Address by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, to the second national art instructors graduation ceremony held in Ciudad Deportiva on October 28, 2005

(Highlighted excerpts)



We had planned to gather for this ceremony exactly one year after the first was held, on October 20, to celebrate Cuban Culture Day on the day a new crop of art instructors, educated in the schools born of the creative spirit of our Battle of Ideas, graduated, but unpredictable and powerful hurricane Wilma obliged us to postpone this much-awaited gathering until today. Some of you, from the eastern provinces, were already in the capital when, two days before, we decided to postpone this celebration because of hurricane Wilma’s dangerous proximity to Cuba. I know that, as a result of this, you have been in the capital for over a week now. Surely, you understand that we could not have sent you back home while that complex meteorological situation was still affecting us. Today, 3,092 of the 3,879 students who began their studies in the 2001-2002 school year graduate as art instructors; the second year to graduate from these institutions, which were opened on February 18, 2001 as part of a program aimed at graduating 30,000 art instructors over the course of 10 years. Of these graduates, 60.4 % are female and 39.5 % are male. Most of them come from working-class families. These newly graduates, equipped with practical skills and experience, were assigned to 3,048 educational institutions, including Cuba’s 26 polytechnic institutes specializing in informatics. With this new group of graduates, Cuba has 6,318 art instructors, which means that at least one art instructor can be assigned to each of the 4,898 pre-schools, grammar schools, special education schools, junior and senior high schools. Thus, a marvelous avenue is opening leading to the education of the youngest generations in the appreciation and sensitivity towards the arts while paving the way for the ambitious purpose of attaining a widespread comprehensive general culture for all of our people. We want for our people to be knowledgeable not only in the arts, but also in history, science, economics, geography, the environment and the most varied fields of knowledge, and to have a profoundly humanitarian conscience. We are pleased to know that from the two graduations combined, 6,147 youths have decided to pursue higher studies and that, of these, 3,555 will pursue a Bachelor’s Degree in Art Instruction. These young people accumulate an immense amount of knowledge that is essential to the lofty aim of creating a society of justice where everyone is given equal opportunities…

…You will be the professors of tomorrow, and so will other young people who are studying today, artists who build consciences and forge minds, who are not indolent or unconscious and forget that a child who beings studying an art form when he is five, six or seven years old, who goes through an art school, who has the opportunity to study at an art institution free of charge, will later shine as an artist, as the true wealth of talent we give our people will one day shine forth. A moral consciousness must be forged early on if we are to be spared the ingratitude of some who reach the top of the ladder in the art world and surprise us with their desertion; one day we get the news: “so and so didn’t come back”. And why does so and so do not come back, if not because they are lacking in conscience, in love for the people who nurtured them and gave them everything, in spite of the blockade, in spite of the sacrifices demanded, in spite of threats? (Applause). They owe to those workers who cut sugar cane, who drove tractors, who worked for endless hours, in agriculture, in industry, anywhere; at a primary school, at a secondary school, at a university, everywhere. A revolution is the triumph of virtue over vice, the triumph of honor over dishonor, the triumph of moral and patriotic integrity over mercenary impulses and vice; the most those who cannot build values on ethical foundations can do is to steal talents, because talents are formed spontaneously in many of those countries, through the initiative of the citizens themselves, there are no art schools for everyone like here: they exist only for the rich or very rich. In our country, they are open to everyone, without exception (Applause). We were talking about teachers, those who educate, who create for the benefit of everyone, and of those who steal from us and want to take our artists and athletes, or our brains in any field of science. As with everything else, they also tried to take all of our doctors and, of the 6,000 we had, not all of them experienced, they took half, 3,000. This did not prevent us from reaching the figure of 70,000 today. More than 25,000, according to calculations I must verify, are studying medicine today. We have an enrollment of 7,000 every year; more than 12,000 are studying at the Latin American School of Medical Sciences; 20,000 Latin American students, most of them from the region’s poorest countries, will begin courses in the first quarter of next year. And nothing but respect will be read in the eyes of those who attempted to deprive this country of doctors. Now, they see an entire nation transformed into a university training professionals in many specialties, most importantly in that humane specialty that restores health and saves lives: medicine. History has already meted out due punishment for the crimes they committed against us. You will see 100,000 doctors come out of Cuba, because we are helping to train doctors for the whole world, while they haven’t a single doctor they can send anywhere (Applause). Mercenary attitudes will never give us an internationalist doctor; mercenary attitudes will never give us a valuable and glorious contingent specialized in natural disasters, epidemics and serious illnesses like AIDS, which is the scourge of entire nations and continents, almost to the point of obliterating their populations; and they cannot prevent us from offering aid, because, for each and every one of those doctors we had, those they stole from us, some 3,000 of them, there are 8 times that number participating in internationalist missions or helping peoples in times of immense pain. First they took 3,000 and then others who had graduated; and, in spite of that, we now have 25,000 doctors, a new type of doctor, offering their services in the Third World. And, here in Cuba, nearly 50,000 of them keep working. How many times the original number? Fifteen, sixteen or seventeen times, distributed across all of the country’s municipalities, reaching all corners of our nation, from Sandino, next to Cape San Antonio, to Maisí, in Baracoa, on the mountains and the prairies. We are well aware that our system is not perfect, but no other country has ever had as many doctors working so close to the population as we do. No other country has ever had what we have in greater and greater numbers: networks of outpatient clinics, that is to say, primary care centers, and not only that but also physical rehabilitation centers attached to those clinics, which now have equipment they never had before, new standardized equipment, which can be maintained and repaired, something which becomes impossible when you have 40 or 50 different brands in use, as was the case until recently in our country, and those outpatient clinics are already becoming a model and centers offering training for doctors. There will be tens, or rather hundreds and hundreds of university campuses offering medical programs. This, of course, isn’t talked about much in cables, no, or on television or the radio, which are crammed full of ads and official lies. The governments behind these media have a lot of nerve…

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