I have a lot of faith and confidence in Cuban democracy.

When we speak of the origin of western democracy it's precisely here, in this territory that the modern definition of democracy first emerged in city/states known now as Greece. This was coming from a society in which 30 thousand citizens had rights and 300 thousand were slaves and citizens without rights that lived in this territory. So that was the concept of western democracy; some citizens had the prerogative of exerting their civil and political rights while the others had none.

There is no one more talkative than Cubans, Cubans express their feelings, there's nobody more rebellious and revolutionary than a Cuban and I say that without chauvinism.

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.

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.

To apply communism is an aspiration, in fact it has never been applied anywhere, it is really still a utopia.

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.