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Speech delivered by Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, at the closing ceremony of the 24th International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, at the Convention Palace, on August 8th, 2026, "Year of the Centennial of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz"

(Shorthand Versions - Presidency of the Republic)

Comrades of the communist and workers' parties of the world;
Dear Comrade Kemal Okuyan;
Brothers and sisters from all corners of the world who honor us with your presence in this rebellious capital today:
It is an honor to have celebrated this meeting in the context of Fidel Castro's Centenary, whose undeniable legacy calls us to confront the enormous challenges of this turbulent and threatening present we are living through.
Cuba, island of dignity and historical resistance against imperialism, and today also against fascism, welcomes you with open arms and thanks you for your courage and determination in coming here, amidst so much pressure, blackmail, and lies.
At the previous meeting in Havana, in October 2022, representatives of communist and workers' parties from more than 60 countries, who gathered at that time, agreed to warn about the dangerous situation humanity was facing. Almost four years later, we can reaffirm, without a doubt, that the world is going through one of its most uncertain and dangerous periods.
We are living through a period of extreme intensification of capitalist contradictions: excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, inequalities in its distribution, environmental destruction, and wars fought over markets, resources, and spheres of influence.
Marxist-Leninist analysis remains fully relevant in asserting that these crises are not accidents, but rather the result of the laws governing the development of monopoly and imperialist capitalism.
Capitalism, consumed by its own contradictions, has unleashed a perfect storm: wars of aggression in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; open genocide in Gaza; a climate crisis that is no longer a warning, but a reality; structural hunger that devours millions; and an external debt that the peoples of the Global South will never be able to repay, because it was conceived to enslave us, not to develop us.
In this scenario, the resurgence of fascism sends us a stark warning. Fidel warned us about this years ago, about how it was transforming its appearance, but maintaining its essence. Today we denounce the reestablishment of fascist regimes around the world.
Nationalism, hegemony, supremacy, and racial discrimination; xenophobia, displacement, and population extermination; wars of conquest for territories and natural resources; punishments that fall upon millions of human beings; and the proscription of ideologies and civil liberties are unmistakable features of this current fascism and its Hitlerian predecessor.
The genocide in Gaza and its shameful public broadcast are not enough for them; they are now attempting to replicate it in Cuba through an aggressive and criminal policy, one that is both stated and denied, both refuted and intensified without any attempt at concealment.
The total suffocation to which we are subjected constitutes a collective punishment that seeks, through the deprivation of the most basic resources and services necessary for survival, to foster exhaustion, discouragement, and social division, with the objective of destroying the Cuban socialist project.
Those who sadistically devise an energy blockade against an entire nation, leaving a humanitarian toll of alarming proportions that deprives Cuban children of their lives at birth, reduces the life expectancy of cancer patients, and denies our people access to medicine, food, electricity, water, transportation, and many other resources for a full life, can be called nothing less than criminals and fascists.
I am going to give you some data on the impacts of the blockade on Cuban society.
Particularly in the energy sector: we had recovered, with enormous effort, more than 1,400 megawatts of power for electricity generation in a group of distributed generation units. These plants are currently not generating power due to a lack of fuel; they run on diesel and fuel oil. If we had those 1,400 megawatts available every day, the troublesome blackouts in Cuba would only last three hours, not twenty or more hours as our people suffer today.
In healthcare, such a sensitive issue, and one where you are all aware of the full potential of our universal and free healthcare system, with opportunities for everyone, with things we know how to do: there are 98,500 patients on the surgical waiting list, including 12,000 children. These are surgeries we can perform in Cuba, but we lack the resources; we lack the energy to power our operating rooms.
There are 34,000 pregnant women who cannot receive enough prenatal ultrasounds during their pregnancies.
There are 67,000 children under one-year-old who have been born in recent months without up-to-date immunization schedules, even though vaccinations in Cuba and our immunization system were always current.
There are 117,000 adults and 1,200 children with cancer who are not receiving adequate treatments, and we have to resort to secondary or tertiary therapies.
There are 16,000 patients experiencing difficulties accessing the services they need for radiotherapy, 12,400 for chemotherapy, and 3,000 for hemodialysis.
Only 30% of the essential medicines are available, even though we are capable of producing all of our own.
The ambulance availability rate is only 22%. Medical transport is overwhelmed.
We are unable to purchase cobalt-60 sources for cancer treatments, and there are delays in obtaining licenses to release medical supplies at ports, also due to the refusal of international shipping companies, which have been pressured by U.S. imperialism not to bring the necessary goods to Cuba.
And as if this weren't enough, we had always maintained infant mortality rates between 4 and 5, which are first-world infant mortality rates; however, in recent years, our rate has doubled and is currently over 9.8.
Wherever any meticulously calculated genocide may appear or find relief, the henchmen of this ignominious policy will be there, ready to tighten the noose of suffocation, if that were even possible.
Their plans conceive of the Cuban people only as a tool, a dying society, to turn against the government and achieve their sinister aims of overthrowing the Revolution. This is not our own interpretation; it has been written and conceived this way for over sixty years by the State Department.
All of this that I have described constitutes flagrant violations of international law and human rights, condemned by the vast majority of the international community, as recently occurred at the United Nations where 136 nations supported Cuba in its just denunciation.
However, the world based on laws and norms for peaceful and civilized coexistence among states has disappeared, replaced by the will of the strongest and most powerful, to the detriment of the poorest nations.
We are living through the most dangerous time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Alongside the economic war, Cuba is being subjected to a high-intensity unconventional war through digital subversion, the financing of internal mercenaries, media smear campaigns, and networks of influence that attempt to disguise blatant intervention as "humanitarian aid."
In this regard, we are not at all surprised by the recent revelations in major U.S. media outlets regarding an increase in CIA operations in Cuba to subvert the internal order. These are not random leaks, as they are presented, but part of the deliberate plan of the US regime to wage psychological warfare against Cuba.
In the height of cynicism and perversity, the Secretary of State recently declared that US sanctions against the Cuban regime will only be tightened. "What we are trying to teach them," he said, "is that there are no escape valves.".
This is an unabashed admission that a difficult situation exists in Cuba as a consequence of an unprecedented economic war. This statement constitutes an open threat of extermination against an entire people if they do not submit to the dictates of the empire.
The United States government has intensified its military threats and updated its "regime change" doctrine, maintains Cuba on the spurious list of state sponsors of terrorism, and, to top it all off, has invented the ridiculous accusation of "espionage power" or hotbed of subversion of the so-called radical terrorist left, of which it seems all of us here are a part, a pathetic and fanciful name, only credible in their psychotic minds, but which they use to confuse, justify more punishments and legitimize their aggressions.
On this matter, United Nations experts emphasized that the illegal unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States against Cuba violate Article 2 of the UN Charter and are part of a broader regime change strategy that encompasses decades of embargo against Cuba.
"The United States government must end all threats and hostile acts against Cuba’s sovereignty and revoke all measures it has imposed on the country that are contrary to international law," the experts said.
They added: "The Security Council and the General Assembly must urgently address these threats as a matter of international peace and security."
There can be no greater act of cynicism than for the perpetrator to try to portray itself as the victim, when its misdeeds have been public and notorious for decades. The United States has no moral authority or right to single out Cuba, which has arguably been the nation most spied on by them and with the largest funds for economic and ideological subversion.
Cuba does not have to indoctrinate anyone. It does not have to export ideas. History teaches us lessons, showing the depths to which empires can sink to satisfy their insatiable appetite for domination and possession of the material and human resources of other nations.
In this meeting, and before you, we denounce the criminal policy of the United States against Cuba, and also those who remain silent and tolerate the excesses of the emboldened American fascist far right, which lies, steals, kills, and pretends to be the arbiter of all destinies.
The United States blockade only works because of the complicity of those who fear the power of Washington more than the judgment of history. The world cannot become complicit in another genocide.
Every time a part of the world remains silent in the face of aggression against Cuba, international law is weakened. Every time a government accepts the illegitimate sanctions of the United States, the principle of non-intervention is eroded. Every time a company is pressured to abandon its investments in Cuba and others do not decide to do so for fear of reprisals, the economic dictatorship of a single power is strengthened.
Faced with this proven and undeniable reality, Cuba has defended itself, within its legitimate rights, as any country in the world would. The Cuban people have also counted on the solidarity of men and women with a strong sense of justice and morality, aware that reason and truth are on our side, many of whom are now being persecuted or threatened for their solidarity activism.
The resurgence of McCarthyism in its worst form and with a transnational reach, which places Cuba at the center of its irrational crusade, attempts not only to criminalize solidarity with Cuba or create a new false pretext for its aggression, but also to silence dissenting voices against the world order they want to impose.
What common cause unites the left and progressive movements around the world? Undoubtedly, social justice; labor and children's rights; the defense of feminist, gender, and racial causes; the care and preservation of the environment; popular participation; historical memory and respect for indigenous peoples; World peace and harmony among nations; international solidarity, among many other things that are generally projected in terms of human dignity.
Can anyone with a rational mind believe that the left or progressive forces are therefore a danger to humanity? The obvious answer is no.
Only fascism can see such a danger in the left, because it seeks to impose by force an ideology and value system that are completely contrary to it; that is why, in its current rise, it desperately seeks to criminalize, neutralize, and silence it.
The extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza, the coup in Venezuela, the collective punishment of the Cuban people are events serious enough not to remain passive. Tomorrow, any nation could end up like Gaza or Cuba if fascism is not confronted. The key lies with the people, in their awareness, their mobilization, and their international unity.
Faced with this suffocation, Cuba has not yielded. We have answers that prove it: the COVID-19 vaccines, food production using agroecological techniques amidst scarcity, the advance of clean energy, popular participation in neighborhoods, and the defense of the entire territory by a people transformed into militias and ready to defend their self-determination, their independence, and sovereignty.
Yes, we have many shortcomings. We are burdened by blackouts, water shortages, inflation, and long lines. But no material lack has extinguished the flame of solidarity, in which Fidel raised us, nor have we renounced Martí's principle that "homeland is humanity" (Applause).
One fact that confirms this is that in these final days of the school year, tense and difficult like no other, 30,185 young professionals have graduated from Cuban universities, 735 of them from 62 countries who were trained in Cuba. And a statistic we are honored to share: 23 new Palestinian doctors and 5 American doctors (Applause).
The people's response, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba, has been firm and creative resistance, unity, the defense of their achievements, and the updating of their economic and social model, without ever renouncing the principles of socialism and without yielding to pressure or blackmail. This capacity to resist and transform has its roots, firmer than ever, in the thought and action of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz (Applause).
Fidel understood, like few others, the need to combine ideological firmness with tactical flexibility. He taught us that "Marxism-Leninism is not a dead doctrine, not a catechism, but a method, a guide, an instrument for concretely solving life's problems."
Cuba works under this conception on the uncharted path of building socialism, as Army General Raúl Castro Ruz also once stated. Not even the classical Marxists could have ever imagined how to do it on a small island, threatened by the largest empire in the history of humankind and completely blockaded, its state cut off from all sources of resources, financing, and trade.
Faced with this dilemma, it is necessary to produce and generate wealth to redistribute it with the greatest possible social justice and to preserve the historic and essential achievements of the Revolution in strategic areas such as health, education, culture, science, energy, and communications.
Doing so will be everyone's task, from state-owned and non-state enterprises, along with other forms of economic management that together make up the Cuban business network, all focused on a single goal: building the prosperous and sustainable socialism that the heroic Cuban people deserve.
I know that the topic of economic and social transformations has been the subject of much reporting and debate. However, I want to emphasize some key concepts: this is a process to revitalize the economy, not to establish capitalism; there will be no rampant privatization, the fundamental means of production remain in the hands of the people, and above all, national sovereignty and independence are preserved.
For such a complex process, the Communist Party of Cuba, as the supreme leading force of the State and society, stands as the primary authority responsible for its direction, coordination, and control.
The Party will continue to be the vigilant guardian of the interests of the people, the working class, the social gains, and the social justice that has driven the Revolution since its inception. It is not, nor will it ever be, a party of elites or lobbies. Its role as the sole party requires it to be increasingly democratic and representative, as Raúl has called upon us to be on so many occasions, without ever losing sight of the people, the Revolution, and socialism. (Applause)
In a world where attempts are made to convince us that there are no alternatives, our common task is to demonstrate with facts that there are alternatives, that socialism remains the only realistic and humane way out of capitalist barbarism, as scientific Marxism taught.
Dear comrades in struggle:
Today, on the centenary of his birth, Fidel is not physically present, but his presence is stronger than ever. What did the Commander-in-Chief bequeath to us? He bequeathed us the certainty that dreams are won by defending ideas; he left us the lesson that internationalism is not just a phrase, but an attitude that should distinguish us; he taught us the conviction that socialism is the only path to save humanity from the abyss.
Fidel was the first to denounce neoliberal globalization as the empire of death, and also the first to raise his voice for a better world for all.
He taught us that the struggle for the preservation of the environment and the human species is also a socialist battle, that science must be at the service of the people, and that the unity of revolutionaries is more important than any tactical differences.
In Fidel, we find not only a historical leader, but a school of revolutionary work: to study, analyze, anticipate, listen to the people, and act with boldness and honesty. As he declared amidst the worst threats: “If what the imperialists want for peace is for us to stop being revolutionaries, we will not stop being revolutionaries, we will never lower our flag!” (Applause.)
Brothers and sisters:
May this meeting in Havana, in Fidel's homeland, serve to renew our commitment, coordinate our actions, and strengthen our conviction that the organized working class, guided by its vanguard parties, can change history.
The moment demands more than declarations of principles. It demands a qualitative leap in our international articulation and coordination. We, the communist and workers' parties, have the historic duty to weave a network of effective solidarity, one that is not limited to statements but translates into concrete actions:
To break the fascist media blockade, using platforms to disseminate the truth about Cuba, Palestine, and all peoples under aggression.
To stand with the Cuban people in their just struggle for the lifting of the criminal blockade against Cuba, mobilizing parliaments, unions, and social movements.
To strengthen the mechanisms of economic and technological cooperation between our countries and organizations.
And, fundamentally, to advance the theoretical debate on 21st-century socialism, adapting Marxist-Leninist principles to the new conditions of the digital revolution, communication, and the ecological crisis, without ever abandoning the central objective: the full dignity of humankind.
Furthermore, I call for self-criticism. It is not enough to condemn the empire; we must build popular power at the grassroots level, win the streets, the neighborhoods, the factories, the schools. The unity of communists must be solid, but as flexible as Fidel's intelligence in engaging in dialogue with all progressive sectors. Unity is not uniformity; unity is the will to fight and to win together! (Applause.)
Faced with the imperialist offensive and the structural crisis of capitalism, communist and workers' parties are called to play a vanguard role, not only in the electoral or institutional arena, but—and above all—in the organization, politicization, and mobilization of the working class under the complex conditions imposed by contemporary capitalism.
It is our responsibility to strengthen the unity of the international communist movement, respecting the diversity of experiences, but with strategic clarity in the face of the common enemy: imperialism, fascism, and monopoly capital.
We must deepen our political and ideological work, challenge cultural hegemony, and confront the disinformation machinery that seeks to present capitalism as the only possible future.
We must organize the working class and popular sectors in the new realities of work, where digitalization, automation, and the platform economy change the forms of exploitation, but not its essence.
Brothers and sisters in arms:
Despite the military might of the United States, the international communist movement does not back down; it resists and stands firm (Applause).
It is impossible to predict how long this imperial offensive will last. We may yet see more aggression and more blockades, but we have the certainty, inherited from our own history, that the future belongs to those who dream and build, not to those who destroy and lie.
Defending Cuba with strength and urgency means halting the advance of supremacist, racist, xenophobic, elitist, and exclusionary ideas, enemies of true freedom and human emancipation.
Defending Cuba means fighting against 21st-century colonialism, against hegemony, against the pretension that a single country should decide the destiny of all.
Comrades, on the eve of Fidel's centenary, I call upon you to redouble your efforts.
Let us not be content with mere survival; Let us aspire to build together a world where the word "solidarity" is not merely an ornament, but the driving force behind everything. Where children do not die of hunger while food is thrown into the sea. Where science heals, not profits. Where politics is, as Che said, the art of serving others.
Always onward to victory, always! (Exclamations of: "Always!")
Long live Fidel on his Centennial and forever! (Exclamations of: "Long live!")
Long live the unity of the communists! (Exclamations of: "Long live!")
Long live the struggle of our peoples! (Exclamations of: "Long live!")
(Applause.)