While an increasing number of persons lack housing, bread, water, health, education and employment in the planet, the wealth of the Earth is being wasted and squandered to manufacture weapons and wage endless fratricidal wars.  This has become –and is ever more becoming- a more frequent and abominable world practice. 

Our glorious and heroic people, despite an inhumane blockade that has been in place for more than half a century, has never given in: it has struggled and will continue to struggle against the sinister empire. That is our humble merit and our humble contribution.  

At the opposite side of our planet, in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, President Barack Obama is attending a Summit on Nuclear Security to impose policies related to the distribution and use of nuclear weapons. 

These are, no doubt, unheard of events. 

I personally did not become aware of these realities just by mere chance. The experience lived throughout more than fifteen years since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution –after the battle in Girón, the criminal Yankee blockade that intended to subdue us by hunger; the pirate attacks, the dirty war and the nuclear missile crisis in October, 1962, which pushed the world to the verge of a sinister hecatomb- led me to the conviction that Marxist and honest Christians –of whom I had met many- regardless of their political and religious beliefs, should and could struggle for justice and peace among human beings. 

I proclaimed so and I have maintained so without any hesitation whatsoever.  The reasons I have today are absolutely valid and even more important, because all the events that have occurred for almost 40 years now confirm that.  Today there are more reasons than ever, because neither Marxists or Christians, whether Catholic or not; Muslims, Shiites or Sunnites; freethinkers, dialectical materialists or even persons who think would like to see the premature disappearance of our irreplaceable thinking species, and wait until the complex laws of evolution could give rise to another similar species with the capacity to think. 

Tomorrow I will gladly greet His Excellency Pope Benedict XVI, as I did with John Paul II, a man in whom the contact with children and the humble citizens of the people always aroused feelings of affection. 

That is why I decided to ask him for some minutes of his very busy schedule when I knew from our Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez that he would be glad to have that modest and simple contact. 

Fidel Castro Ruz

March 27, 2012

8:35 p.m.