Fidel Castro has been applying his formidable intellectual powers and revolutionary experience in recent times to analyse the phenomenon of neo-liberal globalisation. Piercing the veil of the global propaganda of imperialism, Fidel Castro, in a series of major public speeches, has bared the inner workings of the financial and economic system dominated by the United States. Since Cuba has been a special target of the imperialist offensive in the Nineties, Castro is able to draw upon his unique experience of leading a small socialist country which is challenging the imperialist might, resolute in defending the socialist system created by the endeavours of the Cuban people.

The two speeches published in "On Imperialist Globalization" were both delivered in 1999. The first is the Master Lecture delivered at the University of Venezuela, Caracas, in February. It is one of the most memorable speeches from a masterly orator who has made a number of such great speeches. For four and a half hours, Castro expounded on the meaning of neo-liberal globalisation, holding an audience of mostly young people spellbound. Later he summed up what the speech meant:

"I expressed my essential ideas. In summary: what I think about neo-liberal globalisation and how absolutely unsustainable the economic order imposed on humankind is, both socially and environmentally . A special emphasis was made on the significance of ideas and the demoralisation and uncertainty of neo-liberal theoreticians. The strategies and tactics for struggle, probable course of events and our full confidence in man's ability to survive were also analysed."

Castro spoke at the same venue where he had spoken exactly 40 years before, in 1959, fresh from the triumph of the Cuban revolution. The range of the speech published here is breathtaking. Castro unfolds, with eloquent clarity, the mechanisms of exploitation, the US Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization, the transnational corporations, the culture industry which manufactures synthetic dreams. He exposes a system which imposes a high infant mortality rate in Bronx, New York and thrives on sweated labour of women and children in South America. The speech is suffused with the revolutionary experience of Cuba. The speech concludes with revolutionary insights into the future course of the struggle against an unsustainable order.

The second speech was delivered at the closing ceremony of the first International Congress on Culture and Development, held in Havana in June. The speech complements the themes expounded at the Caracas lecture. Here the focus shifts to the onslaughts on sovereignty by the triumphalist imperialist order dominated by a sole superpower. Along with the attacks on culture through its subjugation to a system operated by transnational corporations who monopolise the communication industry, the speech gives a detailed exposition of the NATO aggression in Yugoslavia. The facts about Yugoslavia obscured by imperialist rewriting of history are brilliantly exposed. Castro argues that culture and sovereignty are inter-related and the defence of both against the depredations of a rapacious market provide the framework for the assertion that national sovereignty cannot be surrendered to a self-serving imperial order.


A revolution can only be born from culture and ideas

"I was going to say that today, February 3, 1999, it is 40 years and 10 days to this day that I first visited this university and we met in this same place. Of course, you understand that I am moved - without the melodrama you find in certain soap operas at the moment - as it would have been unimaginable then that one day, so many years later, I would return to this place.

"Several weeks ago, on January 1st, 1999, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the triumph of the Revolution, I stood on the same balcony where I had spoken on January 1st, 1959 in Santiago de Cuba. I was reflecting with the audience gathered there that the people of today are not the same people who were there at the time because of the 11 million Cubans we are today, 7.19 million were born after that date. I said that they were two different people and yet, one and the same eternal people of Cuba.

"I also reminded them that the immense majority of those who were 50 years old then are no longer alive, and that those who were children at that time are over 40 today.

"So many changes, so many differences, and how special it was for us to think that there was the people that had started a profound revolution when they were practically illiterate, when 30 per cent of adults could not read or write and perhaps an additional 50 per cent had not reached fifth grade. We estimated that with a population of almost 7 million, possibly little over 150,000 people had gone beyond fifth grade while today the university graduates alone amount to 600,000, and there are almost 300,000 teachers and professors.

"I told my fellow countrymen - in paying tribute to the people who had achieved that first great triumph 40 years ago - that in spite of an enormous educational backwardness, they had been able to undertake and defend an extraordinary revolutionary feat. Something else: probably their political culture was lower than their educational level."