percent illiteracy to an average ninth-grade educational level, and to having the highest proportion of teachers per inhabitant, which is also the case for doctors.
World statistics are startling in regard to the number of children who have no home, school or medical care; who are forced to work long exhausting shifts, even under slavery conditions; who are sold, utilized in the business of prostitution and pornography, victims of the trade in human organs. None of these children is Cuban.
Cuba has made a maximum effort in defense of jobs and social security for workers. Not one Cuban has been abandoned in the last 38 years.
The Revolution destroyed the institutional bases of racism and all kinds of discrimination, and has worked untiringly for the active and full incorporation of all Cubans in the life of the country, without regard to skin color, gender or religious beliefs.
The Revolution opened the doors of equality, work and study for women. Before 1959, women barely made up 12 percent of the labor force, and many of them were in domestic service. Today, 42 percent of the country's labor force is female, as is 60 percent of the total number of intermediate-level technicians and university graduates.
In our country, in line with the Constitution, there is freedom for all religions. The 4th Party Congress approved membership in the Party for revolutionaries with religious beliefs.
The Revolution has particularly defended the rights of the elderly and the disabled.
Our achievements in health care and education, our feats in sports, the advances made in the arts and culture in general, our scientific development, all these are internationally recognized. Nevertheless, what we have achieved goes much further.
The Revolution humanized work in the ports and the sugar warehouses, in construction and other sectors. It created the merchant marine and a fishing fleet, and developed civil aviation.
Numerous nationally owned industries in very diverse branches of the economy were built up.
As for housing, one of the first measures taken by the Revolution was the law which cut rents in half. With the Urban Reform Law, rent payments were converted into payments toward the purchase of the housing unit, and for that reason the immense majority of the population now own their homes or are in the process of buying them. Eighty-five percent has already been amortized.
Rural life changed radically. A total of 250,000 campesinos received titles to the land they work individually or collectively, by their own choice.
Agricultural workers obtained stable work and were duly remunerated in state enterprises created on the large nationalized landholdings. Schools, doctors, electricity and other social benefits reached all parts of the country. The Revolution mechanized most of the cane cutting, rice harvesting and agricultural work.
Our country filled with highways and roads, as well as water works for productive purposes; mechanical milking, agricultural aviation and other technology which had been unknown in the rural sector were instituted. The forests were protected and the amount of forestland has grown considerably over the pre-revolutionary period. University branches were established in mountain areas.
All this was achieved even though U.S. hostility did not cease for one minute.
The set of transformations and what had been achieved up until the special period would have allowed for successful development of the food program elaborated as a result of the process of rectifying errors and negative tendencies. This does not deny the existence at that time of inefficiency, paternalism and other evils.
With the arrival of the special period, we changed our form of production. Agricultural workers were granted the land they worked in usufruct, so that they could organize cooperative production; plantations and means of production were turned over to them; and they were given payment facilities.
Over three million hectares were converted into basic units of cooperative production. Campesinos' and workers' cooperative production predominates in the agricultural sector, coexisting with state enterprises, cooperatives and private farming.
After three decades of a standard of living which, although relatively modest, was improving gradually and boasted indicators of welfare, equality and social order which are incomparable in the Third World, the people's daily life suddenly became very different. Today's difficult days arrived, dominated by material shortages, and an undesired social differentiation emerged, along with an increase in illegal activity, all of which damages our values.
In its report to the 5th Plenum of the Central Committee, the Political Bureau linked political and ideological work with the radically new situation of the special period.
"We have and we will have socialism," said the report approved by the Central Committee, "but the only socialism that is possible in Cuba now requires the increasing assimilation of factors which are difficult to handle such as monetary-mercantile relations and even some capitalist elements...."
Without renouncing its socialist path, Cuba must insert itself in the world economy, which is dominated by transnationals, characterized by unequal terms of trade, in international markets which are flooded with products and where competition is tougher and tougher.
The challenges this poses for any Third World country are multiplied in the case of Cuba, which is excluded from the institutions of the international financial system and subjected to a fierce economic war carried out by the United States. We lack long-term and medium-term loans and we must pay high interest rates for short-term commercial credits.
Our economic opening implies the creation of joint ventures and other forms of association with foreign capital, which the United States tries to block. Nonetheless, the principal effort is ours. We will have only what we are capable of creating. If we do a better job every day, we will advance further, no matter how long U.S. hostility lasts.
The list of problems is enormous. The limitations in food, clothing, footwear, cleaning supplies and medications; the power cuts and the shortage of cooking fuel; the serious difficulties in transportation, housing and community services, all these have put our people's heroic will to the test as they endure these hardships selflessly and stoically.
Every instance of negligence, waste, bureaucracy, tolerance of the theft of raw materials and goods favors the enemy's blockade and must be resolutely combated.
Permanent strategic objectives which are now decisive are: conservation of everything, lowering costs, achieving greater efficiency in production and services.
The concrete tasks are clear. We must continue the battle to produce enough food; achieve the best results in each sugar harvest and work at optimal levels in cane planting and cultivation; greatly increase the level of construction and better utilize tourism facilities; take the best possible advantage of energy sources, substituting imports and increasing exports; and move forward in the application of the tax policy and the improvement of internal finances.
Given this hard reality, our only alternative is the patriotic and revolutionary conduct of working harder and better.

II. THE PARTY OF UNITY

The first epic battle for liberation from the colonial yoke, the Ten Years' War, fundamentally failed because of a lack of unity among the independence fighters.
The House of Representatives, the government of the Republic in Arms and the Liberation Army were at odds with each other. Furthermore, a single command over all the territories in the campaign was never achieved.
Disunity was the principal cause of the capitulating Zanjón Pact, and of an undignified peace without independence or the abolition of slavery. By registering the Baraguá Protest, Maceo saved the Cubans' honor and dignity and, from that moment, that act became the paradigm of the nation's revolutionary commitment.
The same tragic fate, also the result of disunity, in which the racial factor and a lack of appropriate training were the prime causes, befell the Little War that broke out as a continuation of the War of Independence.
Martí, having interpreted the historical necessity for unity derived from those dramatic experiences, created and headed the Cuban Revolutionary Party. He carried out a mammoth task, directed at uniting the glorious veterans and the younger generation, and overcoming the diverse differences existing among patriots in order to successfully renew the necessary war.
For his part, Maceo had also reached the conclusion that a single independence party was urgently needed, and he was a consistent defender of unity.
In a letter to Martí in 1888, Maceo affirmed that unity among Cubans has been "my spiritual ideal and the objective of my efforts.... Without it, all our sacrifices will be in vain and our most daring undertakings will always drown in bloodshed."
Gómez accepted the Party's offer to act as general in chief of the war being prepared and, with Martí, signed the Montecristi Manifesto, the program of the Revolution that had broken out on February 24, 1895.
The most prestigious military leaders of the earlier battles adopted the same resolutely patriotic attitude.
In the proletarian milieu of the Cuban émigré community, within which Martí forged the Party's solid bases, the involvement of Marxist Carlos Baliño, leader of the Tampa and Key West cigar makers, was especially significant.
Only unity among revolutionaries can lead to the unity of the people. That requires a single party, then as now rooted among the workers.
Disunity among Cuban patriots made it possible for the United States to impose a neocolonial model in Cuba.
The neocolony was initially distinguished by the charade of a two-party system made up of the so-called Liberals and Conservatives. Over time, numerous political parties proliferated with similar characteristics and different in name only.
That multi-party system sought to divide the exploited and oppressed and create the illusion of democracy. The inevitable rivalries among politicians scrambling to plunder public funds also played their part, leading to a second U.S. military occupation in 1906.
The Platt Amendment syndrome and the threat of intervention by U.S. troops had a negative effect on patriotic awareness.
In the 1920s, fiery protests by students, intellectuals and workers broke out. The first national trade unions came into being, with figures like Alfredo López.
In 1925, a group of revolutionaries understood that the working class had to break the oligarchy's political monopoly and create its own party. Baliño and Julio Antonio Mella, the great student leader, were its founders.
The first Marxist-Leninist party devoted itself to spreading the ideas of scientific socialism, encouraging the creation of class-based trade unions and leading them in incessant struggle, as well as organizing the people in the battle for national and social liberation. That struggle forged incorruptible leaders such as Jesús Menéndez and Lázaro Peña.
None of the other parties in the neocolonial republic, including those with honest figures who consistently promoted reformist projects, not to mention the reactionaries, were capable of representing the far-reaching interests of the working people.
Those interests demanded the revolutionary conquest of power to put an end to dependency on the United States and capitalist exploitation, and to achieve, through a new social conscience, the spiritual raising of humankind to its natural condition of the brotherhood of man.
In the memory of the Cuban people, the multi-party system is correctly associated with cheap politicking, injustices, abuse, demagogic promises never fulfilled, fraud, corruption, and the debasement of politics.
Every so often, that formal and hollow democracy, only good for the rich and their accomplices, was broken by tyrannical regimes arising from the same forces dominating national life. Thus, under Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista, Cuba was forced to suffer its most prolonged and bloody dictatorships.
Hence, the great lesson has emerged out of our own historical experience: without unity, revolutionaries and the people can achieve nothing in their struggle.
It was not possible during the dependent republic to achieve one united party of revolutionaries, much less one that would have a decisive influence on the nation as a whole, which was divided by antagonistic social classes and very different levels of consciousness.
The lack of a united vanguard and the people's own armed forces frustrated the great objectives of the 1933 Revolution against Machado.
On one side were the Communists, led by Rubén Martínez Villena, the instigators of the general strike that led to Machado's overthrow. On the other was the force represented by Antonio Guiteras, also firmly anti-imperialist, who held much authority among students and the middle classes. They failed to unite, making it possible for Batista and the U.S. embassy to crush the Revolution.
The popular sectors, in a global situation of resistance to fascist aggression, succeeded in promoting certain democratic reforms and the convening of a Constituent Assembly.
Nevertheless, the progressive principles reflected in the 1940 Constitution, such as the abolition of latifundia and racial discrimination, were never fulfilled because the complementary legislation was opposed by the ruling classes. This would only be possible as a result of a genuine and profound social revolution.
The Cuban people had to endure those phenomena throughout several decades and came to loathe that repugnant politicking. Within that generalized sentiment, the moral preaching of Eduardo Chibás, the leader of the Orthodox Party, gained a mass audience. By sacrificing his life, Chibás demonstrated the impossibility of eradicating corruption within the existing social regime, a fact that the young vanguard of that organization would soon comprehend.
When the permanent structural crisis of neocolonialism in Cuba became evident in the 1950s, the United States, fearing the popular movement that was rapidly gaining strength, fell back on the reactionary solution, returning to power its former servant, General Batista, and thus bringing to an end the legal option of a multi-party system.
That was not an isolated event but Washington's policy, applied every time, for different reasons, that it suited U.S. interests in Latin America. For that purpose, it has resorted to diverse methods, including the direct use of its armed forces, as in the Dominican Republic in 1965; or through covert CIA action, as in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973.
In his speech on March 10, 1952, after carrying out the coup d'état, Batista stated with his customary cynicism and arrogance: "In Cuba the political parties had forgotten that there were three parties, the yellow party, the blue party and the white party..." in a clear reference to the army, the police and the navy.
No bourgeois political grouping consistently confronted the Batista regime. The attitude of those groupings oscillated between supporting the regime, asking for crumbs of power and verbal condemnation without effective action or what was called quietism. Some figures, on their own, maintained an upright stance and fell victim to the dictatorship.
The Popular Socialist Party (PSP) condemned the pro-imperialist nature of the coup but was isolated in the anti-communist environment of the cold war and the repression to which it was subjected. It decisively confronted the military regime but failed to find a way that could lead to its overthrow.
The Batista regime had the constant support of the U.S. government.
At a moment when it seemed that there was no way out of the extremely grave situation in Cuba, when the majority of the people had lost their faith in everything and everyone, on July 26, 1953, everything began to change.
The attacks on the Moncada Garrison in Santiago de Cuba and the Céspedes Garrison in Bayamo marked the emergence of four elements that would be decisive in making the Revolution: new young leaders headed by Fidel Castro, who already had a consciousness based on the precepts of Martí and Marxist-Leninism; a new vanguard organization; the tactic of people's armed struggle; and a program capable of uniting all the people in action presented by the leader of that necessary "charge to kill rogues, to complete the work of revolutions."
In his defense plea, known as La historia me absolverá (History Will Absolve Me), the leader of the Revolution declared that the intellectual author of that heroic action was José Martí.
The armed struggle was reinitiated with the Granma cabin cruiser's landing on the coast of Oriente province. With Fidel and other Moncada survivors such as Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida, and valiant new fighters like Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara, after initial setbacks and surmounting superhuman obstacles, the Rebel Army was reorganized in the Sierra Maestra.
Meanwhile, in the cities, clandestine actions were growing: Frank País is their loftiest exponent. Following in the footsteps of Mariana Grajales [Antonio Maceo's mother], Cubans gave themselves over to the struggle. Celia Sánchez symbolizes the unselfish presence of women in the Revolution.
José Antonio Echeverría, president of the Federation of University Students, founded the Revolutionary Directorate, which in 1957 carried out the daring assault on the Presidential Palace, an outstanding event in its active battle against the dictatorship.
From the underground, the PSP, headed by Blas Roca, and the Socialist Youth continued to denounce the regime and promote unity.
The revolutionary forces worked together in actions directed at taking over power, since they held common patriotic principles; in serving the people, whose repudiation of the dictatorship was expressed in a thousand ways; and finally in agreeing to accept the decisive role of the Rebel Army, born from the ranks of the 26th of July Movement and forged in 25 months of a bloody war of liberation.
After the triumph of the uprising, in the midst of the most intensive class struggle, but now with power in the hands of the working people and their Rebel Army, the newspapers of the oligarchy remained unread and the bourgeois parties disappeared from the national scene without the intervention of any revolutionary legislation to prohibit them. They were absolutely discredited on account of their corrupt record and their links with the neocolonial system.
The cheap politicians went North, where they maintained their groups' worn-out images, with the hope of returning behind U.S. bayonets. Many of them were quickly recruited by the CIA, which pressed them into the service of their criminal plans and, since then, they and their followers have been serving the ignominious cause of annexation.
The army and police forces which had been used against the people were dissolved, together with the other repressive bodies which stole from, oppressed, trampled on and murdered the people during the period of the neocolonial republic. Military installations were converted into schools and large amounts of misappropriated wealth recovered. The rotten bourgeois state apparatus began to be dismantled.
The leaders of the victorious Revolution understood that the most complex and dangerous times were yet to come, and that they would inexorably have to stand up to Cuba's historical enemy and the counterrevolution that served it.
In those circumstances, the process of uniting the revolutionaries gained in strength. They agreed to move toward the formation of a single Party, as the ideal and surest way of achieving the people's permanent unity.
The Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) emerged from the fusion of the 26th of July Movement, the Popular Socialist Party and the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate.
Members of the three organizations who had heroically confronted the terror of the dictatorship and who maintained their principles logically constituted the core of the new Party. They hold the distinction of being founding members.
The triumphant Revolution unleashed an unprecedented mass movement and the leaders imposed by sell-out union leader Mujal, the instruments of the bosses and the dictatorship, were expelled from the trade unions.
The masses, poisoned for many years with pro-imperialist, anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda, rapidly understood, through their own experience, the deception to which they had been victims. Their enemies, the government of the United States and the country's exploiting classes, were unmasked in the first year of the Revolution.
In those unique conditions, the building of the new united Party required avoiding dogmatic concepts, without overlooking the need for a vanguard.
Martí gave us the key: in the situation of a growing sentiment toward independence, a prevailing revolutionary climate and the imminence of the necessary war, it was vital to bring together "the revolutionaries, united in an unbeatable plan for the most lofty and sustained task, united in one single and healthy organization."
With that lesson from Martí and Lenin's warning that the party of the ruling proletariat "should be constituted and developed by selecting the best elements of the class," our vanguard was formed.
In the early 1960s, Fidel made an exceptional contribution to the theory and practice of the organization of a revolutionary Party in power by pointing to the sectarian errors committed in the ORI's formation and creatively applying the ideas of Martí and Lenin to Cuba's specific conditions at that moment. That was the stage when the ORI changed its name to the United Party of the Socialist Revolution (PURS).
The Party had to be made up of men and women who were clearly above any suspicion of complicity with the dictatorship or the bosses; who would voluntarily accept party membership; and who subscribed to its socialist objectives. They had to be exemplary in terms of fulfilling all the tasks proposed by the Revolution in the fields of defense, production and social activism. They had to be of proven honesty and irreproachable in their daily conduct within the collective and the community, and in the education of their children.
The Party's organizing commissions would delineate to the workers' collectives the qualities required to create a genuine vanguard force, so that the workers could indicate which of their comrades possessed those virtues, extensive discussions could be held and those who had the necessary merits could be chosen by vote to form the nucleus of exemplary workers.
Subsequently, the commissions would make a deeper, individual analysis of every member of this nucleus, in order to form the Party's rank-and-file organizations.
In this way, the Party cell mirrored the best virtues of the workers' collective, became its vanguard on the basis of everyone's opinions, and constituted the revolutionary leadership group within the workplace.
In all cases, the determinant condition for the selection of members has been and continues to be the opinion of the masses rather than unipersonal decisions.
Party cells were also created within the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior.
In this way, we have succeeded in forging a rigorously selected Party which also enjoys the authority and full support of the workers and is closely linked to the masses. There must not be any privileges for its members, only greater discipline, sacrifice, more tasks and responsibilities, motivated by love of country and unlimited loyalty to the people.
At the beginning, the unprecedented route chosen out of necessity led to a numerically small organization: 40,000 between 1962 and 1964, with a gradual increase. The growth of its ranks would be the result of the increased number of workers and the raising of their revolutionary consciousness.
In 1965, the PURS, having used those mass methods to successfully eradicate sectarianism, adopted the name that defined its ultimate objective, the Communist Party of Cuba. It created the first Central Committee and unified the revolutionary press into Granma and Juventud Rebelde newspapers.
Currently, we have over 770,000 members who honorably represent the masses of blue- and white-collar, civilian and military workers in both the cities and rural areas.
In just over 30 years, Party membership has multiplied almost 20 times.
That formidable force is complemented by the approximately 500,000 members of the Young Communist League, who are likewise ruled by principles for member selection and who work alongside the members of our mass and social organizations.
Our Party boasts a selection method characterized as much by its democracy as by its rigor.
Entering the Party isn't everything. Party members, grouped within their organizations, must strive actively to apply Party policy in their work and social environment and in a variety of situations.
The collective vigilance of the rank-and-file organization and the leadership bodies, constant critical and self-critical analysis within these and the systematic evaluation of the tangible results of each member or cadre constitute the bases for the correction of shortcomings and individual or general errors, the removal from the ranks of those who cease to become worthy of being members, and the promotion, demotion and renewal of cadres.
At this time we must continue consolidating the just policy of promoting blacks and women in particular as cadres, without recourse to mechanisms, in the same way we have done with youth, something which strengthens our Party's moral authority in the eyes of the people. The Party must insist on the application of this policy in all spheres of society.
The Party's qualitative and quantitative strengthening has continued during the harsh years of the special period, in spite of the ideological impact of the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the intensification of the criminal U.S. blockade, with its terrible consequences for the population's material situation.
• In the last five years, 232,000 exemplary workers - 30 percent of the current membership - have joined the Party!
Experience shows how Party action has been decisive in the search for solutions to confront the effects of the economic crisis of the last few years. The Party, now more than ever, is in a position to improve its guiding role in Cuban society.
The life of every work or study collective, every military unit, the community itself and the territory have to be at the center of the Party's attention. Here, the exemplary attitude of each and every one of the members is revealed on a daily basis, inertia has no place and the moral and political state is fortified.
This is the Party which takes on all the battles.
This is the Party whose ideology is based on the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, those inspired teachers of the workers; Martí's doctrine and Fidel's creative ideas and example.
This is the Party that calls on all its members to think for themselves and express themselves freely in the heart of the Party organizations and, once a resolution is adopted, to act together as one.
This is the Party that educates and learns from its constant contact with the workers, "tapping their opinions, feeling their emotions," as Che noted.
This is the Party whose work style is to be aware at all times of the difficulties, criteria and proposals of the masses.
This is the Party that leads the Cuban nation in safeguarding the country's independence.
This is the Party that has promoted creative work and justice during this final third of the century.
This is the Party that has educated various generations of revolutionaries in unlimited loyalty to their homeland and to the cause of internationalism.
This is the Party that has firmly and intelligently led the resistance of the people, the collective hero of the epic history that Cuba is writing in the final decade of the 20th century.
This is the Party that never retreats in the face of dangers and that is fully confident of final victory.
The enemy is at war with our Party, not because it is the only one, but because its existence and labor guarantees the unity of our people.
The Cuban people decided to have a single party precisely to achieve national revolutionary unity, without which the defense of its free, democratic and socialist homeland would be impossible.
In the context of a strategy of victorious struggle against the most powerful and brazen enemy of all time, the creation of the Party uniting all Cubans is one of the most significant merits of Fidel and the historical leadership.
In relation to the single Party of the revolutionaries of his epoch, formed to defend it from the intrigues of the Spanish colonialists, Martí affirmed:
"It was born as one, from all sides at once. And anyone, from outside or within, who believes it is extinguishable or fragile is mistaken. What only one group wants fails. What a whole people wants endures. The Cuban Revolutionary Party is the Cuban people."
In rejection of the enemy's hysteria, slander, lies and plans, we can affirm:
The Communist Party of Cuba endures and grows, even amidst the adversities of the last few years, because that is what the Cuban people want. It is the vigilant consciousness and the backbone of the Cuban nation's resistance.

III. THE DEMOCRACY WE DEFEND

The Cuban Revolution has carried out a profound and exceptional process of democratization in all areas of the country's political, economic and social life, and demonstrated that it is possible to make the idea of a government of the people, by the people and for the people a reality.
Our political system - genuinely democratic, involving the widespread participation of the people, socialist - is rooted in dignity, equality and the true exercise of human rights. The survival of the Revolution, in these extremely difficult years, can only be explained by this profoundly democratic base. A revolutionary transformation is irreversible when the people fully participate in it, defend it, and deepen it on a daily basis.
The Cuban system is neither an imported one nor unrelated to our history, but rather the consequent result of more than a century and a half of redeeming efforts, initiated by the clergyman Félix Varela, then developed into a people's war in 1868 and 1895, and culminating on January 1, 1959.
An entirely free and sovereign nation, based on justice and solidarity, this is the homeland we have today, the one our forebears dreamed of and the one which continues to battle the imperialist forces that strive to destroy it.
Since the attack on the Moncada Garrison, Fidel has mobilized and genuinely incorporated the Cuban people in the struggle for the triumph of its historic aspirations and the forever postponed dreams of founding a republic based on Martí's ideals.
In the Sierra Maestra, in the midst of the war, the seeds of what the Cuban Revolution would signify after victory were already evident. The people nourished and sustained their own army, and in the liberated territories the first agrarian reform laws were decreed, and the origins of a more dignified and humane life emerged.
In January of 1959, in the face of the bankruptcy of the tyrannical regime, the United States and its internal agents were unable to regroup their forces as a means of suitably accommodating their interests, because the people transformed the climate of insurrection into a unanimous general strike called by the leader of the Revolution.
From that moment on, for the first time in the nation's history, the masses came to effectively exercise power. The transformation of society commenced, and the triumphant Revolution was fully fit to confront the furious attacks of its internal and external enemies.
Over the last four decades, the people's participation has been decisive in taking on all challenges and tasks.
The people were integrated into the armed defense of the country, and voluntarily participated on a massive scale in heroic internationalist missions. The concept of the War of All the People reveals the democratic nature of the Revolution and constitutes our principal weapon against the repeated threats by the United States.
In Cuba, Martí's definition was made a reality:
"A republic is a people who hold the tools of the worker in their right hand and the rifle of freedom in their left!"
The masses' historic victory over illiteracy, the follow-up courses, education programs for workers and campesinos, and the extension of university teaching to the Science and Technology Forum have brought together the efforts of all of society to fulfill Martí's postulate: "Being educated is the only way to be free."
The workers have conscientiously taken on their role in the creation of the nation's wealth. The economic changes have benefited from their indisputable participation. Millions of Cubans, in response to the call made by Che, have offered themselves for voluntary work and made invaluable contributions to the new society. Beginning with the rectification process, the Party has called for the revitalization of these efforts as a formative element in the inherent values of the new man.
The Revolution promotes the creativity of the masses in all fields. The solutions that have been contributed to production and services are innumerable. This, of course, has been possible thanks to the predominance of socialist ownership and the democratization of education, which has offered opportunities for learning to all of the people and has facilitated the technical upgrading of the work force. We have put into practice Martí's principle of linking study and work.
Our policies for the development of health care, education, culture and sports, recognized universally for their successes, are also rooted in vast social outreach with the continued participation of the people.
Equal opportunity for all has been, and is, the permanent objective of the Revolution, whose works reveal a genuine and committed humanism, despite the damage that the effects of the obstinate U.S. blockade entail for this just policy.
The efforts of our mass organizations illustrate the character of Cuban democracy: the Central Organization of Cuban Trade Unions (CTC), the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), student organizations, the Association of Veterans of the Cuban Revolution and many others of a social nature comprise a system of communication, debate and collective leadership and have been a first-rate mobilizing factor in the undertaking of major political and social tasks.
Socialism in Cuba is an organic part of its historical process. The authenticity and originality of our political system and its institutions stand out above and beyond the circumstantial errors and insufficiencies present in any human endeavor. An essential feature of our democracy consists of its ability, with the participation of the masses, to rectify deformations, eliminate errors, break down obstacles and conceive of new paths to follow.
In spite of the United States' tenacious and systematic harassment, the Revolution, far from maintaining a purely defensive stance, has generated forms of participation that have continued to develop and will always require continuous renovation. This spirit of resistance and transformation runs throughout the history of the foundation and development of Cuban institutions.
The constant growth of the people's awareness has progressed alongside the elevation of their cultural and educational levels and their social and material advancement, and this was expressed, in the mid-'70s, in our socialist Constitution. This document was debated by the whole Cuban population, and submitted to a vote in which 98 percent of the eligible voters, aged 16 and up, participated, with the result that 97.7 percent voted in favor, while only one percent voted against. Thus emerged the state institutions representing a people who have increasingly exercised their power since January 1, 1959.
Our people decided to ratify in our Constitution that:
"The Communist Party of Cuba, organized Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the working class, is the higher guiding force of society and the state, which organizes and orients the common efforts towards the lofty goals of the construction of socialism and the advancement towards a communist society."
The foundation of the Cuban political system is the election of district delegates. The candidates are proposed and selected in meetings of neighborhood residents; voting is free, secret and direct and ballot counting is public. In order to be elected, candidates must receive more than 50 percent of the votes. The delegates, who comprise the Municipal Assemblies of People's Power, periodically render accounts to their electors, and can be removed from power by them at any time. Elected representatives at all levels receive no pay whatsoever for this work. Our electoral system is free of corruption, fraud, and the buying of votes. The Party neither proposes candidates, nor elects them, nor removes them from office.
This full democracy has upheld and continues to uphold our State of Law. Not even during the most difficult moments or under the most critical conditions in these years have we ever renounced the most widespread and determined exercise of democracy.
The guidelines approved by the 4th Party Congress, after an extremely far-reaching process of consultation with the people, served as the basis to modify substantial aspects of the 1976 Constitution and electoral legislation. The election of National Assembly deputies and Provincial Assembly delegates by direct and secret ballot was established; the fields of jurisdiction of People's Power and state administrative agencies were more clearly defined; and the People's Council system, the cornerstone of the community's participation in the solution of the problems facing it, was generalized.
The essence of the Cuban political system places emphasis on the authentic incorporation of society as a whole in the decision-making process. Discussion of matters of public interest, whether on a national or local level, contributes to unity and is the starting point for the adoption and application of practical measures.
In this regard, there have been an ever-growing number of enriching experiences, such as the community administration of the People's Councils, and the congresses involving unions, students and other mass and social organizations, where the analysis carried out, with the presence of government leaders, has served to define policies. There is a constant promotion of the collective search for solutions, the distribution of responsibilities, widespread social participation and control by the people.
Mass organizations, social and professional groups and other kinds of associations have provided a space and a channel for the interests and concerns of all sectors of our socialist civil society.
The measures adopted in 1994 by the National Assembly of People's Power for the restructuring of internal finances emerged from a process of wide-ranging discussion among the people: the workers' parliaments held in more than 80,000 work and study centers.
The efficiency assemblies held at least twice a year allow for the effective participation of workers in the discussion of economic problems and plans; they are a way for workers to exercise their role as the collective owners of the means of production.
The public hearings called by the committees of the National Assembly and the large-scale process of presentation and analysis of the Cuban Reaffirmation of Dignity and Sovereignty Law and the Declaration of the 20th-Century Independence Fighters are new expressions of our people's profound patriotism.
Socialist democracy is constantly improved upon in order to spiritually reinforce the people, and contributes to giving a greater creative sense to their existence and work, and higher quality to their lives.
We have worked against apoliticism without creating fanatics. The Revolution needs citizens who freely and consciously fulfill their responsibilities and are able to fully exercise their rights and duties.
There is no gap between our leaders and the people. Systematic communication and identification with the masses represents one of the factors which guarantee unity of action and the strength of revolutionary power. Socialist democracy demands many things of its cadres: austerity, modesty, a commitment to serve the people, openness and honesty in the exercise of public functions and an exemplary private life.
Our leaders emerge from the people and must answer to them for their actions. Among us, those who are not up to the standard of their responsibilities cannot occupy a place in the vanguard. There has never been, nor will there ever be, impunity for those who violate the law and pervert their public functions. The adoption in 1996 of the Code of Ethics for Cuban State Cadres established the basis of their political and moral commitments to society.
These principles are in sharp contrast to the demagogy, mercantilism, incessant financial scandals and widespread corruption that characterize politics in the United States, the country which purports to be a model for the rest of the world.
In reality, the U.S. system lacks credibility among its own people, which cannot be truly represented by mechanisms controlled by the same monopolies that contribute billions of dollars to increasingly costly electoral farces in which the majority of the electorate does not vote.
The United States tries to erode the ethical foundations of the Revolution in order to weaken it from within and undermine our sovereignty. It uses every means possible to encourage selfishness, anarchy and consumerism among us, and attempts to promote the subversion of order, the fracturing of unity, while facilitating the destabilizing activities of small annexationist groups who aspire, with financing from abroad, to a return to the yoke of the United States and the restoration of capitalism.
We are facing new forms of ideological warfare, ever more subtle and complex, which entail a daily challenge for the ability of our institutions to draw the people together. They strive to damage the authority, influence and legitimacy of our revolutionary institutional system. Our response must be coherent and firm, and must appeal to the wealth of arguments defending the Revolution, to unity, to our moral reserves, to the patriotic fiber of every Cuban.
Lumpen elements, criminals, and all those who contribute to the violation of laws and the transgression of order objectively serve our enemies. Each case of corruption that is not stamped out in time serves to undermine the image of our democracy, to the benefit of those who hope to eliminate it. Today, we cannot accept indifference and inaction on the part of revolutionaries.
Our patriotic and socialist values are also endangered by the abandonment of moral principles and norms, a lack of solidarity, insensitivity, and the frivolous fascination with U.S. models and symbols.
The Revolution must remain on the alert, and work ever harder to mobilize our people in the struggle for lawfulness and ethics.
The country's political and mass organizations must debate these problems, create awareness regarding the need to place them among the ideological challenges of the present, and undertake effective action to reinforce revolutionary power.
The press, which the Revolution transferred from the hands of the ruling class to the hands of the people in order to make it truly free, has a vital role to play in the ideological struggle. The mass media, along with educational and cultural institutions, face the greatest challenge: guaranteeing the continuity of socialist, patriotic, anti-imperialist and revolutionary ideals and values throughout the future generations of Cubans.
We defend our national identity against all forms of corrosion and promote Martí's ideal of a great Latin American nation and decolonized universality.
It is essential to safeguard our paradigms and the Cuban patriotic tradition as an essential foundation of political practice. Our people possess enormous moral reserves, and the greatest proof of this lies in their continued resistance against their enemies, and the advance of a revolutionary process that many outside of Cuba believed to be defeated or impossible to maintain after the changes that the world underwent in the early `90s.
Cuba reaffirms its determination to resist and to continue along its own path, the fruit of its historical process. It respects the right of every nation to decide upon its own political, economic and social system, and demands this same respect for itself.
We Cubans are faithful to Martí, who said: "The government must be born from the country. The spirit of the government must be that of the country."
The idea of a democratic society, where the people exercise authority and govern themselves, has accompanied humanity throughout history as an ideal and elevated aspiration, which the powerful have always attempted to limit, while others have viewed it as an unattainable dream.
Its continued presence throughout so many centuries, predating our era, and going back even further than many religions, has given this aspiration a universal value, placing it at the center of the most noble reflections and the most heroic struggles of humankind.
The essence of these struggles has always been human emancipation, without which it would be impossible to make the democratic ideal a reality.
Although the United States strives to appropriate the concept of democracy, its system is in essence undemocratic, for it exploits, oppresses and excludes the large majorities. In order to fool them, they speak of representative democracy, but this only represents the interests of the ruling classes.
The mainstream press, news agencies, radio, cinema and especially television, along with other increasingly sophisticated means of communication, form gigantic monopolies with which to manipulate people's minds and manufacture public opinion.
Democratization continues to be a fundamental goal in the struggle of the workers, the poor and the oppressed of the world. It has acquired an even greater significance at the present time, when neoliberal globalization seeks to impose totalitarian capitalism, in which only the market exists, and the people count for nothing.
Under the neoliberal model, social polarization has grown to intolerable extremes: unemployment, hunger and poverty continue to rise; the state's functions are reduced to the application of shock therapies, and to upholding the law and order of big capital through the repression of the people. At the same time, xenophobia and racism, expressions of fascist tendencies, are further exacerbated.
Within this model, there is consequently no room for the dispossessed, who are condemned to marginality and exclusion in ever increasing numbers. In Latin America, the abyss separating the privileged minorities and the dispossessed is wider than in other regions of the world: half of the population lives below the poverty line, while more than 100 million human beings suffer extreme poverty.
Social inequality is growing under the influence of the spread of neoliberalism, and not only in the Third World but in the industrialized First World as well.
The United States is the country where social differences are most accentuated. Among the disinherited of that opulent society there are millions of our Latin American brothers and sisters, forced to emigrate there by the misery in their homelands; African-Americans and many others mired in poverty.
The United States cannot forgive Cuba for the fact that even in the most adverse circumstances, it has sustained and continued to develop a society which believes in humankind and solidarity, and which has not abandoned the democratic ideal that has been the dream of humanity throughout the millennia.
The regime that the U.S. government wants to impose on us is fully incompatible with the social achievements since 1959. Our work would be completely destroyed. It would be liquidated in the most violent manner, because what predominates throughout the world today is a form of capitalism that some of its defenders have openly qualified as savage.
Moreover, in the case of Cuba, the imposition of such a regime would signify the triumph of the most aggressive and reactionary sector of U.S. society, those with a visceral hatred for us, whose tools are the mafia of annexationists and Batista supporters who demand, in the language of Hitler, a three-day license to kill after the fall of the Revolution.
The United States hopes to reinstate in Cuba a government of the United States, by the United States and for the United States.
In the face of this insane proposition, we reaffirm Maceo's declaration:
"Whoever attempts to appropriate Cuba will reap the dust of its soil bathed in blood, if he does not perish in the battle."
If there has been but one Revolution since 1868, and one party of unity since the time of Martí, then there has also been one single armed branch of our homeland: the Liberation Army, the Rebel Army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces.
Compatriots:
Our socialist democracy, the essence and fruit of a Revolution, has put an end to exploitation and discrimination; it has eliminated illiteracy and raised educational and cultural levels; it has provided workers, campesinos, students, all of the people, with the ability to organize, prepare and arm themselves to defend and exercise their rights; it has given scientists, writers, artists and intellectuals in general, true freedom of creation and research, and the means to carry out their work and give it a greater social significance.
We have achieved the creative pluralism of an emancipated people.
Our political system, which consecrates the power of the people, is the principal conquest we must save, because all of the others depend on it. History has dramatically demonstrated that when the people lose political power, they lose everything.
Our socialist democracy is essential for the continuity of the work we initiated in 1959, in favor of the most humane social relations. It opens up the possibility to continue forward with the Revolution, in order to provide the Cubans of the 21st century with a country, as Martí wanted, with full justice achieved.