– Fidel Castro –
Speech Delivered by Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Councils of State and Ministers, at the National Event of Solidarity with Vietnam and Condemnation of Chinese Aggression, held on February 21, 1979, “20th Year of Victory.”
My fellow countrymen:
I was not supposed to speak at this event. I came, like you, to express my personal solidarity with the people of Vietnam (applause).
The summary was made by Comrade Jaime Crombet and he did it very well (applause); but since I have been brought to the rostrum — I believe that the decision was made by the master of ceremonies — I am going to say a few brief words.
In reality, this is not just any moment that we are living through. We have met many times. There have been many problems in the world in recent times; but this is undoubtedly one of the most serious, if not the most serious of recent times, and it requires a great deal of depth and a great deal of meditation from all of us.
Certainly one of the most repugnant, the most cowardly, the most wretched acts we have ever witnessed — and it will be difficult for any other to surpass it — is this aggression against Vietnam. If the previous crimes were serious, this is the most serious of all, because this crime no longer comes from the colonialists, or the Japanese imperialists, or the French colonialists, or the Yankee imperialists, it comes from a country which until a few years ago considered itself a bulwark of the world revolutionary movement, which considered itself a socialist country, an anti-imperialist country, a friend of the revolutionary movement, a country which — as we have said on other occasions — made a revolution which was viewed with hope by all the peoples of the world and by all the progressive forces of the world.
Imperialism we knew, colonialism we knew; but one could never have thought a few years ago that this could ever happen. It is the most repugnant case of betrayal of the revolutionary movement in the whole history of mankind.
We are certainly not going to say that it is the Chinese people who have perpetrated this betrayal. It is not the Chinese people, it can’t be the Chinese people; it is a clique of facineros, of fascists who have taken over the leadership of the Chinese people (applause). We don’t really believe that the Chinese people are capable of doing that, we don’t believe it, let alone a people with the qualities, and the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese people. They don’t even know what is going on at the moment.
They don’t know at this moment that Vietnam is being attacked, that Vietnam is being invaded. Those people through all the mass media, radio, television, newspapers in the hands of that clique, are being cynically deceived. But still it is not so easy to deceive a people.
And that is why I wonder why the Chinese leadership has not told the people about this war of aggression, this blatant invasion they are carrying out against the Vietnamese people. They are talking about a Vietnamese aggression against China, a Vietnamese aggression against China; they are talking about a Chinese counter-attack.
Well, there is no exaggeration in what has been said here about the methods that government is employing. Needless to say, you don’t even know what’s going on inside China, you don’t know: the problems, the divisions that they have, which of the factions is setting the tone at the moment, and who is responsible, which of the factions is responsible for this war and this incredible adventure, although by all accounts, the one who is there at the forefront of this villainy, of this crime, the number one responsible seems to be this fool (laughter), this puppet, this shameless Deng Xiaoping, who gets purged once, comes back again, gets purged again, comes back, and any day now gets purged again. That could happen. Here we don’t know. The factions have been purging each other for many years. They are purged, rehabilitated, purged again and rehabilitated again until the day when the Chinese people purge them all at once (applause). Ah, but they are dangerous, extremely dangerous.
What has been said in “Granma”, as Comrade Jaime pointed out this evening, about the methods, how they remind us verbatim of fascist methods, of Hitler’s methods, and how this event reminds us verbatim of that other event which began with a similar adventure and ended in a world war: the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s troops in September 1939. It was exactly the same.
Since then, the documents, the participants, the planners of the operation have become known, and films have even been made explaining how the incident took place, how the Nazis dragged ordinary prisoners out of prison, dressed them in Polish uniforms and attacked a German radio station, and how they immediately unleashed the invasion.
China’s acts of harassment against Vietnam had been going on for many days.
Who does not know the Vietnamese? How intelligent, how prudent, how wise the Vietnamese are (applause). Who can imagine Vietnam being interested in a conflict with China? Yet there had been hundreds of acts of harassment on the border by the Chinese.
But this plan was not new. This plan had been in the making for a long time. It has now been demonstrated why those ping pong games between the Chinese and the Americans, those trips by Kissinger to Beijing, those trips by Nixon while the imperialist aggression against Vietnam was intensifying. It was all a plan, it was all a manoeuvre. The Chinese were not really interested in an independent Vietnam, in a united and revolutionary Vietnam. They were not interested at all.
Let’s remember how when the puppet government was still in the south, they invaded some islands that belong to Vietnam. While the Yankees were there, they did not invade any small islands in the south of Vietnam; but when the Yankees left, they invaded the islands, because it was considered that the islands were rich in natural resources, that they could have oil, and so on. And when the south had not yet been liberated but the Yankees had already left, they attacked and occupied islands that belonged to Vietnam. But then they went to work in Kampuchea under the pretext of helping the Kampuchean revolution. They got into Kampuchea and took control of the movement, with people who were unconditional to them, some of Chinese origin and others related to the Chinese, relatives of Chinese, married to Chinese. And so they took over the leadership of the revolutionary movement in Kampuchea.
What did they do there? Well, in the name of revolution, in the name of socialism, they set up one of the most monstrous regimes known in recent times: they cleared the cities at bayonet point. This is not to say that it may not be necessary to evacuate a city at a given moment, in a given situation, in a given need. A revolutionary method is persuasion with the people, with the masses, when there is a real need of a military or any other kind that is indispensable. They evacuated the cities at the point of bayonets. They separated family members from each other, they organized gigantic concentration camps. They even went so far as to establish marriage by… I don’t know if it’s by decree. No, no, strange, strange things. They told everyone who they had to marry. Compulsory marriages. On the other hand, they separated the men from the women, the children from the family, and they liquidated practically all the technicians in the country, they committed unbelievable massacres. Everybody knows that. This is nothing new, to the extent that it is said that 3 million people died in two and a half or three years. That was Maoism in practice, that was Maoism, a Maoism that the Chinese did not apply even in China, they applied it in Kampuchea. It was a real genocide. There was no government that could stand on that basis. It was absolutely impossible. It was a policy of extermination on the one hand, of encircling Vietnam on the other hand; they encouraged the Kampuchean fascists to carry out aggression against Vietnam. The aggressions started in the south from the Cambodian border. There are documentaries showing the massacres of tens of thousands of Vietnamese, men, women and children. One of the most brutal, most criminal, most genocidal governments ever known.
It was bound to blow up one day, and it did. That cannot be sustained in Kampuchea or anywhere else in the world. And I think one of the best things that could ever have happened is the overthrow of that fascist, genocidal group in Kampuchea (applause), the notorious PoI Pot-Ieng Sary clique, swept away by the people; that clique collapsed like a house of cards, so that it meant not only the liberation of Kampuchea, of a people who could no longer live under those conditions, but it also meant a tremendous political defeat for the government of China.
The Yankee imperialists who were masters of pretence and hypocrisy — I say they were, because now they have others who are more than they are — began to cry foul, since, of course, because of the relations between China, the rapprochement between China and the United States, both regimes were interested in encircling Vietnam.
The U.S. government was talking about human rights, and even in the U.S. Senate there was a proposal for international intervention to end the genocide that was taking place in Kampuchea. What was happening was even reported countless times in the world press and in the U.S. press itself.
However, as soon as that genocidal regime was overthrown, they launched a violent global campaign against Vietnam, because of Vietnam’s solidarity with the Kampuchean revolutionary movement, in an attempt to present Vietnam to international opinion as an aggressor country, as a country that was violating the independence of another people. To deny the real fact that that regime was unsustainable and could not be sustained. All this, I repeat, was a tremendous blow to the Chinese ruling clique. And from that moment on, aggression and harassment against Vietnam on the border multiplied, while troops were massed. Everyone knew that the Chinese government was massing troops on Vietnam’s borders.
It was in this situation that Deng Xiaoping visited the United States, and there he declared, the very super cynical man, that Vietnam and Cuba had to be punished. That’s what he was saying, that Vietnam and Cuba had to be punished. He was telling the Yankees: you punish Cuba. Look at what we have come to, what we have come to.
The government of a country that trained the boys, the pioneers, with a bayonet, pricking a straw dummy, which was Nixon, the United States, imperialism; Nixon himself, yes, they pricked Nixon’s straw belly, yes, yes, yes, the straw belly, with the pioneers, before making that final volte-face they did.
That country which sent so many telegrams to the revolutionaries all over the world. One billion Chinese — no, at that time it was 800. Eight hundred million Chinese support them, and count on the solidarity of 800 million Chinese. And they would bring out the 800, and then the 900, and so on and so forth.
Of course, from very early on you saw some strange things in the Chinese leadership. For example, during the October Crisis, when the world was on the brink of war. In a very serious situation, the Chinese kept their mouths shut and went on a little war against India, to take a piece of territory away from India. But in that whole period of the October Crisis they kept their mouths shut, they didn’t say a word.
Later on, they began to make statements, to make accusations and to try to intrigue in connection with the whole October Crisis problem.
But who would have thought that this country at that time, that the government of this country would end up telling the Yankees: Cuba must be punished, and Vietnam must be punished. Those were Deng Xiaoping’s statements in the United States. And then in Japan he said again about Vietnam: Vietnam must be punished.
And so soon… it’s already known today, because one of those internal bulletins got into the hands of a foreign journalist and it has been published. The day after Deng Xiaoping’s return, he met with the Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, which he heads; he spent three or four days meeting with them, and it was there that it was decided to send large reinforcements of troops to the Vietnamese border in a hurry, and to attack Vietnam. Immediately after the return of the United States.
What did Deng Xiaoping talk about with Brzezinski, what did Deng Xiaoping talk about with Carter, did the U.S. government know or not know, did the U.S. government know or not know about the Chinese plan of aggression and invasion of Vietnam? That is a very important question. How do you explain that, having just returned from the United States, he convened the Military Commission and ordered the invasion of Vietnam.
The fact is that the U.S. government has been politically associated with the invasion of Vietnam; it has been politically associated. Moreover, a U.S. senator recently claimed that Brzezinski had told him that the Vietnamese must now withdraw from Kampuchea. A statement. And the U.S. government, which was undoubtedly on the record and has no doubt associated itself with Beijing’s adventure, says that the Vietnamese must withdraw from Kampuchea in order for the Chinese to withdraw from Vietnam. So the U.S. imperialists and the Chinese rulers have made common cause with this invasion. They have made common cause with this mad and crazy adventure. It is a sign that both the U.S. and China are seeking the re-establishment of the genocidal regime of PoI Pot-Ieng Sary in Kampuchea. That is the political objective: to attack Vietnam precisely, to stop all co-operation and all solidarity of Vietnam with the revolutionary government of Kampuchea, to re-establish the genocidal regime and to encircle Vietnam, then, on both sides again, to encircle it from the south and to encircle it from the north. This is the policy of the United States while apparently washing its hands of the problem.
And now, what a nerve, the way the issue has been presented to the world, the way the Chinese have presented it: they were invaded by Vietnam, and they have fought back.
But, well, they are even Hitler’s bad apprentices. Because, let’s say, Deng Xiaoping with this has become, almost, almost, not a Hitler, but a kind of caricature of Hitler. Because we already know from that internal information bulletin published, they already say in the bulletin: what time they attacked, how they attacked by surprise, how they carried out an artillery and aerial preparation at 3:00 in the morning, how they started the invasion. But in the bulletin itself they don’t disguise the casualties they have had; they can’t disguise them, because they said, when the bulletin came out, two interesting things: that they had had about 3,000 casualties. They were the same as the Vietnamese had said up to that point. They didn’t say, of course, that they had lost dozens of tanks. They didn’t say that they had suffered some serious setbacks. All they said in the bulletin was that there had not been good co-ordination between the various weapons and between the air force and the infantry, and as a result they had had difficulties in the advance. In other words, while on the one hand they say that they were attacked and that it was a counter-attack, on the other hand they put out a bulletin with limited internal circulation explaining everything that happened there.
What brazenness, what cynicism, what resemblance, what incredible resemblance to Hitler’s methods, both in the abusive and criminal invasion of a small country and in the way this problem is presented to the world.
Now, a very dangerous situation has been created indeed. What are the intentions, how far will they be able to go, how will this crisis unfold, how far can this crisis go, because they have embarked on a crazy, really crazy and dangerous adventure.
This solidarity with Vietnam, this mobilization of all the revolutionary peoples and all the progressive and peace-loving peoples of the world is by no means in vain. If we have participated many times in acts of solidarity, I am sure that none has more global significance and more importance, and none is more essential than this solidarity (applause).
It is necessary, it is necessary that the progressive forces, that the peoples of the world mobilize to stop this adventure, to stop this danger, to stop this madness, because the whole world could be involved in this situation. The consequences of this kind of adventure, without exaggeration, could be terrible for the world. Because Vietnam cannot be immolated just like that; it is impossible. And then these arrogant mandarins will have no alternative but to retreat, no alternative but defeat. But world opinion must rise up to influence, to determine a halt to an adventure that could lead the world into a catastrophic war.
And this is a moment of definitions for everyone in the world who calls himself a revolutionary, for everyone in the world who calls himself a progressive (applause), for everyone in the world who calls himself a peace-lover. Because this is not a time for vacillation and ambiguity, this is not a time for lukewarm cloths, this is not a time to be looking at Vietnam and China on the same plane, in this whole wide world; this is a time to define who is who (applause). Because no peace-loving man, no progressive man, no revolutionary man, or any man who considers himself a revolutionary in the world, can fail to condemn in the strongest and most categorical way this criminal adventure of the Chinese government (applause).
We must, however, be calm. Precisely at the moments of greatest danger to the world, it is necessary to act with the utmost calm and coolness, and it is the responsibility of all the socialist states, of the progressive peoples of the world, to act with the utmost calm and coolness. This is not the time to lose our heads or to lose our temper, because once certain events are unleashed, they may be irreversible.
It is essential to defeat this adventure, to defeat this madness, because it must be defeated, it must be defeated! (applause and exclaims of: “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!”) Preventing these neo-fascist madmen, this mad faction, that mad neo-fascist faction, which is ruling China at this moment, from getting away with their plan to involve the world in a nuclear war. It is necessary to defeat them and prevent them from getting away with it.
We must keep a close watch on developments, keep abreast of all the information, all the news coming out of Vietnam.
And we must not overestimate China’s power. We must not overestimate it. Nor should we underestimate the power of Vietnam (applause). Technically, from the military point of view, with all its follies and its “cultural revolutions”, its purges and more purges, its rehabilitations and more rehabilitations, the Chinese army is technically backward in terms of armaments. A Chinese tank cannot compare with a Vietnamese tank (applause and exclamations), a Chinese anti-aircraft rocket cannot compare with a Vietnamese anti-aircraft rocket, Chinese anti-aircraft weapons cannot compare with Vietnamese anti-aircraft weapons (applause and exclamations), Chinese artillery cannot compare with Vietnamese artillery.
What a monstrous crime against this people, what heroic deeds and heroism the last decades have demanded of them! First came the Japanese invaders, then the invaders of the French neo-colonialist expeditionary corps, then the Yankee invaders. And now, the latest: the Chinese invaders. In these struggles the Vietnamese gained a lot of experience. There is no people in the world who have a better mastery of tactics and strategy in the liberation struggle than the Vietnamese people (applause), because they have always had to face very powerful enemies. And the Vietnamese know more about tactics and strategy than the Chinese (applause). And a revolutionary war is not the same as a genocidal war; a revolutionary war like the one waged by the Chinese against Japanese occupiers and reactionary forces is not the same as a genocidal, criminal war against a brave people who are defending their cause, their homeland, their revolution, their independence, their existence, as the Vietnamese people are defending it today (applause).
Besides, the Vietnamese are very wise, they know what they are doing very well, and how far they can let an enemy penetrate, and how to fight him and when, in what way; they know what they are doing. And I tell you, I have infinite confidence in these qualities of the Vietnamese people (applause). And even though this neo-fascist faction that rules China talks about the 1 billion, it would be no wonder if they suffered a tremendous defeat in Vietnam, no wonder (applause).
And that is why I say that these criminals have embarked on a crazy adventure, a blind alley. And hence the risks of this situation. It is, in fact, a dangerous situation, a complicated situation, which calls for the utmost serenity, the utmost cool-bloodedness; but, at the same time, the utmost solidarity, the utmost support for Vietnam and the utmost determination (applause).
Our conviction? The Vietnamese defeated the Japanese, the Vietnamese defeated the French, the Vietnamese defeated the Yankees, who were much more powerful, incomparably more powerful than the Chinese fascists (applause), and when the Yankees surrounded the country with aircraft carriers and thousands of planes and strategic bombers, they were defeated. Our conviction is that the Vietnamese will defeat China’s fascist war (applause). That is our conviction! It doesn’t matter whether they penetrated 10 kilometres or 15 kilometres, or a little more or a little less; many have penetrated, and you know how they got out.
Our people must follow events closely — I repeat — be very attentive to all the news. Our press, our television, our radio, must make every effort to provide our people with as much information as possible, and our people must be prepared for everything, for everything! (applause)
Crises are not new to us. We have already known, a few years ago, the October Crisis, when many nuclear rockets were aimed at us, and nobody here lost sleep; I do not know of a single sleepless person. What’s more, I think that in those days people slept better than ever (applause). And it is the same now: we have to be prepared for everything. We don’t know how long this crisis will last. Nobody would be able at this moment to predict how it will unfold. Be ready for anything and be ready for anything! (applause)
Increasing our solidarity, deepening our information and our awareness, without losing our calm and without losing our sleep. Let us say with more depth and decision than ever before: Long live proletarian internationalism! (exclamations of: “Viva!”)
Long live the thousand times heroic people of Vietnam! (exclamations of: “Viva!”)
¡Patria o Muerte!
¡Venceremos!
(Ovation)