Socialism is overcoming certain difficulties, it is working in order to try to achieve social advances, to really achieve a society where everybody improves, not where just the elite improve and the others get worse.

The Cuban people along with international solidarity defeated this imperial position [America] in the middle of the 21st century and have demonstrated the potential of a nation that has lived under an iron handed blockade and permanent aggression including state sponsored terrorism and yet has survived. In the new circumstances we have the absolute conviction that we will move forward even more than we already have.

Cubans are a people who suffered from capitalism in the cruelest way, in the social order, the economic order and the political order.

Just 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.

Today China is a first world economy, in terms of development. The U.S. may still be in first in GDP but it is a broken economy in reality.

In Cuba, we have a democracy that represents the humble, the dispossessed, those who make up the vast majority of the population. It is for those who carry the main weight of society's load in matters of the production of goods and services. These are not the ones that live from financial speculation.

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.