A table full of delicacies could have been left untouched at breakfast on June 27, 2002, due to inappetence and migraine. It must have happened to George Walker Bush, in the White House, as he woke up to the news of what the Cuban people had proclaimed in their Constitution the day before: "Cuba will never return to capitalism."
Such an audacity, in the absurd logic of a U.S. president, had no reason to take place; much less in times of reprisals, when the bombs were showing their power to disintegrate towns and cities in Kabul, Kandahar and other Afghan metropolis, a prelude to what, it was already announced, would happen in Iraq and anywhere in the world where the empire said "no", and anyone would contradict it.
It is true that the revolutionary Cuba, that of Fidel, that of its people, had spent more than 40 years without foreign tutelage, determined to do everything to preserve its achievements. But it is also true that the situation was unprecedented, with no socialist camp or Soviet Union.
A tisane of arrogance and a good dose of underestimation made in the USA, added to that reality, had been enough for a clueless Bush to surround himself with Cuban-American Miami mafiosi -his "partners"- and launch rude diatribes against our nation.
"Elected" President of his country, by a minority of the votes -US "democracy"-, and ignoring the four decades of a Cuba with only one owner: its people, Bush took it upon himself to demand "free and fair elections" (in the style of his own).
And he went even further in his demands. Ignorant, he demanded "market reforms; then -he said- I will work with the U.S. Congress to ease the ban on trade and travel between our two nations." He added that "full normalization of relations will only be possible when Cuba has a new government."
With his insolent pronouncement, the dunce on duty in the White House was looking for a popular reaction in Cuba. And he got it. More than 9,000,000 Cubans, summoned by their mass and social organizations, took to the streets of the archipelago, and of their own free will, expressed in 8,198,237 public signatures of voters, requested that the National Assembly of People's Power reform our Constitution.
On June 26, 2002, the legislative body, on behalf of the Cuban people, adopted changes to the Magna Carta; 36 days after Bush's diatribes, the Cuban response spoiled his breakfast: "In Cuba, socialism is irrevocable."
