50 Years of Revolution: Fidel Castro Speaks to the Americas in English



In May 2003, ex-Cuban president Fidel Castro was in Argentina to attend the inauguration of the new Argentinean president, Nestor Kirchner. Just two months earlier, the United States had plunged itself into a world of intellectual darkness by pre-emptively and illegally invading Iraq. Against this backdrop, Fidel Castro delivered a 2 1/2 hour speech on the steps of the law school to thousands of Argentineans, yet the footage has the feeling as if he was speaking to the entire continental mass that comprises the Americas.

In these videos, 44 minutes have been excerpted and provided with translation so that people from the English speaking world have the opportunity to form a better criteria by which to judge one of the most historically important Americans(in this sense, someone from either of the Americas) of the 20th and 21st century.

After 50 years of revolution, 47 years of an embargo, hundreds of assassination plots, one failed invasion, and unquantifiable lies and slander by the United States government and American media outlets, the world faces the prospect of a crumbling American empire and a Cuban revolution that will survive it in the context of an increasingly independent and socialist Latin America. The multi-polar world is a reality.

By 2003, the beginnings of change had begun to manifest themselves, as Fidel Castro explains towards the end of his speech. In these 44 minutes, he discusses the Bush doctrine, education, health, immigration, the Cuban electoral system, mass media and communication, and neoliberal globalization. He even touches upon "an international economic crisis."