Part 1|  Part 2l  Part 3 |

Thirty-six million people, 14% of the population, live below the poverty line, a rate twice as high as that of other developed countries. Double that of Europe and Japan.

Forty-three million people are not health-insured and another 30 million have such low medical coverage that it is practically non-existent.

There are 30 million illiterates and another 30 million functional illiterates. Cuba did not make this up, these are official figures from international organizations.

Among the black population the rate of poverty is over 29%; the rate for the whole population is 14%. The poverty rate among the black population is, therefore, more than twice that of the general population of the United States. Among black children the figure reaches 40%. In some cities and rural areas in the United States it is over 50%.

Despite economic expansion, the poverty rates in America are from two to three times higher than those in Western Europe, and 22% of American children live in poverty. These are official figures.

Only 45% of all workers in the private sector have social security coverage. It is estimated that 13% of the total U.S. population will not live beyond 60 years of age.

Women still earn only 73% of what men earn in comparable jobs and make up 70% of part-time workers, those who have no right to any social benefits.

Between 1981 and 1995, 85% of new workers with more than one job were women.

The richest 1% of the population, who in 1975 owned 20% of the wealth, now owns 36%. And the gap keeps widening.

There is not one millionaire, not one person who belongs to the upper middle class, among the 3600 people sentenced to capital punishment who are now on death row in U.S. prisons. One might wonder why. You perhaps have a better answer than I do. I am not accusing anyone, I simply say what is going on.

Apparently, one needs to reach the category of millionaire to have the decency and discipline needed to never be targeted for such sentence.

There are more statistics which are a little hard to take, but which I have to tell you about.

In the whole history of the United States not one single white man has ever been executed for having raped a black woman. (APPLAUSE)

Nevertheless, and this is an historical fact, during the time that rape was considered a capital crime, of the 455 people executed for rape, 405 were black: that is to say, 9 out of 10.

In the state of Pennsylvania, for example, where the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in 1776, only 9% of the total population are black. Yet, 62% of those sentenced to death, that is, a proportion seven times greater, are black.

One more thing. More than 90% of the 3600 sentenced to death were victims of physical or sexual abuse during their childhood.

A recent study by a non-governmental organization indicates that black men have a 13 times greater chance of being given longer sentences than white men when it comes to drug-related offenses, although there are five times as many white men dealing drugs in the United States.

More than 60% of the women in prison in the United States are African-American or Hispanic.

Perhaps all we Hispanics, African-Americans, and all people from different ethnic groups other than white are particularly prone to commit all sorts of crimes.

I am not glossing over the crimes that may have been committed, far from it. Neither am I in a position to accurately know what the procedures are like and what usually happens. I simply wonder why. I simply wonder if we are genetically criminal, in which case it would not matter if all of sub-Saharan Africa, if all the indigenous peoples, if all the mixed race people and all the white people in Latin America, all the people in Caribbean nations including Cubans, of course, were vanished. This is a question that we have at least the right to ask ourselves. I have lived these 74 years that you remembered in which I have dealt with a lot of people.

I was born in the country, the son of a landowner. My father was a poor peasant from Spain. He first came to Cuba as a draftee with the Spanish army in the last war of independence and had never gone to school. Once the conflict was over in 1898, he was sent back to his country. But, later he came back, motu proprio.

He worked in the system in place at that time and eventually managed to bring together and direct more than a hundred immigrants or Cuban day laborers like himself. It was the time when the United Fruit Company, in order to develop its sugar plantations in the neocolonial system installed in Cuba, cut and burned the precious wood forests, like those that were used to build the famous Escorial palace in Spain and even the biggest battleship in the days of Admiral Nelson. It was sunk at the Battle of Trafalgar. Those woods were highly prized and my father and those men he had recruited were cutting the forests and precious wood. Who could blame them?

Well, he made some money and bit by bit he bought up land, a lot of land. He ended up owning about 900 hectares of land and controlling more than 10,000 hectares of leased land. I was born and lived on that huge estate. I was lucky to be the son and not the grandson of a landowner, therefore, I had no time to develop the mentality and culture of the rich. There is no merit in being a revolutionary, it depends on many factors. All my friends were poor children and teenagers of my own age. I got to know the poor shacks all around, both on my family land and on the enormous plantations owned by the large U.S. companies where many Haitian immigrants lived. There the living and working conditions were worse than those of slaves although slavery had been abolished in Cuba in 1886. That did not make me a revolutionary, but it helped me later on to understand the situation and the injustices in the country where I was born.

I will add a few words to what I have said so far. You mentioned a while ago the name of an African-American recently executed. You know that our people vigorously condemned the judicial murder of Shaka Sankofa for a crime he did not commit (APPLAUSE), despite the unanimous condemnation of world public opinion and even that of many governments in the world.

I requested a lot of information, data, and details. I even went as far as to look at small maps and sketches of the place where the crimes he was accused of was committed. Only person claimed to have seen him, at night, from quite a distance, a quick glance that not even the most sensitive camera could have recorded, that, and other evidence, led me to believe in his innocence. I am not saying this because someone claimed it was true, but because I analyzed all the information and reached that conclusion. (APPLAUSE)

I even analyzed his social origins, the marginality into which he was born, his first clashes with the law. When explaining to our own people, I have quoted them as an example of the true factors which lead a young man, black or white or of whatever ethnic group, to commit a crime. Also, I am a lawyer. I know something about law. I defended myself when I was on trial for the attack on the Moncada garrison and I have had to do so more than once since I became a lawyer. I hardly had any other clients. (LAUGHTER)

If these were not my own conclusions, I would be acting like a common demagogue in stating what I have just said. (APPLAUSE)

A televised round table was held in our country in which internationally known figures participated. I can see from here one person who took part in that round table.

I am equally well aware that for some time now you have been caught up in a very just struggle, a struggle which our people also fully support: the struggle for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal (SHOUTS AND PROLONGED APPLAUSE), a journalist sentenced to death whose unfair trial has given rise to a giant protest movement throughout the world.

If we go a bit further and analyze the historical data, regarding that one white man for every nine African-Americans executed for rape --there were about 50 whites in total-- we see that other factors aside, the element of social marginality was always present. And when, as it is the case with the African-Americans, racial discrimination is added to social marginality, tens and tens of millions of people suffer horribly from this injustice, including those who have never been sentenced to death nor to prison. Actually, they were born sentenced to be humiliated every day of their lives.

I am more or less white. I say more or less because there is no ethnic group that can claim purity. I remember that I visited the United States in November 1948. I remember because I was there at the same time that Truman, despite all predictions, won the elections. I had gone to visit Harvard. I wanted to study economics. I already had revolutionary ideas but I wanted to equip myself with more knowledge. On the journey back to New York, I traveled in a cheap second-hand car bought for 200 or 300 dollars, one of those sold for a bit more than they are worth as scrap metal, and I drove along those highways down to Florida to go on to Cuba by sea in a ferry. I stopped several times in some places for lunch, a meal or to buy something. I perceived contempt more than once, sort of a disparaging attitude just because I spoke another language or because I was Hispanic. I had the impression that it was not only certain ethnic groups that were discriminated against but also people of any other nationality who spoke a different language.

Since then I have only been back to the United States for a few days in, I think, 1956. I was living in Mexico, preparing to go back to Cuba. I visited New York and other places to meet with the few Cuban immigrants there were in the United States at that time when the Cuban Adjustment Act did not exist. No one could just arrive on a boat or raft; there were almost no aliens here back then. It was actually the Revolution, which opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of people who had wanted to emigrate for a long time, and had no hope of doing so.

Therefore, we could remind those who so hate Cuba, the Revolution and myself in particular that they should thank the Revolution every now and then, because without the Revolution there would not be many Cuban millionaires (APPLAUSE), without the Revolution there would not be a so-called Cuban-American National Foundation (BOOING), without the Revolution there would not be Cuban members of the U.S. Congress, they would not be able to sponsor certain bills, they would not be courted in the election campaigns, they would not be granted their every wish even though a large majority of them do not vote because given the privileges granted to them it suits them better to be Cuban than American citizens.

What I say can be irrefutably proved. There are statistics, I asked for them one day. For example, how many resident’s visas were granted in the last 30 years before the triumph of the Revolution? The numbers were insignificant in the 30s and 40s, and scarcely 2,000 or 3,000 between 1950 and 1959.

It was actually the Revolution, which opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of people who had wanted to emigrate for a long time, and had no hope of doing so.

It is well known that in the first few days of January 1959 a large number of war criminals, embezzlers and Batista accomplices who had murdered thousands of Cubans and looted the country found save haven in the United States. The first revolutionary laws that had to do with recovering embezzled goods, with lowering the rates for basic services, with giving back employment to workers unjustly dismissed during the tyranny, with urban and agrarian reforms and other measures of elementary social justice terrified the richest sectors of our society and they began to emigrate to the United States.

From the first day of the Revolution, visas for the United States were unusually easy to obtain, especially by those from the upper and middle classes, for doctors and other university educated professionals, professors and teachers, technicians and skilled workers. Many of these people had always longed to immigrate to this country. Hostility towards the Revolution and the aim of depriving us of a skilled labor force became obvious almost immediately. They also needed former Batista officers and young people to feed the mercenary attack brigade, a plan that nobody knew about at that time. However, permission was always given to those leaving legally for the United States.

The brain drain encouraged the enormous efforts in the field of education that the triumphant Revolution had begun immediately. Even during the fighting at the Bay of Pigs the commercial air flights were not interrupted. After the Missile Crisis they abruptly suspended the flights and the visas. Tens of thousands of families were separated. On the other hand, even before the Cuban Adjustment Act, they allowed to enter U.S. territory anyone who reached their shores by any means available to them even by hijacking planes or boats.

After the Camarioca incident, 360,000 Cubans left the country legally, in absolutely safety and without a single victim. Among these there were, in addition to relatives of United States residents, a large number of professionals and teachers who could earn a salary ten times higher in the United States than in Cuba, and skilled workers and technicians from major industries. They were in fact economic migrants. Nevertheless, everyone who went to the United States was given the name of “political refugee” or “exile”. If this concept were applied to Mexicans and other Latin Americans who migrate to the United States, there would be between 12 and 15 million Mexican political refugees (APPLAUSE), a million Haitian political refugees, a million Dominican political refugees, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans political refugees, and who knows how many Puerto Ricans. (APPLAUSE) Because Puerto Ricans are patriots and love their country. So why do they come to the United States? For economic reasons and there are almost as many here as on their island.

There is a million in New York. This year we saw them supporting the just cause of Vieques. (APPLAUSE) We had a televised round table on that with many international personalities of great prestige.

These round tables are broadcast on television via satellite in English, of course, which is the language most spoken throughout the world. Our television also seeds Internet. Unfortunately only 1% of Africans have access to the Internet, so we have to reach them by radio. The same thing happens with Latin America.

As to this subject of communications and cooperation with Third World countries, I want to inform you that we have developed a program to teach reading and writing by radio. This idea came up one day when I asked the president of Niger, who was visiting Cuba, what the illiteracy rate was in his country, and he said, 87% illiteracy and only 17% have any schooling. We are celebrating the arrival of the next century and the next millenium and I wonder: In what century of the third millenium will that country with the same population as Cuba have eradicated illiteracy?

I was contemplating the fact that our country with 11 million people, the same as Niger, has 250,000 professors and teachers. It is the same as with doctors: Cuba has the highest per capita rate of teachers in the world. When one thinks about that illiteracy rate knowing that infant mortality among children from under 5 years of age in Niger is higher than 200 for every 1000 live births, that is, more than 25 times as high as the infant mortality rate in Cuba, it is impossible not to ask oneself: When? When? When? I asked him, “Do they have radios?” He said, “Yes, almost every family has a radio.” I said, “How come if they do not have electricity?” He explained, “Yes, because they have a Japanese device which costs X number of dollars to recharge the radio batteries.”

I suggested to a group of Cuban educational experts that they study the possibility of teaching reading and writing by radio, starting with the idea of developing a small manual which, using pictures of animals, plants and common objects would identify the letters of the alphabet and would make it possible to make syllables, words, phrases, and to introduce concepts in the given language, using radio broadcasts under the guidance of specialized teachers. In three months our educational experts designed a method which when tested in the Creole language in Haiti with 300 illiterate people showed really promising results. A pilot program will soon begin with 3000 people. A literacy course using television would be very simple, but access to television is difficult for the majority of the world’s illiterate. Our educational specialists who created, monitored and guided the experiment are astounded. The course is ready in French, Portuguese and Creole.

Here is another way of cooperating with the Third World, by teaching hundreds of millions of people to read and write for an infinitesimal cost. Enough talk about the 800 million illiterate adults, if by using radio, which is not the Internet nor television, it is possible to teach reading and writing to hundreds of millions of people.

It is hard to imagine how humiliated a person feels who cannot read and write. It reminds me a lot of my mother and my father, who barely knew how to read and write, and I can bear witness to how much they suffered. I know they did. That explains the hunger for knowledge that exists in our country. Even when our people have completed grade 10, or grade 12, they still have an insatiable hunger to learn about other things. We have found this out and have created certain programs --I hope that someday you will learn about them-- which are simply astounding, hoping to create a comprehensive and general mass culture. We are even going to teach languages.

I will give you a preview. The new school year has already begun in Cuba. After the battle to get Elián back and our amazement at how talented our children were, our schools now have a 20-inch color television for every 100 of our 2,400,000 elementary, junior and senior high school students, at a cost of 4.6 million dollars (APPLAUSE); and 15, 000 video cassette players at a cost of 1.5 million dollars. So, we are already making full use of the mass media in our school system in support of our more than 250,000 teachers and professors.

Let me just say that in October a course on narrative techniques designed by one of our country’s most capable intellectuals will be broadcast from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. And starting on November 1, from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. there will be a language course, three times a week. To put it simply, many people in our population can not remember the grammar they learned a long time ago. I joke that we do not speak Spanish, but a sort of dialect.

So, three times a week in Spanish and --just imagine-- twice a week in English! We consider English to be a universal language. Centuries of British colonialism and about 100 years of --lets give it an elegant name-- enormous American influence has made it into a universal language. It is widely used, but not patented, so we shall use it.

Almost all scientific and literary books are published first in English. I have been given many as presents and they are in English.

We are going to make sure the knowledge of English is widespread; television courses are already being prepared. Many of those thousands of teachers will see them and record them and show them in school, they will not have to go anywhere for them.

Immediately after we are going to begin French courses. Our hope is that all of our people or the overwhelming majority who are interested will know three languages: Spanish, English and French (APPLAUSE) at minimal cost. That is, the cost of the electricity for the broadcasts and the printed materials that will be sent to all those who would take the course directly, or to those who request them. In the latter case we will send them the materials charging them for the costs of production and distribution. These are courses for everybody who wants to take advantage of them and we will promote them.

I think that the fact that I have told you about this idea will be a source of satisfaction for many of my compatriots, for almost all of them.

One day I asked the minister [of Education], “How many English teachers do you need for high school?” And he said, “Two thousand”. I replied, “That is more than enough.” We are not planning to reduce the number of graduates in primary or high school education. On the contrary, we will not reduce the number of teachers even by one; the numbers will be increased so as to be able to reduce the number of pupils per teacher. That battle has already begun to improve the quality of our education. But we will place the mass media, our television services with no commercials, at the service of education and of a general, comprehensive level of culture. (APPLAUSE)

I think that our country is on its way to a completely new era. I will say no more. (APPLAUSE)

I have gone over my time. I have not kept my word. (APPLAUSE) I will only take up a few more minutes of your time.

I promised you that before I finished my speech I would talk to you about two things: first, the little boy. Elián is doing wonderfully. (APPLAUSE) You can hardly imagine what a happy boy he is, how intelligent he is, what a serious boy he is, he is really extraordinary. Vast crowds did not welcome him --just as we said-- but only by some schoolmates and his closest relatives. Not one of us, not a single Party or State official was there. The family spent six minutes greeting those who were there to welcome them and then immediately left the airport with Elián. He did not miss classes, not even the day he left the United States. In two months, with his family, his teacher and his little classmates, he had made extraordinary progress and later, in Cuba, from June 29 up until July 28, he had intensive classes together with his classmates who were here; he was missing some sounds. He graduated on a par with all the other children and moved up to second grade.

His father insisted that I meet him. I said to him, “I will wait until he has finished school.” And when he finished the school year, very discreetly, I went to see him and said hello.

Now we should make sure that this child has a normal life, normal classes, because everybody knows this little boy. We can count on the support of the whole population, the cooperation of all our people not to approach him when he goes to school, not to shout slogans at him, to treat him like any other child. He has only appeared on television a few times, and that is because the people were demanding it. He has never been asked a direct question, he is always shown with his family and only for a few minutes. He has been given careful attention.

The first day of his new school year has already begun. He is living in the same modest house where he lived before. He is studying in the same school, he has the same teachers --because these rotate up to the fourth grade-- the teacher who was in Wye Plantation and the other teacher whom they did not allow to go, and his same classmates from first grade are still with him and will be until the fourth grade. Also, in the middle of this month his father began working in the same modest work place because that is what he wanted. Everybody wants him to visit. Because not only the little boy but his father also became very respected in our country. He resisted all pressures, even when they tried to buy him out with his son, with promises to return him the child if he stayed to live in the United States. Millions of dollars, and he never wavered, not for one second. (APPLAUSE) It seems to me that he is an example. On this point I should say that I will not elaborate on the details, we can send printed material, that way I will save time. But you will hear more about the child.

We strongly believe in the idea that this little boy should be given the best possible education. Everything would be meaningless if this boy came home and were not really a good student and a good person. They are a good example for our people, and to a certain degree, a good example for many millions of people around the world.

Our people will always thank those of you who were so worried and those lawmakers who spoke here and others who fought so hard as well as the Council of Churches and the various other churches who honorably defended such a just cause.

In the same token I should say that our people will never forget and will always thank the American people who spoke out en masse in favor of the legitimate rights of a father and his son. (APPLAUSE) Once more I said to myself: the American people are very idealistic, therefore, for them to support an unjust cause they first have to be deceived, they have to be made to believe, like in Vietnam and other places, that that was right. In this case, they learned the truth due to a variety of factors, particularly through the mass media which broadcast footage of 400,000 mothers marching, hundreds of thousands of children marching, a million people marching in a struggle that extended for seven months and which still continues against the Cuban Adjustment Act, for the victims it creates. That struggle is also being waged against the Torricelli Act, the Helms-Burton Act, the blockade and the economic war, in fact for respect and peace for our country. This is what we swore to do there, in Baraguá, the site of Antonio Maceo’s historic protestation, and we are still struggling for those aims today.

When the U.S. public learned the truth, they supported the child and his family in numbers that rose to over 80% and which among African-Americans at the height of the events reached 92%. (APPLAUSE) Our people will never forget that.

I am not claiming that our country is a perfect model of equality and justice. We believed at the beginning that when we established the fullest equality before the law and complete intolerance for any demonstration of sexual discrimination in the case of women, or racial discrimination in the case of ethnic minorities, these phenomena would vanish from our society. It was some time before we discovered that marginality and racial discrimination with it are not something that one gets rid of with a law or even with ten laws, and we have not managed to eliminate them completely, even in 40 years.

There has never been nor will there ever be a case where the law is applied according to ethnic criteria. However, we did discover that the descendents of those slaves who had lived in the slave quarters were the poorest and continued to live, after the supposed abolition of slavery, in the poorest housing.

There are marginal neighborhoods; there are hundreds of thousand of people who live in marginal neighborhoods, and not only blacks and mixed race people, but whites as well. There are marginal whites, too, and all this we inherited from the previous social system. I told you that our country is on its way to a new era. I hope someday to be able to speak to you of the things we are doing today and how we are going to continue to do them.

We do not have the money to build housing for all the people who live in what we could call marginal conditions. But we have lots of other ideas which will not wait until the end of times and which our united and justice loving people will implement to get rid of even the tiniest vestiges of marginality and discrimination. I have faith that we will succeed because that is the endeavor today of the leaders of our youth, our students and our people.

I shall not say more, I am simply saying that we are aware that there is still marginality in our country. But, there is the will to eradicate it with the proper methods for this task to bring more unity and equality to our society. (APPLAUSE)

On behalf of my Homeland, I promise to keep you informed about the progress of our efforts.

When those American friends went to Cuba and talked to us of the two cases I mentioned, Sankofa and Mumia, they supplied me with detailed information about their lives and the injustices committed against them. The televised round tables helped a lot to spread awareness about the seriousness of what was happening. It is not a disgrace to be poor, the errors that any person might commit as a child or a teenager are not a disgrace. What is a disgrace is that in the century which is just beginning, with all the technological advances that have been made, when humankind even has aspirations to populate the planet Mars, there are children, teenagers and adults on our planet living in conditions of marginality (APPLAUSE), and that in many countries on top of being marginalized they are discriminated against.

This is the last thing I will talk about. There is only this page left to explain to you about a news item that came out today. The pastor of this church spoke about it, and referred to a sign. It seems incredible to me that the simplest thing in the world has made big news. I thought big news had to be something that was happening in the world, the subjects that were being discussed at the UN Summit Meeting, what we had to do to save humankind and not only Africa. At the rate we are going, not only Africans will vanish but all of us as well.

At this rate, with these models of consumerism which lead to the destruction of the natural means of life, of the atmosphere, to shortages and pollution of drinking water and of the seas, to climatic changes, natural disasters, to poverty, to deeper and widening gaps within countries and between countries, you can state with mathematical precision that the social and economic order which exists in the world today is unsustainable. I feel that these are truly important issues. I was surprised to see that the big news, almost a scandal, was something that happened almost accidentally at the United Nations yesterday. Before I came here I found myself obliged to write a brief clarifying note. I called it “About greeting president Clinton” and it reads thus:

“After the lunch offered by the UN Secretary General, at the end of the Millennium Summit opening session, we were asked to move to an adjacent room for the official photo. We walked toward that room, one following the other, through a narrow space between tables. Then, I perceived President Clinton standing hardly four meters ahead greeting various Heads of States passing by him. He was shaking everyone’s hand out of courtesy. I could not run away to avoid him, neither could he. In both cases it would have been a shameful cowardice. Thus, I followed the others. In about two minutes I was in front of him. Just like everyone before me, I stopped for a few seconds and with due courtesy and dignity I greeted him (APPLAUSE) and he did exactly the same thing; then, I proceed forward. Anything else would have been rude and improper. Everything lasted less than 20 seconds.

“That simple event was soon known and various media reported it kindly. There were soon rumors, and official press spokesmen lacking the right information began giving different versions.

“The Miami Mafia grew hysteric. To them, the President had committed a great crime. They can be such bigots!

“As for myself, I am pleased with my respectful and civilized behavior toward the President of the country which hosted the Summit.”

Today, more rumors and official news reporting that I had walked over to the place where the President was standing. I had no need to do that. Everyone knows that no honorable Cuban would ever beg for a greeting or any honor.

This would be all. I ask your forgiveness for having gone over my time. Thank you. (APPLAUSE)

New York, 22 September 2000

TOP
comments to: comments@ipoaa.com