[Reader-list] REFLECTIONS BY COMRADE FIDEL

[prakash ray]

Dear all,
I am posting Comrade Fidel's take on the US Prez elections from
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/noviembre/mar4/45reflex3-i.html.

Regards,
Prakash


REFLECTIONS BY COMRADE FIDEL

THE NOVEMBER 4TH ELECTIONS

Tomorrow will be a significant day. The world public will be following the
United States elections there. It is the most powerful nation on Earth.
Actually, with less than 5% of the world population it swallows every year
great amounts of oil and gas, minerals, raw materials, consumer goods and
sophisticated products brought from overseas. Many of these, particularly
the fuels and those extracted from mines, are non renewable.

It is the largest arms producer and exporter. Its industrial military
complex also has an insatiable domestic market. Its naval and air forces are
deployed in scores of military basis located in the territory of other
nations. The United States strategic warhead-carrying missiles can reach any
place in the world with absolute precision.

A great number of the cleverest minds in the world are uprooted from their
original countries and placed at the service of the system. It is a
parasitical and plundering empire.

It is a known fact that the black population introduced in the US territory
throughout centuries of slavery is the victim of a marked racial
discrimination.

The Democratic candidate Obama is partly black; the dark skin and features
of that race are predominant in him. He was able to study at a higher
education center where he graduated with outstanding results. He is surely
more clever, better educated and calm than his Republican adversary.

I'm analyzing tomorrow's elections when the world is enduring a serious
financial crisis –the worst since the 1930s— among many others which have
seriously affected the economy of many nations in the course of over three
fourths of a century.

The international media, the political analysts and commentators are using
part of their time to discuss the issue. Obama is considered the best
political speaker of the United States in the past decades. His compatriot
Toni Morrison, a 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, and the first one
from her ethnic group born in the United States who has been awarded such
prize --an excellent author-- has called him the future President and poet
of that nation.

I have been watching the struggle between the contenders. The black
candidate caused much amazement with his nomination in the face of strong
adversaries. He has well articulated ideas which he hammers once and again
into the voters' minds. He does not hesitate to claim that more than
Republicans or Democrats they are all Americans, the citizens he qualifies
as the most productive in the world. He says he will reduce taxes for the
middle class, where he includes practically everybody, while he will
completely remove them for the poorest and raise them for the wealthiest.
The revenues, he claims, will not the used to bailout banks.

He insists repeatedly that the ruinous spending on Bush's war in Iraq will
not be paid by the American taxpayers. He will put an end to it and bring
the US troops back home. Perhaps he is mindful of the fact that that country
had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However,
the blood has been shed of thousands of US troops, injured or killed in
battle, and the lives taken of over a million people in that Muslim nation.
It was a war of conquest imposed by the empire seeking for oil.

In light of the current financial crisis and its consequences, the American
people are more concerned over the economy than the war in Iraq. They are
anguishing over their jobs, the safety of their bank deposits and their
retirement funds, and the fear of loosing the purchasing power of their
money and the houses where they live with their families. They wish to have
the certainty that whatever the circumstances they will receive adequate
medical care and that their children will accede to higher education.

Obama is challenging and I think he has taken and will still take great
risks in a country where any extremist can legally purchase a sophisticated
modern weapon anywhere, as it was the case in the first half of the 18th
century in the west of the United States. He supports his system and he will
be get support from it. The pressing problems of the world are not really a
major source of concern to Obama, much less to the candidate who as a war
pilot dropped tens of tons of bombs on Hanoi City, that is, more than 9,375
miles away from Washington, ad this with no remorse.

When last Thursday I addressed a letter to Lula, in addition to what I
already mentioned in my Reflections of October 31, I literally wrote:
"Racism and discrimination have been present in the American society ever
since its birth, over two centuries ago. Latin Americans and blacks have
always been discriminated against there. Its citizens have been brought up
under consumerism. Humanity is objectively threatened by its mass
extermination weapons."

"The American people are more concerned over the economy that the Iraq war.
McCain is an old, bellicose and uneducated man; he is not very smart and he
is in poor health."

Finally, I said: "If my estimates were wrong and racism prevailed: if the
Republican candidate won the Presidency, the danger of a war would increase
and the peoples' opportunities to progress would be reduced. Nevertheless,
we need to fight and to build awareness about this, whoever it is who wins
this election."

When these views that I sustain are published tomorrow, nobody will have
time to say that I wrote something that could be used by any candidate to
advance his campaign. I had to be, and I have been, neutral in this
electoral competition. It is not "interference in the internal affairs of
the United States", as the State Department would put it, as respectful as
it is of other countries' sovereignty.

Fidel Castro Ruz

November 3, 2008

4:10 p.m.