Response
to the Message from the Young Communists League
Dear comrades,
Reading your message filled me with emotion. None of you
had been born when the Revolution triumphed. The ideas that this message
beautifully express sprang from history's deepest furrow. Their roots are
sustained by every act of sacrifice and heroism of an admirable people, who was
able to overcome all obstacles. They find fertile ground, too, in the example
and the values created by other peoples.
What is a life bereft of ideas worth? Marti once said
that “trenches of ideas are more valuable than trenches of stones”. Are ideas
born of a man? Do they perish with him? Ideas have come into being all
throughout the history of the human species. They will exist as long as our
species does. Never before has the latter faced as serious a threat, owing to
the combination of society's political underdevelopment and the fruits of
technology, which appears limitless and whose capacity for self-destruction is
beyond reason. Genocidal wars, climate change,
hunger, thirst, inequality are everywhere we look.
Human beings need to cling to a hopeful prospect, to seek
a means of survival in science itself, and it is only fair to look for it and
offer it to them. There would be no room, in that brighter future, for the
horrible injustices bred by today's developed
capitalist system under a worldwide dictatorship.
“To be or not to
be”, I believe Shakespeare wrote in one of his plays. That is the alternative
facing young people now. To ignore this would be opting to live in the most
idyllic of worlds but for a handful of decades, which are less than few seconds
in the history of time.
If young people fail, everything will fail. It is my
deepest conviction that young Cubans will struggle to prevent this. I have
faith in you.
Fidel Castro Ruz