REFLECTIONS BY COMRADE FIDEL CASTRO, JUNE 28, 2010

Fidel Castro

As I was writing every one of my previous Reflections, and a catastrophe was quickly zeroing in on humanity, my major concern was to fulfill the primary duty to inform our people.

Today, I feel more relaxed than 26 days ago. As the situation evolves, I can reiterate and expand on the information to the national and international public.

Obama has committed to attend the quarterfinals match on July 2, if his country’s team makes it to that stage. He supposedly knows better than anyone that the quarterfinals will not be contested because very serious developments will take place before that; or at least he should know.

Last Friday, June 25, an international press agency known for the attention to details in its reports, published a statement by the

“…Navy Commander of the elite Corps of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution General Ali Fadavi…,” warning “…that if the United States and its allies inspect Iranian ships in international waters ‘they will have their response in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.’” ~ The information was taken from the local news agency Mehr of Iran.

According to the press dispatch, said news agency reported that “Fadavi added that ‘the Navy of the Revolutionary Guardians currently has hundreds of vessels equipped with missile launchers.’”

The information, produced approximately at the same time of what Granma published or perhaps before, seemed at some points an exact copy of the Reflections elaborated on Thursday June 24th and ran by that paper on Friday 25th.

The coincidence can be explained by the simple use of a logical reasoning. I was completely unaware of what the Iranian local agency had published.

I have absolutely no doubt that as soon as the American and Israeli warships are deployed ~ alongside the rest of the American military vessels positioned off the Iranian coasts ~ and they try to inspect the first merchant ship from that country, there will be a massive launching of missiles in both directions. At that moment exactly the terrible war will begin. It’s not possible to estimate how many vessels will be sunk or from what country.

Knowing the truth timely is the most important thing for our people.

It doesn’t matter if almost everybody, I’d dare say 99.9% or more of my compatriots, instinctively cling to hopes and agree with my sincere wishes to be wrong. I have talked to people close to me, and I have also received news from many noble, selfless and hardworking people who have read my Reflections and do not challenge my considerations in the least but rather absorb, believe and swallow my reasoning through a dry throat; however, they immediately go back to the tasks to which they devote their energies.

That is precisely what we expect of our compatriots. But it would be worse to suddenly become aware of extremely grave events without having heard as much as a news about such possibility.

Then there would be confusion and panic, and that would be unworthy of our heroic Cuban people, which was very close to becoming the target of a massive nuclear strike on October 1962, and still did not hesitate for a second in discharging its duty.

Our brave combatants and the military chiefs of our Revolutionary Armed Forces taking part in heroic internationalist missions were close to becoming the victims of nuclear strikes against the Cuban troops deployed close to the Angolan south border from where the South African racist forces ~ at the time positioned on the Namibian border ~ had been expelled after the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

The Pentagon, with the consent of the President of the United States, supplied the South African racists through Israel with about 14 nuclear bombs, more powerful than those dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as we have indicated in previous Reflections.

I am neither a prophet nor a fortune teller. Nobody told me a word of what was to happen. It has all been the result of what I today describe as a logical reasoning.

We are neither new to this complicated issue nor are we meddlesome.

It is possible to predict what will happen in the rest of the Portuguese and Spanish speaking Americas during the nuclear post crisis.

Under such circumstances, it will not be possible to talk of capitalism or socialism. A stage will open that will see the management of the available goods and services in this part of the continent. Certainly, every country will continue being ruled by those who head the governments today, some very close to socialism and others euphoric over the opening of the world market to fuels, uranium, copper, lithium, aluminum, iron and other metals being sent to the developed and rich countries today that will suddenly disappear.

An abundance of food exported now to that world market will also disappear abruptly.

In these circumstances, the most basic products needed for life: food, water, fuels, and the resources found in the hemisphere south of the United States will suffice to preserve some of the civilization whose unbridled advance has led humanity into such a disaster.

Nevertheless, there are still some uncertainties.

Will the two mightiest nuclear powers,

the United States and Russia,

be able to refrain from using their nuclear weapons against each other?

There is no doubt, however, that from Europe the nuclear weapons of Great Britain and France, allied with the United States and Israel, ~ the same that enthusiastically imposed the resolution that will inevitably unleash the war, which for the above-mentioned reasons will immediately become nuclear ~ are threatening the Russian territory even though this country and China have done everything within their capabilities to prevent the conflict.

The economy of the superpower will fall to pieces like a house of cards. The American society is the least prepared to endure a catastrophe like the one the empire has created in the same territory where it started.

We don’t know which will be the effect on the environment of the nuclear weapons that will unavoidably explode in various parts of the world, and that in the least serious variant will happen in abundance.

As for me, to advance a hypothesis would be pure science fiction.

Fidel Castro Ruz

June 27, 2010

2:15 PM