When we talked about going to help Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea Conakry how many doctors in Cuba raised their hands to go? 15 thousand. In their homes they said, "We are willing to go risk our lives to help other countries". That is true medicine; it is the true observance of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors swear to.
Alejandro Castro EspinThe United States turned to repression when its prominence started to slip in Latin America through establishing military dictatorships.
Alejandro Castro EspinIn Cuba we are building a socialist society and we could say we are on the verge of a communist society which is hard to achieve, very hard to achieve, but is a longing worth fighting for.
Alejandro Castro EspinThe American people have on many occasions been willing to shed their own blood for a noble cause, like when hundreds of thousands of Americans participated in the fight against fascism in Europe, and other causes. There are many good people there, and the Cuban people know the American people, we have many examples of solidarity from the American people in every stage of the Cuban people's fight for independence.
Alejandro Castro EspinJust imagine, more than half of the young people in the European Union do not have jobs. How can one explain that? How can one explain that to a working family, that produces goods and services, those who produce the olive oil that is a a main source of food in any European country? They humbly work the land with great effort and then the little resources they had saved in banks have now become dust simply because they did not have the means to withstand inflation produced by the adjustment policies.
Alejandro Castro EspinIn 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.
Alejandro Castro Espin