Castro anticipates social explosions in Third World

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The following are excerpts from a press conference given by Cuban President Fidel Castro to Cuban and foreign journalists in Havana on April 3, 1990. For reasons of space we have selected one question and answer from the conference. The excerpts are reprinted from the April 22 edition of Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party.

Stella Calloni [journalist for Argentina's daily Sur]: Comandante, there is a sort of wave of pessimism going around with people who say there has been a political earthquake in the world. An earthquake leads to shifts, some end up well and others end up very badly, right? However, are those who are well-off, say the overconfident First World [imperialist countries], are they really as well-off as they think?

Fidel Castro: The situation in the First World, or a group of countries in that so-called First World, looks good in economic terms.

That world is made up of those who plundered us for centuries, those who financed their development with our sweat and blood—I mean that large group of countries which were colonized and plundered and which are located in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. And not only did they plunder us for centuries, they are still plundering us and I think they are plundering us now more than ever.

When I visited the Latin America Memorial in Brazil, I put forth the idea that what they take from us now in one year-in Latin America alone-is more than what they took from us in three centuries....

[T]he net capital leaving Latin America right now is between $25 billion and $30 billion, and this doesn't include unequal ..Earth First!

(continued from page 16) stress the need for widespread environmental consciousness and it did provide a lot of alternative ideas for how to remedy the environmental situations.

The problem with Earth Day was that it offered a lot of personal solutions, blamed a lot people for the problem without addressing the political issues, without addressing the economic issues. They said, "Buy more efficient refrigerators," without questioning the whole issue of large-scale industrial fośsil-fuel-burning or nuclear-burning power plants.

S.A.: Could you explain to our readers what Redwood Summer is? 10 SOCIALIST ACTION terms of trade or capital outflow, which is considerable. My estimate was about $30 billion net—a conservative estimate-and that what they take every year is equal in value of 3000 tons of gold....

That wealth and opulence is based on the plunder of our countries.

Now with the changes in Europe, these countries of the First World want to turn the former socialist countries into new capitalist countries that will participate in the plunder....

We know what's happening for instance in Poland. The facts are well known. There is almost a war between Walesa and the Polish prime minister; they evidently disagree. At the end of last week there was talk of starting a strike in Gdansk, in the famous shipyards, there is another Solidarity, I think it's called Solidarity 80, which charges Walesa and the government with having implemented austerity policies that are unbearable for the people, whose real income has been cut by half. In other words, a very interesting phenomenon is at work, and historians and political experts will be able to study the construction of capitalism in all those countries.

This is one of the priority tasks for the First World now. Let's see what happens; so far it is going well—as long as our countries accept their continued plunder.

But how long can this situation be maintained? I doubt it will be for very long, and the situation in Latin America shows it. For example, inflation. Inflation in Latin America was 1000 percent overall in 1989, in some countries more and others less. In your country [Argentina] I think it was 3500 percent, wasn't it? More or less, in Brazil it was 1476 [percent], if memory serves, that's the figure I had. In Peru it was on the order Cherney: Redwood Summer is modeled after the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi. One of the political realities back in Mississippi in 1964 was that as long as only Mississippi was watching, bigotry was going to continue-and let's face it, it still continues today. But it was very important to shed the national limelight onto the situation which led to the civil rights act of 1964.

In the same way, Americans seem fixated on deforestation in the tropics without realizing that it's happening in their own country. By putting a call to college students to come to Northern California and by modeling it after Mississippi, we have drawn a tremendous amount of enthusiasm from young people who feel that they're missing something.

JULY 1990 of 3000 and some percent also. This is the situation in Latin America, an uncontrollable phenomenon....

During this visit, in many of the interviews I compared the social situation in Latin America and Cuba, but I especially discussed the social situation in Latin America: infant mortality of 65 per 1000 live births in the first year; 85 [infant deaths] between 0 and 5 years per 1000 live births. In Cuba the rate is 11.1 in the first year and about 13 between 0 and 5 years, lower than in many developed countries and it is becoming one of the first in the world, and we are in the Caribbean and from the Third World.

Social situation: Illiteracy: growing. Poverty-yesterday there was a dispatch— between poor and very poor there are 220 million Latin Americans. And the problem of inflation is getting worse, not better.

Nutrition: Twenty-five percent of the Latin American population is undernourished. Employment: Thirty percent of the Latin American population on average is unemployed or underemployed.

I was in the wealthiest city in Latin America, in Sao Paulo, the most developed. I was told it has 20,000 factories—Lula told me when I went to see him; he is an industrial worker. Seventeen million people in the greater Sao Paulo area. When I talked to the mayor of Sao Paulo-she isn't in charge of all 17 million, it's a smaller area, because there are several municipalities in the big city—she told me: "I have 300,000 children without schools." Three hundred thousand without schools! She said it with sorrow. Then she added, "There is an area of 3 million people without a single hospital." An area of 3 million people without a single hospital!

This is the most developed, the We certainly are drawing the connection that this is a civil rights issue. Not just civil rights for the earth, but civil rights for people too, since these forests give us our clean water, our clean air, our rainfall, and so forth.

So what people are going to do for Redwood Summer is come to Northern California, check into one of our offices, and then they will be sent to one of our base camps for two days of intensive non-violence training. And then, they can either participate in non-violent civil disobedience or in the dozens and dozens of support jobs that go along with that-like working in the kitchens, videotaping, childcare, etc.

S.A.: We've been told that Judi Bariwho is just upstairs now in this hospital was singled out specifically for the work There is terrible inequality in the health indices of the United States.

The services we have now, the situation of women in our country should be compared to that of Latin America: 58 percent of our technicians are women, and the proportion is growing. When I explained this to the Brazilians, the believers, the Christians, who met with me, to the intellectuals, they were amazed when I gave them the information that 38 percent of our workforce is made up of women; [ I told them about] the number of day-care centers we have so that these women could join the work force fully and achieve a degree of equality which is still far removed for women in Latin America....

Those are the realities which I explained to the Latin Americans-not to mention the neglected children. There are more than 30 million neglected children in the streets of Latin America, more than 30 million! These figures are very grim. What future is there in all this? I don't see any. And they continue the plunder and the net export of capital. What is the future for all those countries? All this must explode.

That's why amidst the pessimism, I tell you that the system prevailing in the world has no future; the models of development they exported to countries of the Third World have no future...

These are the facts and so the current feeling of overconfidence won't last very long. This overconfidence will be temporary because the world is far from being a paradise, the world is far from having solved these problems, and what is happening is that they are getting worse all the time.

The volcano is there, in the huge humanity that makes up the so-called developing countries, which is a lie because they are not developing countries, they are underdeveloping countries since the gap between the most advanced and the Third World countries is growing, is widening. That's the reality today.

I don't see what they base their overconfidence on. I think it will be a passing feeling and people will react. The world revolutionary and progressive forces will raise their heads and regain their morale.

she's done with timber workers.

Cherney: One of the untold stories of this case is that Judi Bari may have been targeted for assassination for her labor work. She's currently the secretary of the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] Local 1 chapter out of Fort Bragg. She was organizing Georgia-Pacific workers into the radical union-the Wobblies-creating a dual union alongside the IWA, which is the International Woodworkers of America.

This is basically and socially unacceptable to the timber industry. They can't have an Earth Firster organizing saw-mill workers into a union. That is probably the ultimate slap in the face to the corporate timber industry. She is also one of the key organizers of Redwood Summer, even though she advocates non-violent direct action.