The role that Cuba played and the lives of those 2,077 Cubans, whose mothers and families mourn for having lost their children in Africa, helped achieve the true security and independence of Angola. It was a contribution because in the end the Angolan people were the ones who decided that. We also contributed in a definitive way securing the independence of Namibia after years that a United Nations resolution was being ignored by South Africa and the western powers.

In Cuba, what we do not accept is the comparison of our participatory democracy with bourgeois democracy which has not solved anything for humanity. The only thing it has done is to take humanity towards a precarious point. They have created the environmental crisis, the food crisis, the water crisis and the pandemics all over the world. The reason for that is because they have taken the majority of the resources and given it to militarism paid for by the western powers because it is a great business for them; this is the real truth.

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.

There is the case of Henry Kissinger who was a known scholar who later became the National Security Advisor to President Nixon and later on Secretary of State. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing relations between the U.S. and China. At the same time that he was doing that he was also encouraging all sorts of covert actions against Cuba including political assassinations. This contradiction is one that is hard to understand.

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.

Communism is something that comes from the classics of Marxism that talked of a modern society we should aspire to. One that is truly fair where relations of monetary exchange are not the priority but rather one where peoples' needs could be satisfied.

The role that Cuba played and the lives of those 2,077 Cubans, whose mothers and families mourn for having lost their children in Africa, helped achieve the true security and independence of Angola. It was a contribution because in the end the Angolan people were the ones who decided that. We also contributed in a definitive way securing the independence of Namibia after years that a United Nations resolution was being ignored by South Africa and the western powers.