Each day more statistics are made known about the horrifying conditions of poverty and degradation under which millions of the world's children are forced to live. Though this tragedy has been public knowledge for years, the world's nations, including the most developed, are failing to adequately respond to the crisis. The United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, has made extensive international studies which reveal the plight of millions of children, mostly in the Third World, abandoned and victims of the most horrible crimes. The reports show small children forced to work in inhuman conditions; others sexually abused by adults; children kidnapped to have their organs extracted and sold for transplants and street children murdered to "clean up" the cities.

It is painful to see in big cities, including in Latin America, thousands of boys and girls dirty and abandoned, forced to make a living for themselves by polishing shoes, cleaning windshields, selling trinkets or simply begging in the streets.

Massacres of street children have become tragically commonplace in Brazil's big cities, where groups of vigilantes have machine-gunned homeless children. Children are also working in mines and on construction sites, doing the most heavy and dangerous jobs. Studies show that children are being kidnapped and taken to Europe and the United States to be sexually exploited or where their organs are sold to the highest bidder.

Then there is the total lack of education and medical assistance which turns indigent young children into criminals and vagrants, making them a burden on society, living out their lives in pain and anger.

But, as Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage once told the United Nations: "Not one of those children is Cuban." In Cuba, a poor, Third World country, not a single child is without a school or a teacher, not a single child is without medical attention, or social security and not a single Cuban child lives without the love and support of his fellow Cubans.

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