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Vol. 82/No. 13 April 2, 2018
Fidel: ‘No one has the right to use nuclear weapons’
“We have never considered the idea of fabricating nuclear weapons,
because we don’t need them,” former Cuban President Fidel Castro said in
a 2005 book-length interview with Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet,
published under the title My Life. Castro was rebutting a U.S.
government slander that Havana was aiding Tehran in developing a nuclear
arsenal.
“What’s the purpose of producing a nuclear weapon when your enemy has
thousands of them?” Castro said. “It would be entering an arms race all
over again. No one should have the right to produce nuclear weapons,
much less the privileged right demanded by imperialism to impose its
hegemonic domination” on the world.
Returning in that interview to Cuba’s refusal to develop weapons of mass
destruction, Castro said: “Who are you going to use it against? Against
the American people? No! That would be unfair and absurd! Are you going
to make a nuclear weapon? You’ll ruin yourself — a nuclear weapon is a
good way to commit suicide at a certain point.” And “you’re going to do
that against the entire world’s public opinion.”
More than a decade later, in remarks to the seventh congress of the
Communist Party of Cuba in April 2016, Castro said, “The greatest danger
hanging over the earth today derives from the destructive power of
modern weaponry, which could undermine the peace of the planet and make
human life on earth’s surface impossible.”
As opposed to such horrors, Castro told students at the University of
Havana in November 2005, the Cuban people and their socialist revolution
“possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear power. It is the immense
justice for which we are struggling.”
— STEVE CLARK
Related articles:
US rulers seek Israel-Arab bloc to target Tehran
Some Israeli settlers join Bedouins in eviction fight
Revolution, counterrevolution and war in Iran
Social and political roots of workers’ protests that swept 90 cities and
small towns
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