Fifth International Conference for the Balance of the World, at the Havana Convention Center.

Photo: Twitter/ @PresidenciaCuba.

(Stenographic Versions-Presidency of the Republic)

Dear colleagues of the Presidency;

Dear sisters and brothers;

Dear Marti friends from everywhere who come to celebrate with us the 170 years of our National Hero and Apostle of the Second Independence, José Martí:

Cuba highly values ​​the response that so many prestigious personalities from different regions of the world gave to the call launched by the José Martí International Solidarity Project.

Everyone's enthusiastic presence here delights us and deeply honors us.

It means a lot that around 620 academics, writers, journalists, teachers, students, workers, scientists and specialists from different branches of knowledge, coming from nearly 90 countries, meet in Havana to reflect on Marti's thought and its impressive universality. .

If Martí has ​​brought you to us, regardless of political creeds, it is because in each of you, in your lives or in your works, the ideology of that man caught fire, which for Cubans is "the idea of ​​good that he described." ,

according to Fidel's unforgettable words, just when these events were beginning.

Today it opens its arms to you and a Cuba cruelly impacted by more than six decades of blockade, and now with an intensified blockade and a sustained campaign to smear its political system with the objective, never abandoned, of isolating and subjugating us, welcomes you.

But the solidarity that we have given and received as an inalienable value and principle of the Revolution, has not been able to be blocked, just as the conscience of the peoples cannot be annulled.

Twenty years ago, Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, who can be named, without a shadow of a doubt, as the best disciple of the Apostle, warned us:

“Faced with the sophisticated and destructive weapons with which they want to intimidate us and submit us to an unjust, irrational and unsustainable world economic and social order: sow ideas!, sow ideas!

And sow ideas!;

Sow awareness! Sow awareness!

And sow awareness!

Sowing ideas and awareness continues to be the answer, as Humanity enters the third decade of the 21st century, facing unprecedented challenges with regard to the environment, the fight against viruses and pandemics, the escalation of armed conflicts accompanied by manipulations of all kinds in networks and traditional media and by an unbridled arms race.

The most alarming tensions of the present have to do with the categorical refusal of the main world power and its allies to accept the role of new economic powers and the consequent geopolitical rearrangement.

We are still very far from the “balance of the world” to which Martí aspired and to which Our America, already independent of the European and American empires and united in the Bolivarian ideal, should contribute.

But in the United States, as a counterpart to Monroism, an intellectual vanguard committed to the fate of those that Martí called "the poor of the earth" and to denouncing the warmongering adventures in which the current US administration is involved is also resurfacing.

Some representatives of that vanguard are with us today, and we greet them with gratitude and affection (Applause).

The possibility of consolidating, in a systematic way, the dialogue with this sector of independent thought in the United States encourages and comforts us.

Their voices synthesize a very lucid vision and a great moral height and will be heard more and more inside and outside their country for their invaluable contributions to the noble mission of “sowing ideas” and “sowing awareness”.

At this particularly dramatic moment in history, we constantly see how lies, shamelessly repeated, influence electoral processes, and how emotions are manipulated, in the media and networks, to demonize progressive leaders and favor far-right candidates.

The hegemonic media decide what deserves to become news and how it should be treated, responding to an immovable agenda that punctually pursues imperial interests.

The debate of ideas is replaced by the most primitive exchange of slander and insults while hate speech and expressions of fanaticism, polarization, intolerance, racism and contempt for "the other" proliferate.

100 years after the march on Rome, organized in October 1922 by Mussolini, the resurgence of fascism is visible in different regions of the world.

For all these reasons it is of the utmost importance that we participate in the tribute to José Martí on the 170th anniversary of his birth,

adding his contributions to this ecumenical, plural, multidisciplinary forum of emancipatory thought and cultural resistance.

Together we are building here one of those "trenches of ideas" that, as Martí stated, "are worth more than stone trenches."

Today more than ever we need appropriate spaces to listen to each other, to reason collectively, to understand each other, to come closer to each other in everything we may have in common and to debate our discrepancies in a cultured and civilized manner.

I fully subscribe to the platform drawn up by the Organizing Committee:

We are effectively obliged to work on building "a world in balance, at peace (...), where diversity is respected, truly democratic, ecologically sustainable, socially just and where the sovereignty of nations is affirmed."

We have to “fight for the balance of the world”!

It is necessary to "impose dialogue on force" and "contribute to the formation of a thought that allows us to face, in a constructive way, the complex and varied challenges of the 21st century."

Let us not forget that Fidel considered the globalization process as something inevitable;

but he called for the founding of a “globalization of solidarity” among all.

We will only advance in the design of that superior future that we need through honest and transparent dialogue, between equals, oblivious to arrogant and arrogant positions;

only with the conscious exercise of cooperation and fraternity;

only based on inalienable moral principles and adherence to multilateralism and the foundations of coexistence between nations;

only renouncing hegemonic claims, blackmail and impositions;

only discarding the language of threats and weapons and assuming the language of reason and culture.

Dear friends and friends:

The covid-19 pandemic, from which the planet has not yet been fully freed, leaves very hard and very bitter lessons.

Just as exalting values ​​and virtues were manifested and there were notable examples of generosity, nobility, and a spirit of solidarity, traits typical of the terrible ethical crisis that the world is experiencing were also revealed, associated with a system that promotes selfishness and fierce competitiveness. .

The crudely commercial vision of the health services and the pharmaceutical industry showed the inhuman face of capitalism and neoliberalism.

The lowest and meanest impulses in privileged sectors and in the political leadership came to the fore: the desire for profit, insensitivity towards the helpless, the demagogic use of tragedy for electoral purposes, in short, money coldly deciding on life and death.

Cuba concentrated all its efforts on saving human lives.

During the worst chapter of the pandemic, in the midst of a perversely intensified blockade, our scientists managed to create effective Cuban vaccines, and the country was among the countries with the highest vaccination rates in the world.

At the same time, we help other countries.

Referring particularly to the Conference, it was very encouraging to review the scientific program and verify the extraordinary richness of the topics that were dealt with during these working sessions.

The inclusion in the framework of this great event of an International Meeting of Martí Chairs, a Historians Workshop and a Youth Forum, just to mention three notable examples, means an undoubted success.

It is encouraging that, in the midst of a global cultural crisis and the rise of pragmatic tendencies, the Cátedras Martianas have taken solid roots in many universities.

Reading Martí is an exceptional antidote to the frivolous climate created by the hegemonic entertainment industry, the same industry that promotes forgetfulness and colonized versions of history.

Historians, along with professors and teachers, are key pieces on the road to decolonization and emancipation.

On the other hand, it is very valuable that the disastrous Monroe Doctrine has been carefully analyzed, which, although it is 200 years old, continues to be used as an instrument of domination over the towns south of the Rio Grande and as an attempt to refute imperial ideals. Bolivarians and Martians.

Regarding the Youth Forum, the reflections that were made there are very useful contributions in the battle for cultural decolonization as one more effort to stop the plan to stupefy the new generations, to push them towards frivolity, to separate them from any social commitment , from all responsibility, thanks to the torrent of trivial messages that flows through social networks, from commercial propaganda, from the fashion industries and the uncritical exaltation of the “rich and famous”.

Special thanks must be given to the presence at this event of one of the most alarming and distressing dilemmas facing the human species: the climate crisis, caused, as we know, by the irresponsible and ruthless depredation of the planet's resources carried out by big corporations with the suicidal complicity of the ruling elites.

From Havana, since this event, many authoritative voices launched a new alert call that must be heard.

, and Cuba has followed his example in all international forums and has repeatedly insisted on the urgency of responding with the utmost rigor and the greatest urgency that the vanguard of the world scientific community demands of us.

We are glad to know that there are scholars in Europe of Fidel's thought regarding climate change and other areas, who have come to share with us the results of their research.

In the same way, it is beautiful to see that Martí's legacy continues to be studied in different regions and through many different points of view.

Cuba has that privilege:

.

Martí and Fidel are two definitive pillars of our culture, our history and our destiny.

In addition, apart from the permanent presence of Martí and his most brilliant and contributing disciple and follower, Fidel, there has been talk in these hours of educators as relevant as Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar's teacher, and the unforgettable Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire. .

Among the axes of the Conference there have also been essential concepts such as democracy and participation;

the indissoluble links of humanism, science and ethics, and the defense of peace in the most difficult circumstances.

With his sensibility as a poet and essayist, the Cuban and Martian Roberto Fernández Retamar lamented the validity of "Our America" ​​on the 100th anniversary of that insurmountable text by José Martí.

Retamar said at that time: “This fact seems sad to me, since it implies, above all, that the empire against which Martí stood up with David's slingshot, is today a bullying and quarrelsome Goliath (or, as the admirable North American intellectual says Noam Chomsky, gangster), the contemporary Leviathan, the 'monster' in whose 'entrails' the Cuban had lived in times that compared to today seem like a sweet spring”.

What could you not add today to those words of Retamar about everything that you have been finding in your studies of Martí's work as signs, warnings, alerts, urgent notices that are yet to be addressed and resolved?

I express Cuba's will to offer us, from the presidency of the Group of 77 plus China, to promote debate and actions on these issues that concern all our peoples.

Let's continue sowing ideas and sowing awareness, dear friends.

Let's globalize love, respect, solidarity, dialogue against hate, selfishness, outrages, contempt, the denigrating madness of believing that there are men and women superior to the rest.

We still have a lot to do so that the absolute validity of Martí's ideology stops hurting where it was not addressed and becomes the total confirmation of his revolutionary apostolate, of his visionary analysis of the profound imbalances that have deepened instead of being resolved.

Those who lived through his time say that an uneducated man who guarded the door during a speech by Martí in Tampa, excitedly repeated one of his phrases and some incredulously asked him if he had really understood it, to which the man, surnamed Quiroga, He answered: No, I did not understand much of what he was saying;

but when he spoke I felt like crying (Applause).

That was a profound expression of faith.

The two spoke and wrote tirelessly for their contemporaries and for ours.

For his time and for this one.

Let us insist then on the most difficult task and to which they devoted all their energies: balancing the world!

Ever onward to victory!

(Ovation)

See also:

Conference for the Balance of the World: Climate change already affects every region of the planet