"Humanity must preserve itself in
order to live for thousands of years," Fidel
responded to Russian writer Daniel Estulin, author
of the Bilderberg Club trilogy, who is visiting
Havana. He stated that in relation to the visitor’s
belief that in order to solve many of its problems,
humanity will have to emigrate to other planets.
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Daniel Estulin and Fidel Castro |
Fidel
emphatically affirmed that however enthusiastic we
might feel about survival in other spaces within the
solar system, it is better for us not to lose what
we have on Earth, because that is the only way not
to lose everything that lies beyond this planet.
With great difficulty, human beings
have landed on the moon, an inhospitable satellite.
Beyond that lie Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, Venus and
the other planets, which basically equate to dust
clouds, incandescent ovens or ice.
The conversation between the leader
of the Revolution and the writer was a profound,
fascinating dialogue that lasted more than 90
minutes, every one of which was of surprising
intensity.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE HUMAN RACE
"The obligation of all human beings
is to ensure the survival of the entire human race.
The Bilderberg Club wants to exclusively ensure the
survival of its own species, an authentic minority,"
affirmed Daniel Estulin after the formal
introductions.
"You wrote very beautiful things
about your grandfather," Fidel remarked. "I loved my
grandfather very much. He was a very special man. He
was a well-known doctor, a surgeon, in Lithuania. My
grandfather was from Crimea and during World War II,
on just one day, the Nazis killed 11 of his
siblings, as well as his mother, his father and his
104-year old grandfather. Imagine coming from a
large family and the very next day, being left an
orphan."
He lived through World War I, the
1917 Russian Revolution, the Civil War and World War
II. "At some point, in the chaos of the war, he lost
track of his family. His wife and three children –
aged eight, five and three years old – were captured
by the Nazis, sent to a concentration camp and
exterminated," he recalled.
Estulin explained in detail to Fidel
the history of his family, who emigrated to Canada
in 1980 – it was there that he and his grandfather
were reunited – of his pilgrimage through various
countries of the world, and of his Sevillian wife.
He has lived in Spain for the last 17 years.
Although he was born in Lithuania, he is Russian, as
is his mother tongue.
The Comandante was impressed with
how fluently Estulin spoke Spanish. "I write in
English for convenience, because most editors speak
that language. My books have been published in more
than 50 countries. I’ve been told that you read in
English…"
"In Spanish with difficulty…" Fidel
replied jokingly. But he does read many original
English language texts translated into Spanish. One
example he gave was Lincoln: "A biography by
U.S. writer Gore Vidal. It is incredible how one man
can reconstruct the whole atmosphere of that time
and compare it to what is happening today."
MILITARY BASES IN LATIN AMERICA
"They’re at war with Chávez because,
against all odds, Venezuela is still one of the few
countries in the world where there are no U.S.
military bases. And they hate Cuba for the same
reason: its independence. In Cuba, they cannot
destroy the concept of ‘nation-state’, in my opinion
the most important concept of the last 600 years,"
affirmed Estulin.
"You left out Ecuador, which had a
base in Manta for 10 years and they succeeded in
removing it. There are bases in many other
countries. Within a matter of hours, they can place
troops in any nation," Fidel observed. "As if they
were branches of McDonalds," said Estulin,
ironically.
"With respect to direct bases, they
have Guantánamo, they have the Malvinas…And in the
other countries, they might seem not to have them
but in reality they do. They engage in practices and
exercises. They don’t have any in Venezuela.
Colombia is a country converted into a base. They
have them in Honduras. They don’t have them in Costa
Rica but they do have 40 vessels there, included
aircraft carriers, ‘nobly’ helping in the war on
drugs. It’s completely cynical…" added Fidel.
For Estulin, the upcoming elections
in Venezuela are crucial. It is not a case of two
ideologically exclusive tendencies facing each other
at the polls. Sources linked to the U.S. State
Department have confirmed that – after the
demonizing of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian process
– there is a plan to install military bases in that
country, which will not be possible with the
sovereign and Latin Americanist policies of the
Venezuelan leader.
The conversation continued on this
subject and the challenges facing the new National
Assembly that will emerge from the elections on
September 26, which will see the return of an
opposition that is out of practice in terms of
legislating because of the years that it has
remained outside of the process in its attempt to
boycott the Bolivarian government.
Chávez – who recently paid a visit
to Havana – is optimistic, confirmed Fidel and is
working tirelessly on the peace process with
Colombia. "He sleeps a little during the day and
works all night long."
But the world that Fidel is
visualizing – and he says it himself – is not that
one, a world of electoral conflicts. "In my opinion,
the empire is going to fall. If there is a war, the
whole world will fall. Our struggle is for no war,
but not at any price. This is not about imposing
conditions. There will be no war if nobody pulls the
trigger, which is now in the hands of Obama, who is
not a warmonger. As Israeli journalist Jeffrey
Goldberg says, in his analysis of Bush: ‘I don’t
personally expect Obama to be more Bush than Bush.’"
AL QAEDA
They commented on the string of
attacks in Iraq the previous day. Sixty-two people
were killed on the very same day that the U.S.
troops officially left Baghdad. Fidel raised the
question: "Who is in control there? There is also
the situation in Afghanistan; there are some very
interesting things related to what you wrote about
Bali – the 2002 attack on a nightclub. That attack
was attributed to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is another
mystery that is being uncovered."
The Comandante en Jefe confirmed
that he always had his suspicions about Al Qaeda and
Bin Laden. "Every time that Bush went out to instill
fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden appeared
saying what he was going to do and making threats.
Bush was never lacking in support from Bin Laden. I
seemed line a tableau and it was Wikileaks that
demonstrated that he was, effectively, a CIA agent.
They proved it with documents."
Estulin commented that high-ranking
U.S. officials and intelligence services in other
nations have acknowledged that the last time Bin
Laden’s voice was heard was on December 21, 2001. "Since
then, he has disappeared. Since that date, he has
been replaced by a bad actor who dresses like him
but doesn’t even look like him."
RUSSIA IN THE SIGHTS
Once again, as in his conference
with national colleagues the previous evening,
Estulin took up the central thesis of his exposé: "The
objective of the Bilderbergs is to destroy Russia as
a military power and China as an economic power."
And he thanked Fidel again for including excerpts
from his books in his recent Reflections, because, "They
cannot silence what you say." "It wasn’t always like
that," clarified the leader of the Revolution.
The journalist stated that the world
superpowers are aware that the only state capable of
militarily standing up the United States and
destroying it is Russia, and emphasized that there
is a third plan, the Barbarossa – as the Nazi
invasion of the USSR was known – against the current
Russia.
The Russian writer reiterated that
the final objective of this whole montage, including
a possible nuclear war, is to destroy Russia, the
great military enemy of the United States. "Russia
has the potential to wipe the USA off the face of
the earth. It has much more powerful weapons that
those that the U.S. arsenal might possible contain
at this moment in time. For example, the P-7000
Granite, an intercontinental ballistic missile with
a nuclear warhead of 500 kilotrons. It is launched
from a submarine. It flies at a speed of 2,983
kilometers per hour. There is nothing in the world
faster than that. The fastest U.S. aircraft flies at
around 2,600 kilometers.
"There has been no talk about that,"
Fidel commented. Estulin said, "They are extremely
afraid of it. It is a fact that the Kursk nuclear
submarine – sunk in the Barents Sea on August 12,
2000 – was carrying these weapons."
That is one element to take into
account when considering that "my country, Russia,
is the Number 1 military enemy of the United States.
Right now they are building 13 super-secret bases in
Afghanistan and each one of these is larger than any
other U.S. base in the world, and there are already
more than 700. They are not building them to attack
Iran but Russia’s southern border."
Estulin has documented information
on the strategic weapons aimed at his country, the
plans for Afghanistan, historical precedents, and
the collapse of the USSR.
Fidel listened to him very closely.
"Accumulating more than 25,000 nuclear weapons isn’t
for sane people. All of that was passing through my
mind while you were speaking, and I was asking
myself where it’s all going to stop. That was
exactly what I wanted to discuss with you. I have
devoted a lot of time to reading and collecting
information. We dedicate all our time to informing
ourselves, while those who make decisions than can
determine the lives of millions of people are
disinformed."
ATOMIC MINI-BOMBS
The history of small-format atomic
weapons dates back to the end of the 1950s or the
early 1960s, for pacific use. Estulin explained, "When
engineers wanted to open a pass through a mountain
to build a tunnel, for example, they realized that
there wasn’t a high enough quantity of dynamite to
do so. So then they began to use controlled atomic
energy. The military industry realized that it would
also serve to kill people. Third- and fourth-generation
weapons emerged from there.
Some of these weapons can be the
size of a baseball. But there are two ways of
constructing an atomic bomb: with uranium or with
plutonium. The difference is the critical mass: that
of uranium is more or less 50-52 kilos of the
critical mass while of plutonium it is far less. The
Hiroshima bomb was uranium and that of Nagaski,
plutonium.
According to Estulin, terrorists
have never had access to uranium bombs because, "we
haven’t seen an explosion like that of Hiroshima
since 1945. Terrorists do not have the technology to
produce mini-nukes. Only the United States, Russia,
France and Israel can do that."
IN THE SIERRA MAESTRA
The bombs dropped from Batista’s
airplanes, Fidel recalled, were sometime of 500
kilograms, and opened a large hole, but did not
destroy many houses. "They fell, buried themselves
and exploded," Fidel added. "In the case of atomic
bombs, the mushroom cloud and fire are two
unmistakable signs accompanying them. I don’t
remember that happening in the Sierra Maestra.
"They destroyed, without any doubt,
but not in those apocalyptical dimensions of the
nuclear bomb. "Once they launched two 500-kilogram
bombs on us and I went to see them: they had damaged
a little bit more than half a hectare, but there was
no fire. We were about 100 meters from the place
where they bombarded. They more or less knew where
we were, because we had the enemy troops surrounded,
there was never any fire. And they dropped bombs on
us! That was the first we had to deal with, 20
minutes after starting any combat action."
The Batista Army used those weapons
very well, because the United States had trained
them. "They used B-26s, as well as a kind of fighter
plane with 8 machine guns and they had some Hunter
Jets, three in all, two of them we used afterward to
defend ourselves during the mercenary Bay of Pigs
attack (1961). Those Jets were handled by pilots who
were taken prisoner for refusing to carry out
Batista’s orders and had been tried and punished for
that."
The Comandante en Jefe commented
that all the dynamite used by the Rebel Arm in the
war was taken from unexploded bombs. "Our people
learned to uncover them and pull them out. We made
contact mines with a little torch battery… Sometimes
we would put in 20 kilograms of TNT and that could
turn a light tank upside down; it could completely
destroy heavy ones.
Fidel’s memories traveled back to
the fighting methods of the Rebel Army, based on
respect for dignity, the humane treatment of
prisoners, and ethics in confronting an enemy which
totally lacked that values. "No soldier is going to
hand himself over if he knows that they are going to
kill him. It was the simplest thing in the world for
us to put out of action an army trained by the
yankis, which came to consider itself invincible."
Without abandoning the subject,
Fidel asked Estulin what his argument was in
response to people who challenge his investigations,
specifically in terms of the effect of radiation
where mini-nuke explosions had allegedly taken
place.
According to the journalist, even in
the language of those writing about the explosions
one can find indications as to what produced them,
although the most obvious evidence such as the
effects of radiation on the people affected in the
short-, mid- or long-term is concealed.
"For example, Fidel insisted, "Who
is interested in the Oklahoma explosion?" The
writer’s response prompted him to move on to
interests beyond that of the U.S. presidency, which
nobody reaches without being approved by those
interests.
Estulin believes that the plans of
the world elite are to exterminate surplus humans on
a planet whose population is growing at a faster
rate than the availability of resources in many
regions.
Fidel only noted: "Humanity will
have to resolve the issue of renewable energy…" and
after commenting on the drama provoked by the forest
fires in Russia, recommended to the journalist the
documentary Home, which focuses on the
challenges of human survival."
THE BATTLE IS FOR THIS PLANET
Estulin posed the question of
whether humanity could still be on this planet in
50-100,000 years’ time. For him, the response is:
No. "There will be too many of us. The only
alternative is that, through progress and
development, we colonize the moon, Mars, space and
assure ourselves that billions of humans can survive,
and that for me is immortality."
"What you say about human progress
is correct," Fidel replied, "But in my view, life is
going to unfold here, on this planet. There is no
atmosphere on Mars, the Moon and the other planets
of the solar system. Your theory is absolutely right
in the sense that humanity has to preserve itself in
order to live for thousands of years, thanks to
progress.
"But we have to fight against the
forces that are preventing this progress." And Fidel
gave one example: "It is calculated that life began
on this planet around four billion years ago, more
or less. Oil began to be formed more or less 400
million years ago. Humans are wasting in less than
200 years the oil accumulated over 400 million years…
The atmosphere cannot resist that consumption."
Estulin affirmed his agreement. "I
think that all of us have to fight as much as Fidel
for the survival of the species…"
The author commented that many
people believe that we have reached the point of no
return, and that we have to stop dead. "The dangers
are very great," Fidel observed.
Estulin gave his books to Fidel and
wrote as a dedication: "We shall win the war when
the power of love exceeds the love of power."
Fidel read it silently and then said
out loud: "We will win the war by not waging it."
Translated by Granma International
(Taken
from CubaDebate)
Granma Internacional