No subject

has emerged. Its chapters are about of equal length, although some
are longer and some are shorter. We did not want the form to
determine the content. Texts that are essential for understanding the
problems are included. I use the method of selecting basic ideas as
found in the documents.

Making available the basic data is a responsibility of those who
really struggle for a better and fairer world.

*****

EPILOGUE The objective realities of which Belisario Betancur spoke
led Pastrana to what he no doubt did not desire when he assumed the
presidency of Colombia for his four-year term between 1998 and
2002.12

The United States is not a friend of the peoples of Latin America.
For more than a century and a half it intervened in Latin America=E2=80=99s
internal affairs, stole its territory, robbed its natural resources,
attacked its culture, imposed unequal trade, sabotaged unity efforts
going back to the era of independence, promoted conflicts between our
countries, exploited the great differences in the heart of our
societies. The nations of Latin America have suffered waves of
inflation and economic crisis while other parts of the world
developed. Despite emigration, the number of people in extreme
poverty rose, as has the number of children compelled to beg in the
big cities.

During the last fifty years, military coups and bloody tyrannies,
supported and encouraged by the United States, have meant hundreds of
thousands of =E2=80=9Cdisappeared,=E2=80=9D tortured, and murdered in Centr=
al and
South America. The coup plotters and torturers were trained in U.S.
military schools.

Despite the seriousness of the crime committed against the people of
the United States by the terrorist act in New York on September 11,
2001=E2=80=94putting aside the responsibility of the President for his
negligence and the deficiencies of his government=E2=80=99s security
bodies=E2=80=94there is no justification for supporting the war Bush declar=
ed
against =E2=80=9Csixty or more dark corners of the world,=E2=80=9D among wh=
ich Latin
American countries could be included.

Pastrana, who met often with the guerrilla commander, no doubt could
sense the difference between Marulanda=E2=80=99s sincerity and Bush=E2=80=
=99s
cynicism. Peace with Bush and war against Marulanda are two
completely opposite things.

The problem of drugs, which today causes so much pain to the peoples
of Latin America, in reality originates with the enormous demand in
the United States, where the authorities have never decided to combat
it energetically while assigning this task solely to the countries
where poverty and underdevelopment push masses of peasants into
cultivating the coca leaf or poppies instead of coffee, cacao, or
other products undervalued in the U.S. market.

It was not in vain that Ra=C3=BAl Reyes told Arbes=C3=BA that the State
Department contacted the FARC, interested in collaborating with it in
the fight against drugs. =E2=80=9CIt was the only thing that interested
them,=E2=80=9D said Reyes. We can add that when they wanted their
=E2=80=9Ccollaboration=E2=80=9D the FARC weren=E2=80=99t terrorists!13

Marulanda advocated replacing these crops with others, along with
social programs and economic compensation. With great realism, he did
not see any other way to eliminate them.

This is what Cuba did with illicit crops when the Revolution
triumphed. For many months when we were still in the mountains we did
not even know what a marijuana plant looked like. The few who grew it
were the most adept at going back and forth across enemy lines. Some
extremists on our side wanted to begin putting the growers on trial.
I recommended waiting until the war was over. That was how these
kinds of crops were eradicated, although there did not exist, of
course, the serious and complex problem that Colombia faces today.

Ra=C3=BAl Reyes and Manuel Marulanda are no longer alive. They died in the
struggle. One, in a direct attack using new technology developed by
the Yankees; the other from natural causes.

I disagreed with the head of the FARC over the pace he assigned to
the revolutionary process in Colombia. Over his idea of excessively
prolonged war. Over his conception of first creating an army of more
than 30,000 men; from my point of view this was neither correct nor
economically feasible as the means to defeat enemy ground forces in
an irregular war. He did extraordinary things with guerrilla units
that, under his personal direction, penetrated deep into enemy
territory. When someone failed to complete a similar mission, he was
always ready to show it was possible. He once spent two years
traveling over half of Colombia with a unit of 40 men.

The FARC, because of its operational conceptions, never surrounded or
forced the surrender of a full battalion backed by artillery, armored
units and air power. This is an experience we did have, thus
defeating even larger units of elite troops. This is not what
happened with the FARC, despite the tremendous quality of its
fighters.

My opposition to holding prisoners of war, to applying policies that
humiliate them or subject them to extremely harsh jungle conditions,
is well known. With these policies troops will never lay down their
arms, even if the battle is lost. Nor was I in agreement with
capturing and holding civilians who have nothing to do with the war.
I must add that prisoners and hostages make maneuvering more
difficult for the combatants. I admire, however, the revolutionary
firmness that Marulanda showed and his willingness to fight to the
last drop of blood.

The idea of surrendering never passed through the minds of any of us
in the guerrilla struggle in our country. That is why I said in one
of my Reflections that truly revolutionary fighters should never lay
down their arms. That is what I thought 55 years ago. That is what I
think today.

I invested more than 400 hours of intense labor in this effort. I
revised it carefully following the two hurricanes that hit Cuba with
such extreme violence. I am satisfied having done it. I learned much.
I have kept my promise.

Fidel Castro Ruz 16 September 2008

1. Jorge Eli=C3=A9cer Gait=C3=A1n, a leader of the opposition Liberal Party=
,
was assassinated in Bogot=C3=A1 on April 9, 1948. The city erupted in a
mass popular uprising known as the Bogotazo.

2. A leader of the Communist Party of Colombia, Jacobo Arenas became
one of the central figures in the FARC.

3. The Communist International, which brought together revolutionary
organizations from around the world that sought to learn from and
emulate the Bolshevik leadership of the October Revolution, was
founded in Moscow in March 1919 under the leadership of V.I. Lenin.
By the late 1920s, a privileged caste of which Joseph Stalin was the
main spokesperson had won control of party and government, reversing
the proletarian course of Lenin at home and internationally. The =E2=80=9Co=
ld
party=E2=80=9D Castro refers to is the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), the
pro-Moscow party in Cuba. The Rebel Army was the guerrilla force
headed by Fidel Castro and members of the July 26 Movement. After the
rebel victory, the July 26th Movement fused with the PSP and the
Revolutionary Directorate, eventually becoming the Communist Party of
Cuba.

4. L=C3=A1zaro C=C3=A1rdenas, president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940,
nationalized the Mexican oil industry in 1938 backed by massive
mobilizations of working people.

5. In April 1965 U.S. marines invaded the Dominican Republic to block
a popular uprising against a pro-imperialist military regime.

6. In 1960 and 1962 million-strong assemblies of the Cuban people
adopted the First and Second Declarations of Havana, which took up
the key questions of revolutionary strategy in the fight against
imperialist plunder and class exploitation, culminating in the fight
for power.

7. From 1849 to 1861, armed expeditions by =E2=80=9Cfilibusters=E2=80=9D to=
 Mexico,
Central America, and the Caribbean were conducted in an effort to
grab territory and expand the power of southern U.S. slaveholding
interests. One of the most notorious was William Walker, who landed
in Nicaragua in 1855 and made himself president of the country in
1856 before being defeated by Central American armies.

8. Democrat James Carter was U.S. president from 1977 to 1981. Robert
Pastor was Carter=E2=80=99s national security adviser on Latin America. Gen=
.
Omar Torrijos Herrera, head of the Panamanian National Guard and the
dominant figure in the government there for 13 years, signed pacts in
1977 that led to control of the Panama Canal being returned to
Panama, Dec. 31, 1999. Torrijos died in a 1981 plane crash. In
December 1989, during the administration of U.S. president George
H.W. Bush, Washington invaded Panama and overthrew the government of
Gen. Manuel Noriega.

9. On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)
led working people in Nicaragua in a popular revolution that took
power out of the hands of the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship and
established a workers and farmers government. Washington trained,
financed, and armed a counterrevolutionary army that murdered
thousands of workers and peasants there before being defeated. The
FSLN leadership, however, retreated from a proletarian course, and
the workers and farmers government no longer existed by the time the
FSLN lost the presidential elections in February 1990.

10. A well-known poet and longtime revolutionary, Roque Dalton joined
the ERP in 1973. He was later accused of being a =E2=80=9Ctraitor=E2=80=9D =
by the ERP
leadership and executed on May 10, 1975. Joaqu=C3=ADn Villalobos was a
central leader of the ERP, which in 1980 united with four other
revolutionary organizations to form the Farabundo Mart=C3=AD National
Liberation Front (FMLN). A 1992 peace agreement ended the armed
conflict. In the mid-1990s Villalobos was given a scholarship by the
British Foreign Office to study at Oxford and became an
=E2=80=9Cinternational conflicts resolution consultant.=E2=80=9D

11. Rub=C3=A9n Mart=C3=ADnez Villena (1899-1934), a poet and member of the
Cuban Communist Party, was active in opposing the dictatorship of
Gerardo Machado.

12. Belisario Betancur was president of Colombia from 1982 to 1986.
Andr=C3=A9s Pastrana was president from August 1998 to 2002. Both were
backed by the Conservative Party. Pastrana engaged in direct
negotiations with the FARC rebels.

13. Raul Reyes, a top commander of the FARC, was killed in an air
raid when Colombian forces attacked a FARC camp near the Ecuadoran
border in March 2008. Marulanda died of natural causes that same
month. Jos=C3=A9 Arbes=C3=BA, currently deputy head of international relati=
ons
for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, represented
the Cuban leadership in many meetings with FARC leaders.


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=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Havana, Cuba
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un Para=C3=ADso bajo el bloqueo"
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