Trevor Loudon's New Zeal blog has moved to

TrevorLoudon.com

redirecting you there now

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Bolivia's Morales-First Stop Cuba

Bolivia's new Socialist President, Evo Morales has lost no time in visiting sympathetic foreign leaders. His first stop naturally was Cuba. From the US Communist Publication "Workers World".

"The New Year began with a development of the greatest importance for Latin America and for the class struggle: a visit by Evo Morales to revolutionary Cuba. It was the first trip abroad by the newly elected president of Bolivia. He went on New Year’s Eve, just as Cubans were preparing to celebrate the anniversary of their socialist revolution.


Morales is also expected to visit South Africa, China and Brazil. He is not planning to visit the United States.

Evo, as he is affectionately called by his supporters, will be inaugurated on Jan. 22.

Cuban President Fidel Castro said the election of Morales had “shaken the world.”

The Cuban government placed a lot of importance on Morales’s trip. A high-level delegation of Cubans took part in the meetings with the Bolivian president-elect. They included the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon; Carlos Lage, vice president of the Council of State; and Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque.

On the Bolivian side were 60 representatives, the largest delegation to accompany Morales abroad.

Presidents Castro and Morales immediately signed bilateral cooperation and solidarity agreements during the visit. The agreements, signed on Dec. 30, mainly cover health care, education and sports.

As a result of these agreements, Bolivians will now be receiving free eye care, with Cuba contributing equipment and specialists. Cuba is also offering 5,000 scholarships for Bolivians to become future doctors and specialists.

Cuba will assist in a national literacy campaign in Bolivia as well.

Evo Morales’s orientation to Cuba shows that the popular movements in Latin America are gaining strength and are veering away from Washington. They are anti-imperialist and for self-determination.

Like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Cuba now has a good friend in Evo Morales of Bolivia—a friend whose priority is the people’s needs, not imperialist greed.

This trip showed the unbreakable links between the peoples of Latin America and Cuba. Bolivia is the land where revolutionary leader Che Guevara, who was born in Argentina but fought in the Cuban Revolution, was killed by the CIA.

Morales stated in Cuba that his visit signified “one of two generations of struggle for dignity, a meeting of two revolutions. The struggle of the Cuban people and above all of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was not in vain. They left the seeds and now there are fruits, not just in Bolivia but throughout Latin America.”

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home