[R-G] Fidel: Chavez's Clarion Call

[Anthony Fenton]

February 16, 2009
"If You Need My Blood, Fidel, You Have It"
Chavez's Clarion Call
http://counterpunch.org/castro02162009.html
By FIDEL CASTRO

It was 2006. I was really very ill but very much aware of what was  
happening. During those days around the middle of September, the XIV  
NAM Summit where Cuba was elected to the Presidency was ending. I  
could barely sit up and take my place at a table. That's how I  
received some important heads of state or government. The Prime  
Minister of India was among them. The highest ranking visitor I  
received in that emergency room in the Presidential Palace was the  
Ghanaian Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, who a  
few days later would be ending his mandate.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of Algeria, one of the  
personalities with whom I met, looked me straight in the eye and said:  
"If you need my blood Fidel, you have it".

I appreciated it greatly. He had been foreign minister in the  
government of our friend Houari Boumediene.

Bouteflika as well had just gone through a health crisis that had him  
teetering on the edge of death. One might say that his recovery was  
astounding.

His words constituted a noble and selfless support for our cause,  
which was not expected, by our internationalist spirit that was never  
exercised in exchange for anything.

His noble gesture took place years after a despicable traitor to the  
history of his self-sacrificing and combative people coincided, in the  
city of Monterrey Mexico, with the demands of the head of the empire  
that I be thrown out of a Summit taking place there, after speaking to  
the people gathered there, with the exception of Bush who hadn't  
touched Mexican soil while I was setting foot on the same land.

Just before the minute I left, Hugo Chavez urgently visited me and,  
indignant about such high-handed behaviour by the head of state of the  
host country, he exclaimed: "Fidel, tell me how much oil Cuba needs to  
defeat the Yankee blockade".

The dialogue seemed unreal. It isn't easy to remember, through the  
mist of emotions, what the exact words of my response were.  
Doubtlessly, they were words negating my acceptance.

Be that as it may, Cuba's destiny followed its course. The fate of our  
people was bound to the legendary memory of Che and the thinking of  
Marti and Bolivar.

Our future cannot be separated from the events happening next Sunday  
when the day for approving the Constitutional Amendment begins. There  
is no other alternative but victory.

The destinies of the peoples of "Our America" will depend  
substantially on that victory and it will be an event which will have  
influence on the rest of the planet.

However, what is missing is an acknowledgement to Hugo Chavez for his  
contribution to Spanish literature. His latest article published on  
February 12th under the title of "Chavez' Lines", is an inspired  
document of exceptional quality, of the kind only great writers can  
pull together. It is pure Chavez, body and soul, reflected in print,  
the way very few can achieve.

Last week's enthusiastic throng is a spectacle which can only be  
accessed by television for an incalculable number of people in the  
world.

The unmasking of the staged self-provocation in the Jewish synagogue  
is the antithesis of those moving images that in 1945 Soviet troops  
showed to the world after they stormed and took the Auschwitz  
concentration camp; they showed the world what had happened to  
millions of Jews and people from other occupied countries including  
children, old people and women, imprisoned by the Nazis. It wasn't  
Eisenhower's soldiers making the effort and spilling their blood to  
liberate them.

The monstrous world of injustices that imperialism has imposed on the  
planet marks the inexorable end of a system and an era which cannot  
have long to survive. This too shall run out. We thank our Venezuelan  
compatriot for his clarion call.