-DATE-
19660320
-YEAR-
1966
-DOCUMENT_TYPE-
SPEECH
-AUTHOR-
F. CASTRO
-HEADLINE-
REPLY TO STATEMENTS MADE BY CHILEAN PRES. FREI
-PLACE-
CUBA
-SOURCE-
HAVANA IN SPANISH
-REPORT_NBR-
FBIS
-REPORT_DATE-
19660321
-TEXT-
CASTRO SPEECH SCORES CHILEAN GOVERNMENT

Havana in Spanish to the Americas 0035 GMT 20 March 1966--E

(Statement by Cuban Premier Fidel Castro in reply to statements made by
Chilean President Eduardo Frei)

(Text) Eduardo Frei, the president of Chile by the grace of his great
demagogy and abundant help from Yankee and German financial capital--and
according to his own belief, by the grace of God--speaking during an event
held in front of the presidential palace, stated that he would not answer
the statement I made on 13 March because he has too much respect for his
country, too much respect for the post he holds,and too much self-respect
to enter into a contest of insults which once was aimed against President
Kennedy, today is aimed against China, and tomorrow is aimed against Chile.
Then he added: We will not allow anyone to stick his hand into the country
or we will break his hand. He said this even though a few hours before the
event to which I am referring he had personally announced to reporters that
the government would issue a declaration, and it did so a few hours later
through the Department of Government.

From news agencies' dispatches I have taken a text of the statements made
by Frei during the event held in front of the presidential palace and of
the paragraphs of the declaration released a little before by the
Department of Government which were filed by these news agencies and which
say: "From time to time and since he has been in the government, Fidel
Castro has systematically insulted nation after nation. President Kennedy
heard his diatribes an so did many other rulers. Nations of the socialist
world, such as Yugoslavia and the People's Republic of China, to which he
referred with extraordinary violence during the same speech in which he
attacks Chile, have not escaped. That is his way of covering up his
internal difficulties. The Chilean Government has never attacked him.

"The attitude of Fidel Castro confirms the conditions under which
revolution is intended to be carried out in Latin America--either through
his system based on the capricious dictatorship of one many, without
elections, without congress with a single party, with an official press,
without freedom, with thousands of executions, and with the dependence of a
political and economic satellite of a foreign power, or through the
revolution in freedom which Chile selected in 1964 and which is being
carried out with the voluntary participation of the people, with free
elections, an open congress where all currents of opinion are represented,
with free radio and press, with labor freedoms, and with active political
opposition.

"The Chileans who desired the Castro system were overwhelmingly crushed in
1964, 1965, and 1966 by the secret vote of the people. The Chilean people
are not willing to see our nation turned into the toy of temperamental man
or a battlefield of the cold war. We are building a nation to free
ourselves from all sorts of imperialism, not to be slaves to anyone. There
are groups in Chile which do not accept their defeat, which want to destroy
the country's economy, to disregard the authority of law and are now
inciting violence in an attempt to gain advantage from the misfortunes
which they caused.

"The nation now knows where these groups obtain their inspiration and the
respect in which they are held by Chile. Castroism lost its opportunity to
turn the tide to the left in Chile and Latin America. Its lack of freedom
and its economic failure carried it to extreme rationing and its subjection
to foreign interests took away this meaning. The Chilean Government will
not move an inch from its revolutionary course or from its vocation to
serve the people who express their support freely and not through fear. For
this reason, Castro's insults only serve to confirm his desperation. Castro
does not know Chile, nor its history, nor the dignity of its people. Chile
has never nor will it ever accept foreign interference in its internal
problems. His insults only provoke the unity of the nation." Amen.

For my part, I am not going to create a scandal and shout that I am
insulted. However, will Your Immaculate Excellency permit me, will the
gentlemen of the Christian Democratic parliamentary majority, which also is
in solidarity with his offended excellency, permit me to answer these
beautiful statements addressed to us without saying pharisaically later on
that this is an insult to Chile?

The poor bourgeois that exists in Frei is enmeshed in his own
contradictions. His role is to prevent a revolution in Chile, but he has
become fond of calling himself a revolutionary. He swears up and down that
he is effecting a revolution, and yet at the same time nothing frightens
him as much as a revolution. Ah, if only what he is doing in Chile could be
revolutionary; but it is not revolution.

Perchance, are we to understand that the Department of Government, in
issuing those statements, has nothing to do with Frei? And if that is not
the way of it, how are we to explain that he says later that he will not
reply because he has too much respect for his position, for himself, and so
forth and so on? Is it that the government can stoop to reply but not Frei,
who at the same time does stoop to reply while saying that he will not
reply?

If all this is to let us know the great attachment he feels for his
position and his own person, that is no secret for any of those who know
how vain, how attached to themselves and their positions bourgeois
politicians are.

It is curious, too, that both Frei and his Department of Government, and
his parliamentary majority, and his official press, and all the oligarchic,
bourgeois, and reactionary papers in the capital, all coincide in
describing as an insult to Chile my words in reply to the unfounded,
slanderous insinuation that the mine strikes were a result of plans mapped
at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana.

Identifying themselves as the nation which they govern on behalf of the
exploiting classes, instead of replying with arguments to the retort
provoked by an unjust accusation, they assume the air of offended vestal
virgins and conjure up to aid them the shades of chauvinism, screaming to
the four winds: the nation has been insulted! There has been serious
meddling in Chile's domestic affairs! National unity! National unity!

Poor tortured devils! What old, demagogic, discredited tricks they have to
fall back on to get out of a tight spot! How much hubub, confusion, and
noise they can raise! At bottom what they are trying to do with these
hysterical cries is to have the people forget the bloodshed and the dead.
But they are mistaken if they think they are going to remain forgotten. As
Lincoln said, you can fool all of the people only some of the time.

I did not insult Frei. I merely replied. I explained and analyzed his
imputations. Still less did I insult Chile. Frei, by the way, is not Chile.
Chile also means the workers and women who were killed and wounded at the
mine massacre, to whom our working people give wholehearted solidarity;
their orphans and families left abandoned by this crime know they can count
on their Cuban class brothers. Chile also means its heroic workers, its
exploited peasants, its progressive intellectuals, its awakened masses of
revolutionary militants.

This sizeable portion of the Chilean people, however, means nothing for the
imperialist monopolies, the big landowners, the greater bourgeois, and
their spokesman and other interests that put Frei in office. For them Chile
means Frei.

Our cause is ennobled, not dishonored, by the comparisons Frei makes
between the Cuban revolution and his laughable political pantomine, which
can be called revolutionary only by the enemies of revolutions. Between the
two processes there is the difference that exists between the true and the
false, the heroic and the ridiculous, the fact that will go down in history
and the farce that will be tossed into the historians' wastebasket.

Frei got into office with the help of imperialist money and the almost
complete support of press, radio, television, and other media which are the
weapons used in legal political fighting and which, in Chile as in any
other capitalist oligarchical society, belong to the rich.

Bourgeois freedom of the press, which is the one to which Frei refers, is
the freedom of the rich to own the greatest part of the media for
disseminating ideas: they use them to defend their class interests against
the exploited. It also means a lack of freedom for the poor and
dispossessed to have available such media--which entail increasingly more
fantastic expenditures--unless it be within very tight limits, in smaller
number, allowing no comparison with the means at the disposal of their rich
exploiters.

Every means at the disposal of imperialism, the oligarchy, and the
bourgeois--their political, social, cultural, and religious institutions,
their lies, prejudices, and fears--were mobilized to make Frie's victory
possible. A section of the people was miserably deceived by psychological
terror over the danger of a real revolution, while being offered a beatific
"revolution" that could be carried out by the bourgeoisie aided by the
imperialists.

If the case of Chile has really served for anything it is not to point a
new way for the revolutionary masses, but to put before all revolutionaries
in the hemisphere still more forcefully the question of whether the
peaceful triumph of the revolution is possible in the face of the
exploiting classes which, led by imperialism, possess all the society's
gold and a monopoly on weapons that are used in this kind of battle, even
though they may be willing inside their bourgeois institutions to grant a
few crumbs of legality to the revolutionary forces. Cuba's course has not
served to justify Chile's experiment. Just the reverse is true; Chile's
experiment will serve to justify Cuba's course still further to the
revolutionaries of the hemisphere.

In Cuba, to be sure--and we are very pleased because of it--there has been
and end to private ownership of media for disseminating ideas, media that
used to belong to the exploiters but now serve the cause of the
revolutionaries.

Similarly, there has been an end to imperialist or capitalist private
ownership of our mines, our banks, our foreign trade, our public services,
our factories, and our big plantations. The soil and subsoil and even the
air, water, and the rays of the sun that give us light belong wholly to our
people and produce for them. This is seen by Frei, Yankee imperialism's pet
and the guardian of its interests in Chile, as economic and political
satellitism.

In Cuba, to be sure--and we are proud of it, not ashamed, and it is in
keeping with our principles--no big landowner, no banker, no mineowner, no
attorney for imperialism, no Frei can be in the government, because as a
matter of fact there are no oligarchic, bourgeois, proimperialist,
reactionary parties, nor do we need them, because their property has been
socialized and their economic, political, and social system--that is,
capitalism and its bourgeois parliamentary republic, or failing that,
governments or proimperialist, oligarchic gorillas--have been eradicated,
banned, eliminated forever.

A good proof of this is that Frei and his group care little about the
bourgeois elections, the bourgeois parliament, and bourgeois freedoms, but
do care about economic and class interests which these forms of government
protect. While they refuse to maintain diplomatic and trade relations with
Cuba they maintain magnificent relations with military governments which
have come to power through force and which have thought it convenient to
abolish such bourgeois political systems in most of the Latin American
countries. This is in order to serve best the interests of imperialism, the
oligarchy, and of the bourgeoisie itself and to face with force of arms the
just and inevitable rebellion of the exploited.

It is true, and we are proud of the fact, that the revolution did not
achieve victory in an electoral process but rather through the
revolutionary armed struggle of the people, which was the only possible
path. We were able to understand the potential force of the exploited
masses and the historical need and possibility of the revolution, beginning
with a few rifles we unleased the immense energy contained in the people
who with their irresistible drive swept out an army which was larger as far
as numbers were concerned. It was an army which was trained by the United
States and which defended the interests of the imperialists, the
landowners, the bourgeoisie and their parties and properties. That war
would never have been won without the determined and combative support of
the oppressed masses of workers, peasants, and students.

These oppressed masses of yesterday, which are armed and victorious today,
have made possible the much more difficult and historic task of defending
and sustaining in power he Revolutionary Government against the fierce
blockade of the Yankee empire--located only 90 miles from our coasts. Those
masses, whose political and cultural level increases by the day, are better
organized, trained, and armed in the party, in the rebel army, and other
armed institutions, also in the militias, in the factories, in the
mountains, in the plains of our peasants and farmers, in secondary
education and university centers, and they constitute the invincible force
of the revolution.

In any mass event held in the large provinces of Cuba we can gather more
citizens ready to give their lives for the revolution than the votes that
Frei obtained with the help of the imperialists, the oligarchs,and the
bourgeoisie together in the elections that took him to power. And this can
be verified by Frei himself, if he desires to do so.

The revolutionary people do not see the power of the state as something
distant, something divorced from them or against them, but they fully
identify themselves with that power because they are the power.

In Chile, naturally, many persons may not understand the tremendous
difference between one political system and another, but in Cuba our people
laugh at the pslams intoned by Frei in honor of elections and other
bourgeois institutions, because our people are all too well acquainted with
all the deceit, lies, and frauds they cloak.

Once every so many years the citizens had the theoretical right to
determine in bourgeois elections which bourgeois or oligarchic candidate,
which bourgeois or oligarchic party, would administer the state and the
oligarchic and bourgeois institutions which, furthermore, were the only
kind conceived and permitted by the constitution and the laws. Of all the
rights those constitutions and laws consecrated, property rights were of
course always the most sacred.

Fir more than half a century, with frequent interruptions because of Yankee
interventions, electoral changes, coercion, and coups--such as the rest of
Latin America has experienced for a century and a half--our people knew the
disgusting system with all its political vices, corruption, demagogy, dirty
deals, unpunished embezzlement, special privilege, abuses, bribery, and
deceit. Elections among the oligarchic and bourgeois parties were an
exercise in outbidding each other in order to buy votes and make
propaganda.

In the rural areas in particular, the big landowners spent millions of
pesos in every election. Thousands of "political sergeants" gathered to
agree on how much money they would receive for the votes to be cast at the
respective places for these professionals' kin, friends, and proteges.

In my childhood and adolescence I witnessed these things, because I was
born in a family of landowners whose property was surrounded by the immense
holdings if three big Yankee sugar companies. The rural
population--illiterate, poor, and ignorant--was systematically victimized
by these procedures. Naturally the men thus "elected" by the people were
not going to build schools or pass revolutionary laws. The revolution wiped
out that rotten society and its degrading methods forever.

Frei charges that I do not know Chile's history. He does not know the laws
of history and does not have a theory to interpret the development of human
society. For Frei, as well as for the bourgeoisie of the bourgeois
parliamentary republic, it is not a political system which evolved from the
historical development of society that responded to the realities of an
epoch and to the interests of a class which was recently freed from the
feudal chains and which aspired to embody the ideals of mankind.

For Frei, as well as for any bourgeois, the capitalist society and its
political form, the bourgeois parliamentary republic--whose philosophy
inspires each of his arguments and standards to such an extent that when he
speaks of a revolution he always thinks if a imperialism
revolution--constitute the ideal economic, political, and social
organization. As far as he is concerned, society is governed by eternal
immutable laws, and therefore such are the laws that govern that bourgeois
society, laws which he simply considers a perfected product of human
though. From a different concept, we Marxists see the revolution as a great
leap toward higher forms of human coexistence, forms that must arise as the
inevitable result of the historical process and which present themselves as
both a need and a possibility.

Those who proclaim political and social forms which today act as a brake on
the development of man and his livelihood cannot call themselves
revolutionaries. For this reason, we cannot believe that Frei and his group
understand the Cuban process, nor can they judge it with their prejudices,
with their limited viewpoints, and with their myopic bourgeois political
eyes. How could Frie's mentality be reconciled with the communist idea of a
classless society in which even the state does not exist as a coercive
power no do any of the institutions that distinguish it as a state?

The state has existed since it arose historically as an instrument of
domination of some classes over others. The state does no lose that
characteristic while passing from capitalism to communism but it stops
being the instrument used by the exploiters against the exploited and
becomes an instrument of the exploited against the exploiters.

Frei, how beautiful will the day be when that force is not only not exerted
in society but when it no longer exists within society! Then no one like
you in Chile will have to order weapons to be fired against the workers of
a copper mine owned by a Yankee monopoly and no one like us would have to
execute police agents who murdered thousands of revolutionaries, or spies,
saboteurs, and criminal agents of imperialism who desire to destroy us,
because there would be no exploiting monopolies--not even in the United
States nor in any part of the world--no exploited worker, no wars, no
counterrevolutionaries, and no executions.

It is hard to have to execute any man who, the product of a society and an
epoch, serves the worst sort of interests of the country's enemies, but it
is still harder, and in no way morally justifiable, to massacre workers in
defense of those worst interests. The reactionaries have never been
concerned over shedding the people's blood in defense of their own class
interests, and nothing is more common than for a reactionary to accuse
revolutions of being cruel.

Even without going back to the times when the revolutionary slaves who
followed Spartacus were crucified by the tens of thousands on the Appian
Way, the entire history of colonization and imperialism and the experience
of modern social struggles--from the civil wars in France around the middle
of the last century and the Paris Commune of 1871, to the fierce repression
in Indonesia a few weeks ago when almost 100,000 communists were murdered
in a matter of days, and passing through the period of the atrocities
perpetrated by fascism and nazism--demonstrate that reactionaries and
victorious counterrevolutions are a thousand times more cruel than
revolutions. Nothing in the world is more cruel than imperialism. Nobody is
capable of being more savage and bloodthirsty than Frei's protectors are in
Vietnam. It is from those bloodthirsty protectors that Frei takes his
arguments in accusing the Cuban revolution of severity.

We will not let ourselves be defeated by those bloodthirsty imperialists
and we will defend ourselves with all necessary vigor and without
hesitation, not only to survive as a nation and a people, but in order to
fight unceasingly to attain the humane society which human beings have been
able to achieve--the most perfect human society, where man stops being a
wolf and becomes a brother to man. And even though the socialist state is
just a transition to that higher form of society, it is still a much more
democratic state than the bourgeois state, because the former represents
the interests of the exploited majorities, and the latter represents the
interests of the exploiting minorities.

The word democracy has had a different meaning in every historical epoch.
When the word was used for the first time in ancient Greece, where its root
and its fame originated, it denoted the form of government that held sway
in a class society, where alongside a landowning, slaveowning minority that
debated government problems "very democratically" in the assembly there
existed masses of slaves without rights who worked for the minority on
farms and at businesses with no opportunity to share in the destiny of a
society in which they created the material wealth.

Bourgeois democracy is also based on a class society, and, even if it
highly displeases Frei, it expresses the domination of the capitalists over
the wage earners, who in the bourgeois society, like the slaves of ancient
society, are the ones who create material riches.

Even though the socialist state is a new social and political organization
that has great practical and even theoretical tasks to resolve, with its
objective of building for the first time in history a classless society,
based on the modern productive forces developed by man, it is called upon
to create the most truly free society that has ever existed. Each county
will pave its own way toward that higher society and will contribute its
experiences. Our country is doing it. We have not hurried to set up our
forms because we want these forms to fit in with the realities and not vice
versa.

The conditions of our process determined the union of the revolutionary
forces in a vanguard party. However, it is not the only one. There is
another one--the counterrevolution--which is organized and directed by the
imperialist government of the United States. The members of our party are
elected and reelected by the constant participation of the masses of
workers and fighters. It is a homogeneous and disciplined vanguard which,
representing the workers, governs the country and leads the struggle
against the imperialist enemy and for the development of the socialist
economy. It is not a heterogeneous mixture like Christian Democracy, where
young individuals who sincerely desire revolutionary changes and represent
the sanest and most progressive faction of the organization are joined to
old reactionary opportunists and crafty persons who, being in the majority
and openly supported by Frei, would rather give their souls to the devil
than pass a revolutionary law.

Frei, who likes to call himself a revolutionary, in the field of economics,
social affairs, and politics will never be more than a reformist bourgeois
whose program tends to consolidate in Chile the capitalist system of
production, and this without clashing with the interests of imperialism.

Frei dreams the impossible dream of reconciling the antagonistic classes.
He thinks that the interests of the workers can be reconciled with those of
imperialism and the bourgeoisie, those of the bourgeoisie with those of
imperialism, those of the petty bourgeoisie with those of the big
bourgeoisie, and those of the peasants with those of the oligarchy.

In a country ridden with foreign debts, sacked by the monopolies, with a
feudal system of landownership and a hardly developed economy, with social
needs that have been accumulating for decades, and where really there is
little to distribute without sacrificing the interests of the imperialists,
the oligarchs, and the big bourgeoisie, to improve the conditions of the
peasants, the workers, and the middle class Frei wants to compensate the
oligarchs, enrich the monopolies, and keep the bankers, big industrialists,
and businessman happy.

If imperialists, oligarchs, and bourgeois keep the lion's share, including
the crumbs with which Frei hopes the Yankees will help him carry on with
his pseudorevolutionary abortion, what will be left for raising the
workers' real income, providing the peasants with technical and economic
aid, improving the middle classes' standard if living, not to mention
paying the foreign debt, hospitals, roads, water systems, and streets?

It is obvious that the mainspring of this policy, "a midsummer night's
dream," can break only at the weakest part of the system--represented by
the workers. The workers cannot be asked to make sacrifices to develop and
perpetuate the interests of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. The workers
would only sacrifice themselves, in Chile as anywhere else in the
world--and one does not need to know much local history for this--if those
sacrifices were asked of them in behalf of the future interests of their
class, and not for their exploiters. Hence the workers in Chile refuse to
give up their hopes for better pay. This is the only real, objective
explanation of the strikes. To suppose that it can be a result of the
Tricontinental Conference comes from great ignorance or bad faith, or both.

A few other points remain in reply to Frei. It is absolutely untrue to say
that the government of Chile has never attacked Cuba. His whole political
campaign had an anti-Cuban background, based on the most unjust,
tendentious interpretations and the grossest lies and slanders written
about our revolution by its imperialist detractors. A recording by a close
relative of ours--all of whose acts are directed and whose statements are
composed and disseminated by the CIA--was given wide publicity over the
radio on the eve of the elections, to put the finishing touch to the
psychological terror campaign directed at the people of Chile in order to
influence the outcome of the elections.

That was gross intervention by the CIA and the U.S. Government at a moment
when the future government of the country was to be determined, and also a
repugnant procedure by imperialism to create a political effect. On that
occasion Pontius Pilate washed his hands as he joyfully reaped the returns
of such dirty politics.

Barely a month ago the Chilean Government's representative in the United
Nations, adding his voice to the whole clique of puppets that include such
democratic individuals as Stroessner, Castelo Branco, Castro Jijon, Peralta
Azurdia, the little puppet Garcia-Godoy, and other ruffians of the same
ilk--about whom Frei feels no scruples, either Christian or
democratic--signed the document against Cuban addressed to the U.N.
Security Council, an action tantamount to adding fuel to the flames of the
U.S. aggressive plans against Cuba. Is this not an attack of the worst and
most treacherous sort, since it incites to armed aggression against our
people? As a result I was not much surprised that he should take another
step along the same road and insinuate that Cuba was to blame for the
strikes in Chile.

Furthermore, is Chile's present government perchance averse to
imperialism's policy against Cuba? In obedience to an agreement imposed by
the United States on the OAS, which as Frei himself has at times indicated
is an anachronistic institution, Chile's preceding government broke off
trade and diplomatic relations with Cuba in abject submission to the
imperialist order. Foodstuffs that had come to our country from Chile in
exchange for sugar were cut off. Imperialism scored one more success in its
criminal blockade of Cuba.

In 17 months in office, Frei has not had the courage to rectify this
submissive action which surrenders Chile's sovereignty. For that reason it
is very shameful that under these circumstances Frei resorts to the
argument regarding rationing in Cuba, when he in fact participates in the
inhumane blockage which the most powerful imperialist country is carrying
out with the full force of its political and economic resources against a
small nation with an underdeveloped economy.

Cuba is facing Yankee imperialism with a firmness and courage that some day
even the grandchildren of Frei will admire. The real and heroic revolution
of the Cuban people is not being carried out with the approval and
acclamation of Yankee imperialism as is the false revolution which the Frei
government claims to be carrying out. He states that he wants to free
himself from all sorts of imperialism, but what he is doing is mounting the
carousel of the "Alliance for Progress" and accepting Yankee imperialism
like an ideological Lazarus, and accepting a revolution directed by
imperialism is like a church in the hands of Luther.

Despite the blockade and the rationing of a few articles which this
farcical revolutionary throws in our face, any humble family in our country
obtains more goods and services than any Chilean family in the same class.
As a consequence of the lows and measures adopted by the revolution, the
immense majority of the people are living in rent-free houses. The strides
made by education and medical care in only a few year have surpassed those
achieved in the rest of the Latin American countries. There are not
illiterates in our country. All children, regardless of where they live,
have teachers. Almost a million adults are attending classes to improve
their cultural and technical level. Almost 150,000 youths and children
receive free housing, food, clothing, and shoes in our educational centers.
Unemployment has been eliminated.

Family income--either direct or indirect--has increased by more than 1
billion pesos. Under the agrarian reform, more than 100,000 peasant
families stopped paying rent and have become landowners. The country
recovered from foreign hands all the national resources and the basic means
of production, and despite the difficulties caused by the blockade and the
threat of Yankee aggression, which force us to invest considerable material
and human resource, we are moving ahead with the development of our
economy.

Does Frei think that he can reconcile these realities by using a few Yankee
cliches to speak of the alleged failure of the Cuban revolution? We would
like to know what Frei and his new Christian Democracy would have done if
he had to pass the test of fire of a true revolution such as that of
Cuba--90 miles from the United States.

If the rich in Chile have more than enough of everything and are
unrationed, the poor lack almost everything; they are rationed, without any
card, by the miserable wages they receive and their pitiless exploitation
by imperialism, the oligarchy, and capitalism.

So as not to leave unsaid a few stupidities typical of a man who lacks
political firmness and arguments for honest debate, Frei calls me
temperamental, simply because I was obliged to answer his attacks and
scheming against the Cuban revolution. However,in connection with Yankee
intervention in the Dominican Republic we publicly, on 1 May 1965, praised
the Chilean government's initial stand, and when we took a similar position
with regard to some other of its acts that we thought were positive--merely
because in politics we adhere to principles--Frei did not call me
temperamental.

A revolutionary temperament does not necessarily mean a temperamental
revolutionary, just as a bourgeois spirit does not necessarily mean a
clever bourgeois.

Frei is astonished because the Cuban revolution laid bare the Yugoslav
press attacks and intrigues against Cuba. Cuba was also capable of a
dignified denunciation of the economic aggression committed against us by
the government of China in an act of stupidity and political blindness, and
Cuba formerly passed a judgment on Kennedy that he deserved for his crimes
against our country. That means that although we are a small nation we will
not be intimidated or subjugated by anybody.

What is shameful, on the other hand, is for Frei to try to sanctify
Kennedy, the author of the economic blockade of our country, the promoter
of counterrevolutionary gangs that murdered Cuban workers, peasants,
teachers, and students; admittedly responsible for the Giron invasion that
cost the lives of more than 100 revolutionary fighters; organizer of the
pirate attacks on our shores from Central American bases, and other similar
deeds. This Kennedy, who began what today is the bloody war in Vietnam, was
an unscrupulous servant of imperialism. His death, and the criminal manner
of it, does not redeem his faults. When I see what saints Frei worships, I
understand his political credo. And I warn him that Mao Tse-Tung will not
appreciate being listed with Kennedy and the league of Yugoslav communists.

Lastly, Frei declares that whoever sticks his hands into the country will
be destroyed. That would be worthy of applause if it were true. But why
does he not destroy the interventionist hands which behind the back of the
government and without respecting Chile's sovereignty tries to apply the
Camelot Plan in his country?

And more basic yet, why do you not decide to destroy the hands of the
imperialists who for a long time have been meddling in the economy of Chile
and who exploit the labor of hundreds of thousands of the best sons of the
nation? Is it perhaps that as far as you are concerned the claws of
imperialism do not exist?

When I see that the workers' blood is shed because they request, in order
to lighten somewhat their miserable living conditions, a little of what the
foreign monopolies extract from Chile--and there are threats that more
blood will be shed--I really do not believe that you are able to destroy
the only hands which intervene in and dominate the life and destiny of your
country--the hands of Yankee imperialism. It is logical that your
remorseful conscience seeks relief in false patriotism and tries to find in
Cuba a ghost of an enemy.
-END-