Neoliberal Globalisation and the Third World

“Fifty years ago we were promised that one day there would no longer be a gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. We were promised bread and justice; but today we have less and less bread and more injustice.

“The world can be globalised under the rule of neoliberalism but it is impossible to rule over billions of people who are hungry for bread and justice.

“The pictures of mothers and children under the scourge of droughts and other catastrophes in whole regions of Africa remind us of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany; they bring back to us memories of stacks of corpses or of moribund men, women and children.

“Another Nuremberg is required to put on trial the economic order imposed on us, the same order that is killing of hunger and preventable or curable diseases more men, women and children every three years than all those killed by World War II in six years.”

— Cuban president Fidel Castro speaking at the Group of 77 South Summit Conference in Havana in April 2000.

Fidel's speeches at the conference and the supplementary material appended to them provide a vivid picture and a powerful indictment of Western capitalism’s “new world order” and a call to struggle to save humanity.