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(Part Two)
Lula warmly reminded me of the first time he
visited our country in 1985 to take part in a
meeting organized by Cuba to analyze the
overwhelming problem of the foreign debt;
participants representing a wide spectrum of
political, religious, cultural and social
tendencies presented and discussed their
opinions, concerned about the asphyxiating
drama.
The meetings took place throughout the year.
Leaders of worker, peasant, student and other
groups assembled to examine the various
subjects. He was one of these leaders, already
well known to us and abroad for his direct and
vibrant message, that of a young worker leader.
At that time, Latin America owed 350 billion
dollars. I told him that in that year of
intense struggle I had written long letters to
the President of Argentina, Raúl Alfonsín, to
persuade him discontinue the payments on that
debt. I knew the position of Mexico, unmoved in
the payment of its enormous debt, but not
indifferent to the outcome of the battle, and
the special political situation of Brazil. The
Argentine debt was sufficiently large after the
disasters of the military government to justify
an attempt to open up a breach in that
direction. I did not succeed. A few years
later, the debt with the interests rose to 800
billion; it grew twofold and it had already been
paid.
Lula explains to me how that year was different.
He says that Brazil has no debt today either
with the International Monetary Fund or with the
Paris Club, and that it has 190 billion US
dollars in its reserves. I assumed that his
country had paid enormous sums in order to
comply with those institutions. I explained to
him about Nixon's colossal fraud on the world
economy, when in 1971 he unilaterally suspended
the gold standard that had limited the issuing
of paper money. Until then the dollar had
maintained a balance in relation to its value in
gold. Thirty years earlier, the United States
had almost all the reserves in this metal. If
there was a lot of gold, they bought it up; if
there was a shortage, they sold. The dollar
played the part of international exchange
currency, under the privileges granted to the US
at Bretton Woods in 1944.
The most developed powers had been destroyed by
the war. Japan, Germany, the USSR and the rest
of Europe had barely any of this metal in their
reserves. One ounce of gold could be bought for
as little as 35 dollars; today you need 900
dollars.
The United States, I said, bought up properties
all over the world minting dollars, and exercise
sovereign privileges over such properties
acquired in other countries. Nevertheless,
nobody wants the dollar to devaluate any
further, because almost all countries accumulate
dollars, that is, paper money, that devaluates
constantly as a result of that unilateral
decision made by the President of the United
States.
Presently, the currency reserves of China,
Japan, Southeast Asia and Russia combined amount
to three trillion dollars (3,000,000,000,000);
it’s an astronomical figure. If you add the
dollar reserves of Europe and the rest of the
world, you will see that this all comes to a
mountain of money whose value depends on what
the government of one country decides to do.
Greenspan, who for more than 15 years was the
chairman of the Federal Reserve, would have died
in a panic had he been faced with such
situation. How high can U.S. inflation climb?
How many new jobs can this country create this
year? How long will its machinery to mint paper
money last before its economy collapses, besides
using the war to conquer other nations’ natural
resources?
As a result of the harsh measures imposed on the
defeated German state at Versailles in 1918,
when a republican regime came to power, the
German Mark devaluated to such an extent that
you needed tens of thousands of them to buy one
dollar. Such crisis fed German nationalism and
contributed extraordinarily to Hitler’s absurd
ideas. He was looking for a scapegoat. Many of
the most important scientific and financial
talents as well as writers were Jewish. They
were persecuted. Among them was Einstein, the
author of the theory stating that energy is
equal to mass multiplied by the square of the
speed of light; it made him famous. Also Marx,
who was born in Germany, and many of the Russian
Communists were of Jewish descent, whether or
not they actively practiced the Hebrew
religion.
Hitler did not lay the blame for the human drama
on the capitalist system, rather he blamed the
Jews. Based on crude prejudices, what he really
wanted was “vital Russian space” for his
Teutonic master race, dreaming of building a
millennial empire.
In 1917, by the Balfour Declaration, the
British decided to create the State of Israel
within its colonial empire, located on territory
inhabited by the Palestinians who had a
different religion and culture; in that part of
the world, other ethnic groups coexisted for
many centuries before our era, among them the
Jews. Zionism became popular among the
Americans, who rightly detested the Nazis, and
whose financial markets were controlled by
representatives of that movement. That state
today is practicing the principles of apartheid;
it has sophisticated nuclear weapons and it
controls the most important financial centers in
the United States. It was used by this country
and its European allies to supply nuclear
weapons to that other apartheid, the one in
South Africa, so that they might be used against
the Cuban internationalist combatants who were
fighting the racists in the south of Angola if
they were to cross the Namibian border.
Immediately afterwards, I spoke to Lula about
Bush’s adventurous policies in the Middle East.
I promised to send him the article that was to
be published in Granma the next day, on
January 16th. I would personally
sign the copy he would be getting. Before he
left, I would also give him the article written
by one of the most influential U.S.
intellectuals, Paul Kennedy, about the
connection between food and oil prices.
You are a food producer, I added, and you have
just discovered important reserves of light
crude. Brazil has an area of 5,333,750 square
miles and 30 percent of the world’s water
reserves. The planet’s population needs
increasing amounts of food, and you are great
food exporters. If you have grains rich in
proteins, oils and carbohydrates –be they fruits
like the cashew nuts, almonds, or pistachio;
legumes such as peanut; soybean, with more than
35% protein, and sunflower seeds; or grains like
wheat and corn— you can produce all the meat or
milk you want. I didn’t mention others on a long
list.
I continued with my explanation saying that in
Cuba, we had a cow that broke the world record
in milk production, a Holstein-Zebu hybrid.
Right away Lula named her: “White Udder!” (Ubre
Blanca), he exclaimed. He remembered her name.
I went on to say that she would produce 110
litres of milk a day. She was like a factory,
but she had to have more than 40 kilograms of
fodder, the most she could chew and swallow in a
24-hour period, a mixture where soy meal, a
legume that is very difficult to grow in Cuban
soil and climate, is a basic ingredient. You
now have the two things: safe supplies of fuel,
raw food materials and manufactured food
products.
The end of cheap food has already been
announced. I ask him, What do you think will do
the dozens of countries with many hundreds of
millions of inhabitants who have neither the one
nor the other? This means that the United
States has a huge external dependency which is
also a weapon. It could use all its reserves of
land, but the people of that country are not
ready for that. They are producing ethanol from
corn, therefore, they are taking a great amount
of this caloric grain off the market, I added
making my point.
On the same subject, Lula tells me that
Brazilian producers are already selling the 2009
corn crop. Brazil is not as dependent on corn
as Mexico or Central America. I think that the
United States cannot keep up fuel production
from corn. This, I say, confirms a reality with
regards to the sudden and incontrollable rise of
food prices which will affect many peoples.
You, on the other hand, can rely on a favorable
climate and loose soil; ours tends to be clayish
and sometimes as hard as cement. When we
received tractors from the Soviets and the other
Socialist countries, they would break down and
we had to buy special steel in Europe to
manufacture them here. In our country we have
lots of clay-based black or red soils. Working
them with dedication, they can produce for the
family what the peasants in the Escambray call
“high consumption”. They were receiving food
rations from the State and also consuming their
own production. The climate has changed in Cuba,
Lula, I said.
Our soil is not suitable for the large scale
commercial production of cereals, as required to
meet the necessities of a population of almost
12 million people, and the cost in machinery and
fuel imported by the nation, at today’s prices,
would be very high.
Our media prints news about oil production in
Matanzas, reductions in costs and other positive
aspects. But nobody says that the prices in
hard currency must be shared with foreign
partners who invest in the necessary
sophisticated machinery and technology. Besides,
we do not have the required labor force to
intensively take part in cereal production as
the Vietnamese and Chinese do, growing rice
plant by plant and often reaping two or even
three harvests a year. It has to do with the
location and the historical tradition of the
land and its settlers. They did not first go
through the large scale mechanization of modern
harvesters.
In Cuba, quite a while ago now, the sugarcane
cutters and the workers in the mountain coffee
plantations have abandoned the fields,
logically. Also, a large number of construction
workers, some from the same origins, have
abandoned the work brigades and have become
self-employed workers. The people are aware of
the high cost of fixing up a home. There is the
cost of the material, plus the high cost of the
manpower. The first can be solved, the second
has no solution –as some would believe– throwing
pesos into the street without their due backing
in convertible currency, which would not be
dollars anymore but Euros and Yuans,
increasingly expensive, if all together we
succeed in saving international economy and
peace.
Meanwhile, we have been creating and we should
keep on creating reserves of foods and fuel. In
case of a direct military attack, the manual
work force would be multiplied.
In the short time Lula and I spent together, two
and a half hours, I would have liked to
summarize in just a few minutes the almost 28
years that have gone by, not since the time he
first visited Cuba, but from the time I met him
in Nicaragua. This time he was the leader of an
immense nation whose fate, however, depends on
many aspects that are common to all the peoples
on this planet.
I asked his permission to speak about our
conversation freely and at the same time,
discretely.
As he stands in front of me, smiling and
friendly, and I listen to him speaking with
pride about his country, about the things they
are doing and those they plan on doing, I think
about his political instincts. I had just
finished quickly looking over a hundred-page
report on Brazil and the growth of relations
between our two countries. He was the man I met
in the Sandinista capital, Managua; he was
someone who connected closely with our
Revolution. I neither spoke to him, nor would I
ever speak to him, about anything that could be
construed as interfering in the political
process of Brazil, but he himself, right at the
beginning, said: Do you remember, Fidel, when we
spoke at the Sao Paulo Forum, and you told me
that unity among the Latin American left-wing
was necessary if we were to secure our
progress? Well, we are now moving forward in
that direction.
Immediately he speaks to me with pride about
what Brazil is today and its great
possibilities, bearing in mind its advances in
science, technology, mechanical industry, energy
and other areas, bound up with its enormous
agricultural potential. Of course, he includes
the high level of Brazil’s international
relations, which he describes enthusiastically,
and the relations he is ready to develop with
Cuba. He speaks vehemently about the social
work of the Workers' Party which today is
supported by all the Brazilian left-wing
parties, which are far from having a
parliamentary majority.
There is no doubt that it was a part of the
things we analyzed years ago when we spoke. Back
then time flew by quickly, but now every year is
multiplied by ten, at a rhythm which is
difficult to follow.
I wanted also to talk to him about that and
about many other things. It’s hard to tell
which one of us had the greater need to
communicate ideas. As for me, I supposed that
he would be leaving the next day and not early
that same evening, according to the flight plan
that had been scheduled before we met. It was
approximately five o’clock in the afternoon.
What happened was a kind of contest as to how we
would be using the time. Lula, smart and
quick-witted, took his revenge at a meeting with
the press, when, smiling and cunning as you can
see in the photos, he told the reporters that he
had only talked for half an hour and Fidel had
talked for two. Of course, with the privilege
of seniority, I used up more time than he did.
You have to discount the time taking photographs
of each other, since I borrowed a camera and
became a reporter: He followed suit.
I have here 103 pages of dispatches reporting
what Lula said to the press, the photos taken of
him and the confidence he communicated about
Fidel’s health. Truly, he left no space for the
reflection published on January 16th
that I had just finished writing the day before
his visit. He took up the entire space and this
is equivalent to his enormous territory,
compared to the miniscule land surface of Cuba.
I told him how happy I was that he had decided
to visit Cuba, even without the assurance that
he would be able to see me. As soon as I knew
that, I decided to sacrifice anything, like my
exercises, rehab and recovery, just so I could
be with him and talk extensively.
At that moment, even though I knew that he would
be leaving that same day, I was unaware of the
urgency in his departure. Evidently, the health
condition of the Vice President of Brazil,
according to his own statement, urged him to
take off so that he could arrive in Brasilia at
around dawn the next day, in the middle of
spring. Yet, another long and hectic day for our
friend.
A strong and persistent downpour fell on his
residence while Lula waited for the photos and
two other bits of material, together with my
notes. He left that night for the airport under
the rain. If he had seen the front page of
Granma: "2007, the third rainiest year in
more than 100 years", he would have been able to
understand what I had told him about the climate
change.
Well then, the sugar harvest in Cuba has begun,
along with the so-called dry season. The sugar
crop yield is only at nine percent. How much
would it cost to grow sugar for export at ten
cents a pound, when the purchasing power of one
cent is almost fifty times less than at the time
of the triumph of the Revolution in January of
1959? Reducing the costs of these and other
products to fulfil our commitments, to satisfy
our consumption, to create reserves and develop
other production, is highly commendable; but not
even in our wildest dreams can we find easy
solutions to our problems, the solutions are not
just around the corner.
Among many other topics, we discussed the
inauguration of the new President of Guatemala,
Álvaro Colom. I told him that I had seen the
ceremony in its entirety and the social
commitments made by the newly elected
President. Lula mentioned that what we can see
today in Latin America was born in 1990 when we
decided to create the Sao Paulo Forum: “We made
a decision here, in a conversation we had. I
had lost the election and you came to lunch at
my home in San Bernardo."
My conversation with Lula was just beginning,
and I still have many things to tell and ideas
to offer, that might perhaps be useful.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 23, 2008
Part
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