First of two interventions in the UN General Assembly IX meeting
December 11, 1964

UN General Secretary, Mister U Thant, understood our reasons. Without doubt the United States wanted to assume a new arbitrational and illegal prerrogative: that of violating the airspace of any small country. Thus, our fatherland sky continues being furrowed by U2 planes and other types of spy appearance that, in the most absolute impunity, navigate in our airspace. We have given all the necessary steps in order to end the air violations, as well as the provocations that the yankee marines accomplish against our sentry posts in the zone of Guantánamo, the low-level flights of planes over our vessels and over ships of other nationalities in international waters, the pirate assaults against various flag ships and spy infiltrations, of saboteurs and of weapons in our island. We wish to build socialism; we have identified us with the colors that openly fight for the peace; we have declared to belong to the group of not aligned countries, nevertheless we are Marxist-Leninist because the not aligned, as us, fight against imperialism. We want peace, we want to build a better life for our people and, because of this, we make everything to avoid to fall into navy provocations trap by the yankees. But we know the mentality of the United States rulers; they want to make us pay at an expensive price this peace. And we answer that this price can not surpass the dignity limits.

And Cuba reaffirms, once again, its right to have on its territory the weapons that, it considers appropriate to have and its opposition to recognize the right of any other power, even if it's a large one, to violate our soil, our territorial waters or our airspace. If Cuba subscribes collective agreements in any assembly, it will observe them faithfully; but until this not happen, it fully conserves all its rights, as any other nation.

In front of the imperialist pretexts our prime minister proclaimed the five necessary points to guarantee a solid peace in the Caribbean. They are:

First: Stop the economic embargo and all the tread and economic pressure measures that the United States apply all over the world against our country.

Second: Stop all the the subversive activities, launching or weapons disembarkation and explosive by air or sea, organization of mercenary invasions, spies infiltration and of saboteurs, all the actions effected from the territory of the United States and some accomplice countries.

Third: Stop all the pirate attacks performed from the existing bases in the United States and Puerto Rico .

Fourth: Stop all the violations in our air and naval space by the United States planes and war ships.

Fifth: Withdrawal of the Guantánamo Naval Base and restitution of the Cuban territory occupied by the United States .

No one of these elemental requirements has been satisfied, and from the Guantánamo Naval Base provocation actions against our forces continue. Such Base has been transformed into a malefactors cave and into a catapult for the introduction into our territory. We would bore this Assembly if we made a relationship at least approximate of the number of provocations of all type. Suffice it to say that its number, including the first days of this month of December, is 1323, only in 1964. The list includes minor provocations, as the violation of the limits line, the launching of objects from the territory controlled by the United States; acts of both gender sexual exhibitionism by the United States; verbal affronts. There are more serious features, as shooting small calibre weapons, weapons use directing sights to our territory and offenses to our national symbols. Very serious provocations: surpass the demarcation line, with facilities fire in the Cuban side and shoots with guns, act that was repeated 78 times during this year, with the painful balance of the death of soldier Ramón López Peña by the shoots coming from the Unites States posts located 3,5 kilometers away the northwestern coast. This serious provocation was accomplished at 19:07 of July 19, 1964, and the our Government prime minister publicly said, in July 26, that if the fact is repeated our troops would be given the order to answer the aggression. Similarly it is given the order for withdrawing the advanced lines by the Cuban forces on farther positions from the demarcation line and from building adequate housings. 1323 provocations in 340 days are almost 4 per day. Only a well disciplined army and with our moral can resist such summary of adverse acts without losing the head.

Forty-seven countries countries met in the Second Conference of Not Aligned Countries' State and Government Chiefs, in Cairo, decided, unanimously:

"The Conference, realizing with preoccupation that the foreign military bases represents, in practice, a means to exercise pressures on the nations, and to block their emancipation and their development, according to their ideological, political, economical and cultural grants, declares to support without reservation the countries that seek to obtain the suppression of the installed bases in their territory and it demands all the states the immediate evacuation of troops and bases that may have in other countries.

The Conference supports that the maintenance by the United States of America side of a military base in Guantánamo (Cuba), against the will of the government and people of Cuba and against the arrangements of the Belgrade Conference Statement, constitutes a violation to Cuba's sovereignty and territorial integrity of Cuba.

The Conference, considering that the government of Cuba declares ready to solve its controversy with the government of the United States of America about the Guantánamo base on equality bases, requests briskly the Government of the United States to present negotiations with the Cuban Government in order to vacating this base."

The government of the United States have not given any response to that instance of the Cairo Conference and intends to maintain indefinitely occupied by the force a chunk of our territory, from which it accomplishes aggressions as those before exposed.

The Organization of American States, that peoples call too "Ministery of the NorthAmerican Colonies", has "vigorously" condemned us, nevertheless it had already expelled us, ordering the member countries to breaki the commercial and diplomatic relationships with Cuba. The OAS has autorized agressions to our country, anytime, with any pretext, violating the most elemental international treaties and thoroughly ignoring UN. Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico opposed that measure with their votes; the government of the Mexican United States supports the sanction void even if it was approved later. By now we have no more relationships with the Latin American countries, except that state, and we can support that it is about the accomplishment of one of the phases prior to the direct intervention by the imperialism side.

We want to clarify, once again, that our preoccupation by Latin America is inspireded by the legacies that join us: the language we speak, the culture we feed, the standard we have in common. That we are not inspired by any other reason than to wish the release of Latin America of the United States colonial game. If some of these Latin American countries here present decided to re-establish their relationships with Cuba, we would be ready to make it based on equality and not based on the criterion that it is a gift to our government the fact of recognizing Cuba as a free country; because we have conquered our recognition with our blood in the release struggle days, we have conquered it in the defense of our beaches during the yankee invasion.

Although we reject the will of interference in the internal matters of other countries, we can not deny our friendliness toward the peoples that fight for their own release and we should honor the pledge of our government and of our people of openly express to the entire world our moral support and our solidarity to the peoples that fight in any part of the world for making real their full sovereignty rights proclaimed by the United Nations Charter.

The United States are those who interfer; they have always done it in Latin America. Cuba knows this truth since last century; but it's also known by Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Central America in general terms, Mexico, Hait and Santo Domingo.

In these recent years, in addition to our peo0ple, they have provoked direct agressions to Panama, where the Channel marines shot in cold blood to our defenceless people; Santo Domingo, whose coasts were violated by the yankee fleet to prevent the fair people's anger after the murder of Trujillo; and Colombia, whose capital city was assaulted after the rebellion provoked by the murder of Gaitán. Hidden interventions are performed through the military missions that participate in the internal repression, organizing the forces aasigned to that goal in several countries, and also in the military coup d'ètats, also called "gorilazos", that happen very often in the American Continent in these years.

Specifically, the Unites States forces intervene in the repression of the peoples of Venezuela, Colombia and Guatemala, that fight with arms for their freedom. In the first of these countries they are not only police and army counselors, but they also rule the genocide made by air against the peasant population in vast regions, and the installed yankee societies make any kind of pressures in order to increase the direct intervention.

Imperialists prepare to repress the american peoples and they are building-up the international crime. The United States intervene in America with the pretext of the free institutions defense. the day will come in which this Assembly will have acquire more maturity and ask the government of the United States to guarantee the life of the latinamerican and black peoples who live in this country, and that in its majority is NorthAmerican by origin or by adoption. How can it constitutes itself freedom guardian who kill its own sons and discriminate them every day based in the color of the skin, who sets free the killer of the blacks, and even more it protects them, while punishes the black people that demands respect for their legit freedom rights? We know today the Assembly is not in conditions to ask explainations about these facts; but it must be absolutely clear that the government of the United States is not the freedom guardian, but that it designs exploitation and oppression against world's peoples and against a large part of its own people.

To the ambigous language which with some delegates have presented the Cuba-OAS affair we answer with clear words and we proclaim with high voice that America peoples will ask the guilty governments about the betrayal... Cuba, sirs, free and sovereign, without chains that linked it to anyone, without foreign clothes withis its territory, without proconsuls who orientate its policy, can high-brow speak in this Assembly and demonstrates the justice of the phrase: "America Free Land" with which it has been denominated. Our example will bear fruits in the continent, as it's already happening in Guatemala, Colombia and Venezuela. And ig the enemy is not small neither our force is despicable, because peoples are not isolated. As Havana Second Declaration affirms: "No Latin America people is weak, because it's part of a 200 million brothers family who suffer the same poverty, who are excited by the same feelings, who have the same enemy, who all want a same better fate and who join all the world men and women solidarity.

"This epic in front of us will be written by the indigenous excited mass, the landless peasants, the exploited workers; it will be written by the progressive mass, the honest and brilliant intellectuals who are so abundant in our worried Latin America lands. Mass and ideas struggles, epic that will be accomplished by our peoples battered and spurned by imperialism, our peoples unknown until today, begin to wake-up. It was considered it as an impotent and subdued congregation and they begin to feel fear of this congregation, giant congregation of 200 million latinamericans in which the yankee monopolistic capitalism watches its hangman." "Their revenge hour, the hour developed by itself, is indicated with the accuracy of oun continent extreme to another. Now this anonymous mass, this color, dark, melancholic America, who sings in all the continent with the same sadness and disappointment; today this mass is that who starts to definitely joins History, begins to write it with its blood, starts to suffer it and to die; because nowadays through the fields and mountains of America, through its land precipices, through its plains and forests, between loneliness or the cities traffic, along the large ocean coasts and the rivers brooks begins to appear this rich in burning hearths world, full of the wish of die by "that that belongs to it", of conquest its rights delayed by almost five-hundred years by this or that. Now History will take in consideration America's poors, the exploited and humiliated, who have decided to start to write by themselves, for ever, their own history. They are seen, one after another, by the streets, in an endless march of hundred of kilometers, in order to arrive to the rulers "olimpos" and recover tehir rights, They are already seen, armed with stones, sticks, machetes, everywhere, each day, occupying land, emerge hands into the land that belongs to them and defend it with their lives; they are seen with their banners, their flags, their order words, through the mountains along the plains. And this bitterness wave touched, by the claimed justice, of trampled-on right, that starts to arise between Latin America lands, this wave will not stop. It will be growing-up with the days; because it's built by more; by the majorities under every aspect, those wfo accumulate richness with their work, create values, starts-up History wheels and that wake up of the large stultification dream to which they were been subdued."

"Because this great humankind has said enough and it's mobilizing. And its march, a giants one, will not stop until the conquest of its real independence by which they have dead more than once in vain. Now, anyway, those who die, will die as those of Cuba, those of Playa Girón; they will die by their sole, real and unavoidable independence."

All then, misters delegates, this new display of Continent, of America, is shaped and ressumed in the yell that, every day our mass proclaim as an irrefutable expression of their fight decission, paralizing invader's armed hand. Movement that is supported and understood by all the world's peoples and, specially, of the socialistic field, with the Soviet Union at the lead. This movement is: Fatherland or Death.

Most recent revision: Februar 24th, 2002.