What worker or peasant can pay 80 - 90 million dollars to elect a senator or 4 billion to elect a president? Only great capital can do that. That is why we say that bourgeois democracy has been evolving in the last years into dollar democracy, this is not the democracy of sovereignty, and only the people can determine that.

When we talk about Cuban democracy we are referring to participatory democracy which is big difference with representative bourgeois democracy. Our is a democracy in which everything is consulted with the people; it is a democracy in which every aspect and important decision that has an impact in the life and society of the people, is done in consultation.

In building up a democratic model I think that Cuba's contribution, little by little, has contributed to getting closer to the ideals of those philosophers, of those Greeks who thought about how a society could be fairer, how a society could really represent the interests of the people. We have tried to get closer to that from a Latin-American perspective and from the Cuban perspective.

The future of Cuba is one earned by a country that has resisted for over 50 years against the most powerful empire on Earth. The resilience of its people made this triumph materialize.

In the southern countries and in the regions and continents like Africa, which is where the origin of life on earth began, there is tremendous debt on humanity, it is one of the most underdeveloped areas and where the worst pandemics exist. In many incidents the European powers that colonized them are now not even capable of helping them.

America did not need to be discovered because quite simply America had the American-Indians. There were whole groups of people that already lived there including very developed societies such as the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans. But then came the European vision that saw the conquest as a source of advanced growth away from medieval Europe. The new revolutionary bourgeois trend formed a new perspective on what was democracy that they saw as an improvement to the democracy of ancient Greece.

It is only through popular consultation and exchange with the people about social and economic policies that we were going to define the strategic direction of Cuba in the next years. To reach prosperous and sustainable socialism, which is our aspiration, we discussed that with the entire population.