Your Holiness:

The island whose soil you have just kissed is honored with your presence. You will not find here those peaceful and good-natured native inhabitants that populated it when the first Europeans reached this island. The men were almost all exterminated by exploitation and slave labor that they were unable to resist; the women were converted into objects of pleasure or domestic slaves. There were also those who died under the blade of homicidal swords, or as victims of unknown diseases imported by the conquistadors. Some priests left heartrending testimonies of their protests against such crimes.

Throughout the centuries, more than one million Africans, cruelly uprooted from their distant lands, took the place of the indigenous slaves that had already been wiped out. They made a considerable contribution to the ethnic composition and origin of our country's current population, in which the culture, beliefs and the blood of all those who participated in this dramatic history is mixed.

It is estimated that the conquest and colonization of the entire hemisphere cost the lives of 70 million indigenous people and led to the enslavement of 12 million Africans. Much blood was spilt and many injustices were committed, many of which, after centuries of sacrifice and struggle, still persist under other forms of domination and exploitation.

Cuba achieved its nationhood under extremely difficult conditions. It battled alone with unsurpassable heroism for its independence. For that reason, exactly 100 years ago it suffered a genuine holocaust in its concentration camps, where a considerable part of its population perished, fundamentally women, the elderly and children. This was a crime committed by the colonialists which although it has been forgotten in the conscience of humanity, has not ceased being a monstrous crime. You, a son of Poland and a witness of Oswiecim [Auschwitz-ed], can comprehend that better than anyone.

Your Holiness, another genocide is being attempted today, so as to bring to its knees, through hunger, disease and total economic strangulation, a people which refuses to submit to the dictates and the sway of the most powerful economic, political and military power in history, a power that is far more powerful than that of Ancient Rome, which for centuries threw to the lions those who refused to renege on their faith. Like those Christians atrociously slandered in order to justify the crimes, we, similarly slandered, would prefer death one thousand times before renouncing our convictions. Just like the Church, the Revolution also has many martyrs.

Your Holiness, we think like you on many important contemporary world issues and that is a source of great satisfaction to us. On other matters, our opinions differ, but we pay respectful homage to the deep conviction with which you defend your ideas.

In your long pilgrimage throughout the world, you have seen for yourself much injustice, inequality, poverty; fields without crops and campesinos without food and without land; unemployment, hunger, disease, lives that could have been saved and are lost for a few cents; illiteracy, child prostitution, children working from the age of six or begging in order to live; marginal neighborhoods where hundreds of millions of people live in inhumane conditions; discrimination for reasons of race or gender, entire ethnic groups ousted from their lands and abandoned to chance; xenophobia, contempt for other peoples, cultures destroyed or under destruction; underdevelopment, usurious loans, uncollectable and unpayable debts, unequal terms of trade, monstrous and nonproductive financial speculations; an environment mercilessly destroyed, at times beyond repair; unscrupulous arms trading for repugnant commercial ends, wars, violence, massacres; generalized corruption, drugs, vices and an alienating consumerism imposed as an idyllic model on all peoples.

Humanity has grown almost fourfold in this century alone. Thousands of millions of people are suffering hunger and a thirst for justice; the list of peoples' economic and social disasters is interminable. I am aware that many of them are a motive for Your Holiness' constant and growing concern.

I have had personal experiences that have allowed me to appreciate other aspects of your thinking. I was a student at Catholic schools up until I went to university. I was taught then that to be a Protestant, a Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Animist or a participant in other religious beliefs constituted a dreadful sin, worthy of severe and implacable punishment. More than once, in some of those schools for the wealthy and privileged, among whom I found myself, it occurred to me to ask why there were no black children there. I have never been able to forget the totally non-persuasive responses I received.

Years later, the Vatican Council II, convened by Pope John XXIII, took up some of those delicate questions. We are aware of Your Holiness' efforts to preach and to practice respect toward the believers of other important and influential religions that have spread throughout the world. Respect for believers and non-believers is a basic principle that we Cuban revolutionaries have inculcated in our compatriots. Those principles have been defined and are guaranteed by our Constitution and our laws. If difficulties have arisen at any time, that has never been the fault of the Revolution.

We cherish the hope that, one day, no adolescent in any school in any region of the world will need to ask why there isn't a single black, Indian, Asian or white child in it.

Your Holiness: I sincerely admire your valiant statements on what happened with Galileo, the known errors of the Inquisition, the bloody episodes of the Crusades, the crimes committed during the conquest of America, and on certain scientific discoveries that nowadays go unquestioned but which, in their time, were the object of so many prejudices and anathemas. That necessitated the immense authority that you have acquired in your Church.

What can we offer you in Cuba, Your Holiness? A people with fewer inequalities, fewer unprotected citizens, fewer children without schools, fewer sick people without hospitals, more teachers and more doctors per inhabitant than any other country in the world visited by Your Holiness; an educated people to whom you can speak with all the liberty you wish, and with the security that this people possesses talent, a high political culture, deep convictions, absolute confidence in its ideas and all the awareness and respect in the world to listen to you. There is no country better equipped to understand your felicitous idea, such as we understand it and so similar to what we preach, that the equitable distribution of wealth and solidarity among human beings and peoples must be globalized.

Welcome to Cuba.

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(Translation and transcript issued by the Cuban Council of State)

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