UNESCO. General Conference; 30th; Records ... - unesdoc - Unesco

play a baseball game, and Fidel Castro has put me on notice that Cuban chivalry stops at the gates of the stadium.
Well, we shall see in Cuba in a few days’ time.
(21.20) Social rights, sport, culture - these all form part of the basic rights of human beings. I have told you that I
wanted to be a painter, I wanted to be a poet, I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a major-league player; I ended
up as a soldier and later a rebel soldier. Now, as I am a soldier and know Venezuelan military circles well, my
brothers in the Venezuelan armed forces are pushing through a social programme such as has never been seen in
my country. More than 100,000 men have left their weapons in the barracks and gone out with the army’s field
hospitals, hospitals that are set up for wartime; there will be no war between Venezuela and any of its neighbours
or anyone else. No shooting war, as they say; because there are other wars: hunger, this is the true war; misery,
disease, these are the wars of peace; these are the wars that need to be won every day. Under a project we have
called Bolívar, Bolívar 2000, the military and thousands of volunteers and local authorities are helping to rescue
people on the fringes of society, people who have nothing to eat, morning, noon or night. We cannot wait to use
shock-therapy on the macro-economy only to hear free-marketeers tell us that you have first to get the macroeconomy
right, and that only then, with the gradual trickle-down effect, will people begin to be fed, drip-fed. No;
the one thing the neo-conservatives don’t take into account is that when the drops begin to trickle, they are doing
so over the biggest cemetery in history.
(21.21) What is the role of the armed forces in this process of searching for peace? I feel this is a topic that should
be discussed the world over. The military for waging war, for people fighting against one another; no. We want to
use these structures, these well-disciplined, high-tech bodies to fight such wars as hunger. In my country we are
embarking upon an experiment, and as Mao Ze Dong said years ago, the people is to the army as water is to fish. In
Venezuela, the military are like fish in water, shaking hands with the people, working and building schools,
repairing roads, performing surgery in the poorest neighbourhoods, carrying passengers and patients in military
aircraft and charging them only minimum fares equivalent to the cost of the fuel. The navy’s sailors are not at war,
but are sailors for peace who form cooperatives with the fishermen and help them to fix their boats in order to put
to sea in search of fish and sail the rivers; they also build schools and care for children. My wife, who arrived
yesterday from Caracas, was telling me that an abandoned holiday village for children has now been fixed up: the
military, the government and neighbours of a Venezuelan site on the Caribbean coast have restored this village,
which is now ready to receive some 1,500 children. What a terrible affliction is that of abandoned street-children.
We have said that children must not be street-children; they must be the children of the nation, schoolchildren,
children who play games, practise sport, the children of life and happiness. This is a great commitment to these
abandoned children who are to be found everywhere.
(21.22) In short, this is a social project to put human beings first, as they should be. In this way, Venezuela is
endeavouring to help not only itself, but as the country of Bolívar has always done, to help its brothers and sisters
of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and everywhere, especially the South, the Third World, to find a
much better path for our peoples. This is the path of our life, and it is well worth investing our life in such a path,
as so many have done before.
(21.23) Mr President of the General Conference, Mr Chairperson of the Executive Board, Mr Director-General, I
am infinitely grateful to you for having listened to me, for having had the patience and kindness to invite me and
my wife, Marisabel, members of my government and representatives of Venezuelan society, to talk here for a while,
to share a few reflections, and above all to say that Venezuela has changed course in the direction of championing
human beings, in other words, the ardently desired search for true peace, social peace, economic peace, political
peace, for genuine democracy, for liberty, equality, fraternity, that old slogan, which was born in this very city over
200 years ago, and which still rings out, illuminating the search for the right path. As a Dominican poet used to say
– and I shall end on this note of affection, sympathy, devotion and gratitude to you all – a poet now aged, but still
spry, from Santo Domingo, that beloved city in the heart of the Caribbean. Pedro Mires wrote many poems, one of
which I learnt when I was very young and went to play baseball in the Dominican Republic. I got an old book of
poems and copied out a number of them. One of them is called “My country”; although it is very long, I learnt one
passage from it, which I have never ceased repeating over the years. I shall allow myself to recite it to the world,
and I beg Don Pedro’s indulgence for extrapolating: “If anyone wishes to know which is our country, the country
of humanity, do not ask, for it does not exist; we are going to fight for it”. Thank you very much.
22.1 El PRESIDENTE:
Señor Presidente Hugo Chávez, muchas gracias por su honrosa visita a esta casa, por la reconstitución
emblemática del itinerario de América Latina y más precisamente de Venezuela, por su sensibilidad frente a la
UNESCO y la necesidad actual de las relaciones multilaterales. Aquí seguiremos juntos para seguir luchando por
este tipo de paz, esta paz concreta, precisa, nada abstracta, que es la paz con la cual todos, la UNESCO de
Federico Mayor y todos nosotros, soñamos. Muchas gracias.
(22.1) The PRESIDENT (Translation from the Spanish):
President Hugo Chávez, thank you very much for honouring us here with your presence, for having
retraced so eloquently the path travelled by Latin America and more particularly by Venezuela, for your sensitivity
to UNESCO and to the current need for multilateral relations. Here we will continue together to fight for the kind
of tangible, practical peace, with nothing abstract about it, of which we – the UNESCO of Federico Mayor and we
ourselves – all dream. Thank you very much.
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