Fidel Castro with Cuba’s Diplomats
HAVANA TIMES, July 17 — Former President Fidel Castro met in Havana on Friday with senior Cuban Foreign Affairs officials including numerous ambassadors. His talk centered on the threats to humanity posed by possible US attacks on Iran and/or North Korea.
“What they are doing to Iran is a carbon copy of what they did to Mohamed Mossadegh, the former Iranian prime minister ousted after a coup encouraged by Washington and other Western powers when he began a process of nationalization of Iranian resources in the 1950s,” Fidel Castro was quoted as telling the diplomatic corps.
Castro —who came out of seclusion after four years of recovery outside the public view— resurfaced on July 7 and ever since has been actively reinserting himself into everyday Cuban life. The senior advisor to the government of Raul Castro has thus far kept his statements to international issues, leaving the domestic front to his brother.
PS: Achieving socialism in the U.S. or any country–Cuba included–is possible by redefining what authentic, workable socialism truly is. We believe in using the institutions of private property rights and the market for socialist construction. This involves direct cooperative ownership of the instruments of production by those who do the work, not by the socialist state. It involves political democracy and the natural elimination of bureaucracy.
Hubert: If Cort has a valuable point, I fail to see it. His words are typical of those who criticize others without end, yet cannot do anything in their own countries but repeat the tired old rhetoric and stand in total isolation from the people.
This isolation means that they do not have a correct political program to build a transformational political party and win the people to its banner.
As far as my own “inability” etc., all I can say is please stay tuned. We have discarded the state monopoly socialism imported into the socialist movement by the capitalist Engels and his bourgeois co-conspirator Marx, and are hoping to win a socialist cooperative republic in the U.S. within the foreseeable future.
You make a good point about North Korea. That unfortunate country does just what Engels & co. stipulate at the end of the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto: concentrates all the instruments of production in the hands of the state.
This is “state monopoly socialism,” pure and simple, and it comes directly from the minds and pens of the originators of Marxism, not from Stalin or any other nasty bureaucrat or dictator.
The same kind of blind, quasi-religious devotion to the disproven holy scriptures of Engels & Marx that is keeping the Cubans from reforming their economy along cooperative socialist lines–making use of the experience of the workers in the Mondragon cooperatives–is keeping people all over the world from getting rid of monopoly capitalism. I wish it were not so.
Grady,
Cort does have a very valuable point!
And what about your own inability to bring about a socialist transformation in your own country?
Also, can anyone explain to me what is socialist about North Korea or more to the point worth defending?
Socialism is internationalist and democratic or it is nothing at all.
I have been to Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico and a number of others and I am known worldwide and real socialists support proletarian struggles.
“The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people,”
Che Guevara
Cort: All this self-righteous criticism of Fidel and Cuba, and not a word about your own inability to win the people and make a socialist transformation in your own country.
Physician, heal thyself.
Fidel got one thing correct, the US got rid of the Mossadegh government but also the Shah by General Huysar and brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,to power in 1979. Millions of Iranians know this!
Also what happen to Cuba’s proletarin internationalism since 1979, since then ten of thousands of socialists have been assassinated by the Iranian government, trade unionists and workers put in jail, women oppressed and not a word about this.
Why is Cuba supporting a fascist government in Iran and Capitalism?