I take great pleasure in acknowledging the exemplary inspiration that a
small country in the Carribean, Cuba, as represented by no less than its Foreign
Minister, has given countries like the Philippines. Despite its small size,
Cuba has played a major role in world politics. For the past 36 years,social
reformers, and revolutionaries throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa have
looked to the Cuban revolution as an example. Cuba has played a prominent role
in the United Nations and the Movement of Non-Aligned countries. When Cuba
speaks in international fora, in addition to representing its own country, it
speaks on behalf of the poverty-stricken peoples in the colonial and
semicolonial world. Even its outstanding athletes, whenever they win in various
events in the Olympics represent the excellence and aspirations of the Third
World!
Cuba's impact is felt in industrialized capitalist countries as well. The
spectre of the Cuban Revolution, the first socialist revolution in the Americas,
has haunted defenders of capitalism in the United States. Since the revolution
came to power in 1959, the U.S. government has used every means at its disposal
to isolate, weaken, and overthrow Cuba's revolution through economic blockades;
the military invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961; the threat of nuclear
annihilation during the 1962 missile crisis; spy flights; assassination attempts
against Cuba's leaders; introduction of diseases through biological warfare to
destroy Cuban
crops and livestock; training and covering up for right-wing terror and
assassination squads , and above all an unrelenting propaganda campaign to turn
the people of the world against Cuba. In 1980, then U.S. president Jimmy Carter
candidly stated why the U.S. government has been afraid of Cuba which has a
population of only 10 million:
"The real threat of Cuba is that they offer a model to be emulated by
people who are dissatisfied with their lot or who are struggling to change
things for the better."
The United States and other western powers have connived to destroy the
social changes brought about by the Cuban revolution. Its ability to survive
the onslaught of the superpower that is the center of capitalism, just 90 miles
north of this island nation is a testimony of the spirit of its people, their
tireless creativity and strength in grappling with the problems of guiding the
economic development of a once backward country besieged and attacked by U.S.
imperialism. We admire the spirit of the Cuban working people who have endured
Yankee invasions and plots, sabotage,and embargos ,and done with great anguish
and sacrifices to defend and shape their social revolution.
Before the Revolution, Cuba was a backward country with a one-crop economy
and most of its people lived in abject poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and
disease. Since then, the country has made advances especially in education,
health care and improving the quality of life of workers, peasants and urban
poor. Illiteracy which once afflicted a third of its population, has been
eliminated, and free and universal public education instituted. The Cuban
health care system, by far the best of any developing country, is also free.
Since the revolution, life expectancy, according to United Nations(UN) figures,
has risen from under 55 years to over 70.
It will interest those in the health professions to know that Cuba has
introduced what one of the most outstanding Cuban revolutionary leaders Dr.
Ernesto "Che" Guevarra, a medical doctor, called social medicine. This is where
medicine becomes a collective responsibility, "a social medicine". Doctor
Guevarra outlined social medicine in a talk on "The Duty of Revolutionary
Medical Workers"(1965):
"The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a
robust body-- not creating a robust body through a doctor's artistic work on a
weak organism, but creating a robust body through the work of the whole
collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity. One day medicine will
have to become a science that serves to prevent diseases, to orient the entire
public toward their medical obligations, and that has only to intervene in cases
of extreme urgency to perform some social surgical operation or to deal with
something uncharacteristic of that new society we are creating. Social medicine
orients the people, it assists the greatest number of people and it prevents
everything foreseeable related to diseases. The doctor, the medical worker
should go among the masses, among the community, and find out what diseases they
have, what their ailments are, what extreme poverty they have lived over the
years, inherited from centuries of repression and total submission."
These words of the Cuba's revolutionary fighter,Argentine medical doctor
and internationalist, Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevarra were perhaps what inspired our
own alumni of the Usniversity of the Philippines, Dr. Bobby de la Paz and Dr.
Johnny Escandor, both doctors of the Filipino people who lived, persevered and
died as part of the Filipino people's struggle against the fundamental causes of
disease and poverty. I am pleased to announce that during recent meeting of the
University Council of U.P. Manila, the faculty voted to make Dec. 10 of every
year, a day to commemorate the life and example of Drs. Bobby de la Paz and
Johnny Escandor.
In Cuba's example, small countries will always look for inspiration:
inspiration in struggle, inspiration in tenacity, inspiration in the spirit of
sacrifice, and inspiration in the spirit of internationalism which is the
political framework of Cuba's foreign policy, that is, "the subordination of
Cuban positions to the international needs of the struggle for socialism and for
the national liberation of the people, " thus putting priority on supporting
struggles for social justice throughout the world. Cuba's revolutionary society
has sustained an inspiration to peoples and nations who want to free their
countries from poverty, from illiteracy,and from disease. The passion of its
leaders and people in their staunch spirit of defying the Goliath of Yankee
imperialism right at the heart of the American hemisphere has become a
continuous source of inspiration to national liberation movements and small
nations. This is why to this day, the United States has tried to impose
immeasurable suffering on the Cuban people whose fate its arms and money cannot
control nor buy.
Mere words cannot really do justice to the Cuban experience and
revolutionary process, but we hope they will prevail, as they have prevailed
these past three decades. It is no understatement to say that many
revolutionaries and social reformers in the Philippines have been strengthened
by their example, comradeship, solidarity and commitment to socialist economic
development. For, despite the economic embargo that Yankee imperialism has
imposed for so long on Cuba's fragile economy and the complex problems that it
has had to confront, this revolutionary society has transformed the lives of its
people and today has one of the best community-based health care programs in the
world, which, I am sure, even our Department of Health in the Philippines, can
learn from.
We should uphold Cuba because what it has overcome is a mirror here of our
own past and present, to the human condition that we still endure under U.S.
imperialism. On that basis, Cuba is a mirror perhaps to our destined future.
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