Speech given by Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee and President of the Council of State and Council of Ministers, in the closing ceremony of the first International Congress on Culture and Development. International Convention Center, June 11, 1999, "Year of the 40th Anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution". 

Esteemed ministers and culture leaders in the countries of Latin America or Ibero-America,

Distinguished guests,

Dear delegates to the first International Congress on Culture and Development,

It seems to me that the organizers are satisfied with the results of both meetings.

Among the subjects discussed --and undoubtedly there were many and of great value-- some caught my particular attention. I find they are among the subjects related to culture and politics that I mostly appreciate. For example, the need for states to promote a correct policy of environmental education; the importance of history to convey values and defend the peoples’ identity; the need to reject colonialist or hegemonic models; the advisability of avoiding damages to the national identity from tourism; the necessity to meditate on the current world, to build a public awareness and to transmit ideas which I consider of basic importance; the urgent need to foster a true revolution of man’s ethic through his education and the implementation of the right cultural policies. This is really the first time that I see this last subject so clearly formulated.

Finally, there is an item 12, which I do not know if absolutely everybody will agree with but at least I do, and it reads: "The capitalist economy cannot guarantee the prospective development of humanity because it does not take into account the cultural and human losses that result from its own expansion". I would go a little bit further and say that not only does it not guarantee the prospective development of humanity but that, as a system, it puts at risk its very existence.

You urged me to say a few words the day that the Congress opened and I touched on an essential point related to the transfer of ideas.

I do not know how much discussion there has been on the ways to implement that principle. I do know, however, that as a fundamental part of the integration policy that is up for debate you have raised the need for culture to be given a priority over the other objectives of that integration.

We feel that, united we would be worth the sum of many and very rich cultures. In this token, when we think about Our Americas, as [José] Martí called it, the Americas down from the Río Bravo [Río Grande] --although it should have been from the Canadian border because that portion also belonged to our Americas until an insatiable expansionist neighbor seized the whole territory of the west of what is today the United States of America-- it is that integration which I have in mind, but including the Caribbean nations.

The Caribbean nations are still not present in these Ibero-American Summit conferences. Fortunately, all Latin American and Caribbean countries will, for the first time, meet with the European Union in Río de Janeiro on the 28th and 29th of this month. So, the family is already growing although, in general, the Caribbean nations have been the last of the forgotten as we, Latin Americans, also were and still are forgotten.

The sum of all our cultures would make up one enormous culture and be a multiplication of our cultures. Integration should not adversely affect, but rather enrich, the culture of everyone of our countries.

In this context, when we talk about unity we still do so in a narrow framework. But I like to go beyond that. I believe in the unity of all the countries in the world, in the unity of all the peoples in the world and in a free unity, a truly free unity. I am not thinking of a fusion but of a free unity of all cultures in a truly just world, in a truly democratic world, in a world where it would be possible to apply the kind of globalization that Karl Marx talked about in his time and that [Pope] John Paul II talks about today when he speaks of the globalization of solidarity.

We still need a good definition of what the globalization of solidarity means. If we take this thought to its final consequences we will realize that item 12 is a reality because I wonder if the capitalist system can guarantee the globalization of solidarity. No one speaks about the "globalization of charity", which would be very good in the meantime, but let us hope the day will come when charity is unnecessary. That will be the day when the sentiments of solidarity become universal and the spirit of solidarity goes global.

I say this to make it clear that I am in no way a narrow nationalist or a chauvinist. I hold man in a higher concept and cherish more ambitious dreams for the future of the human species, which has gone through so much hardship to end up being what it is today, and accumulated such knowledge as it has today, while still not deserving the description of a truly human species. What we presently have is still very far from that but, perhaps, the further it seems, the closer it actually is, since this humanity is going through a colossal crisis and it is only from colossal crises that great solutions may come.

That is what history has been teaching us so far, up to this very moment when the real globalization, which was not even mentioned a few years ago, has been made possible and inevitable by the enormous advances in science, technology and communications. People communicate with one another in a matter of seconds, wherever they are.

Suffice it to say that it is more difficult for me to communicate with our minister of Foreign Affairs here than with our ambassador in the United Nations. The ambassador there has a cellular phone and even if he is in the meeting room beside his colleague, the U.S. ambassador --with an empty seat between them-- he can talk over the phone. Just today, when the phone connection was made and I asked where he was --whether in the mission, at home or in the United Nations-- he said: "I am in the car." I said: "In the car! But I hear you so well!" He said: "Yes, we have stopped at the traffic light now." And we continued talking for several more minutes. It is incredible, really.

Technological advances explain the accuracy of the famous satellites guiding the missiles and the smart weapons which are not so smart that they do not fail disturbingly often, that is, if they actually fail unintentionally.

The incident with the Chinese embassy [in Belgrade] seemed so strange, so bizarre; then in trying to explain it they said the problem was that they had been bombing guided by some old outdated maps. So, due to some outdated maps a bomb could have fallen here too, in this meeting room.

Money moves rapidly, too, and speculative operations with currencies are carried out at great speed for a trillion dollars every day; and they are not the only speculative operations taking place, nor is it only with currencies they speculate.

At the time of Maghellan, it took I do not know how many months to go round the world and now it can be done in barely 24 hours.

Me too, I went round the world not long ago, stopping off in Denmark, China, Vietnam, Japan, Canada and back to Havana. I then began playing with the numbers and doing some calculations and I realized that flying East, on a faster plane than mine, it is possible to leave China early on Monday morning and arrive in Havana on Sunday afternoon.

We have seen the world change in a few decades.

If you do not mind I will introduce an issue, just like you have introduced many others, and I would call it Culture and Sovereignty.

I will rely on concrete facts and I am not talking theory or philosophy but things that we can all see, that even a near-sighted person can see: namely, that there can be no culture without sovereignty. [Minister of Culture] Abel [Prieto] outlined how a handful of brilliant personalities succeeded in saving the national culture from American neocolonialism and hegemonism in Cuba.

Another country has more merit than we do: Puerto Rico, which has been a Yankee colony for 100 years now but where neither their language nor culture have been destroyed. It is admirable! (Applause)

Of course, imperialism has today much more powerful means to destroy cultures, to impose other cultures and homogenize cultures --much more powerful means. Perhaps, at this moment, it can be more influential in 10 years than it was in the past 100 years. However, the example I gave you sheds some light on the peoples’ capacity to resist and on the value of culture. The Puerto Ricans were deprived of all sovereignty and, despite everything, they have resisted.

Although it is possible to find examples to show that there can be culture, or that a certain degree of culture can be preserved without sovereignty, what is inconceivable or unimaginable in today’s world and toward the future is the existence of sovereignty without culture.

While you, Congress delegates, ministers and government leaders of culture in Ibero-America were here yesterday involved in your debates, a great battle was being fought at the United Nations for sovereignty and we would say a major battle for culture, too. Yes, because I say that, today, the means in the hands of those who dominate the world economically and almost politically are much more powerful than they ever were.

That great battle had to do with the Security Council meeting which discussed a draft resolution on the war unleashed against Yugoslavia, basically against Serbia. In my view, it was a historic battle because imperialism and its allies --or better still, imperialism and those who support it against their own best interests-- are waging a massive struggle against the principle of sovereignty, an awesome offensive against sovereignty.

We could see this coming. After the collapse of the socialist camp, the USSR disintegrated and a single superpower remained in the world. It was noticeable that that superpower --of well known origins whose diabolical methods and principles are also very well known-- could not refrain from trying to use all its vast power to impose its standards and its interests on the world, carefully at first and then by increasingly stark means.

We are already looking at an imperialism that is using all its might and force to sweep away anything that stands in its way and culture is one of those things very much in its way. They are the owners of the vast majority of the communication networks, that is, 60 percent of the world communication networks and of the most powerful and unrivalled television channels. And, they have the almost absolute monopoly of the films shown in the world.

It can be said that France, which is fighting an almost heroic battle to preserve its culture as much as possible against the United States cultural invasion, is the only country in Europe, that I know of, where the American films shown account for less than 50 percent of the total. In the other countries of the Old Continent, it is above 50 percent. In some of them it can be 60, 65, 70 and even 80 percent. As for television series, it is 60, 70, 80 and 90 percent, so that about 70 percent of the television series shown and 75 percent of the video cassettes distributed are from the United States; these figures that you must have heard before. Ramonet [a French journalist] writes about those figures. It is an almost absolute monopoly.

There are major Latin American countries where 90 percent of the films and series shown come from the United States and you know the characteristics of what comes there. Very little material comes from Europe, so in those aspects there is a total cultural colonization by the United States.

It goes without saying that, in our case, it is extremely difficult to find films of some moral and cultural value. How do we escape from films that show violence, sex and the Mafia almost exclusively? How do we escape from so many alienating and poisonous films that they distribute throughout the world? It becomes difficult for us, for our television practically without commercials, as I said to you, to find films to show on weekends; and people are often critical of what is shown. On the other hand, they are copies because we should say, in all sincerity, that as we were blockaded and all our imports prevented we found ourselves forced to copy.

Some things are easy to copy, including films, and I think that the comrades in our prestigious ICAIC [Cuban Films Institute] in the early years --and rightly so, it is a historical merit-- specialized in copying U.S. films. Then, there were some good ones, I mean, in the past there used to be more good American and European films. They were worth watching.

The commercial spirit has so pervasively penetrated culture as to become overwhelming. Which country in Europe can spend 300 million US dollars or more on a film? Which country in Europe can make profits of $500 million, or even $1.2 billion trading on paraphernalia related to a film? Those are companies that exploit everything, and the sales of goods associated to an expensive and highly publicized film actually give them higher profits than the screening of the film.

Actually, those films can cover all their costs and produce high profits in the United States market alone. Therefore, as you can easily understand, they can sell the films much more cheaply anywhere in Europe or the world. Who can compete with them?

Still, those European countries, some of them in a real cultural shock and others relatively indifferent to the phenomenon, who with their unity and integration expect to develop their economic, technological, scientific and cultural possibilities, --practically as a necessity for survival-- even those countries support the imperialist policy. They are supporting a policy aimed at sweeping away the principles of sovereignty. And it is not the case of very small countries, small islands or very poor underdeveloped nations whose per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 200 or 300 US dollars a year, but rather countries whose per capita GDP is 20, 25, 30 and even 40,000 US dollars.

They, of course, are giving up national sovereignty to the extent that they are uniting, opening borders, applying the free circulation of capital, of workers, of technicians and creating common institutions that provide advantages only for the European countries. The South countries must arrive in little boats and enter illegally.

Those countries are giving up their national currencies, and with good logic, in order to adopt a common currency. That is different from adopting a foreign currency governed by the U.S. Federal Reserve System which is tantamount to annexing the country to the United States.

What would become of us, who have, at least, demonstrated that it is possible to resist a double blockade and such a difficult period as we have gone through during these years? How would that have been possible without our own currency? To this I would add, as in passing, that we have revalued our currency seven times. From 1994, when one US dollar bought 150 pesos, to 1999 or the end of 1998 --let us say almost five years; the whole of 1994 should be counted-- we have revalued the currency seven times. Today, one US dollar can only buy about 20 pesos. No country has done that, I tell you. None!

The formulas of the [International] Monetary Fund, all the recipes that it imposes and that you know so well, where do they lead? Sometimes, through privatization or savings the countries are able to accumulate major reserves to protect their currency but then, in a number of days or weeks, they lose everything. We have seen that happen in a matter of days. We neither have nor need those enormous reserves. Other countries have them and lose them.

There is only one country --one single country in the world!-- that does not even need a reserve because it prints the banknotes that circulate throughout the world; the country that, as we have said on other occasions, first converted gold into paper by unilaterally suspending the free conversion of its banknotes and which changed the gold in its reserves for the paper currency that it printed --a currency accepted by everybody for its equivalent value in gold. Later, then, it converted the paper into gold, the miracle dreamed of by the alchemists of the Middle Ages. In other words, they print a piece of paper that circulates as if it were gold. I am explaining the phenomenon in a simple way although the procedure is more complicated than that.

They use Treasury bonds and apply different mechanisms. But, in essence, the fact is they can afford it because they print the currency that circulates worldwide, they print the banknotes kept as a reserve in the banks of every country in the world. They print the paper, they buy with it and the others keep the paper --a large part of it, not all of it, of course. Therefore, they are the ones who print the world's reserve currency.