José Martíerdom

Barack Obama's new best friend rewrites history when he's given the time to speak in Panama at the Summit of the Americas;

President Raúl Castro said this Saturday that Cuba was attending the 7th Summit of the Americas in order to fulfill the mandate of Martí with the freedom won by our own hands.

 That is, if 'by our own hands' you mean not by José Martí, who was killed in the earliest stages of the 1895 revolution. At best the rebels managed to stay alive until the United States entered the conflict after the disaster with the battleship Maine.

 He [Castro] added that 117 years ago, on April 11, 1898, the then President of the United States requested authorization from Congress to militarily intervene in the independence war, already won with rivers of Cuban blood....

Though it took Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders to take San Juan Hill to make the Spanish realize they'd lost? Or was it the destruction of the Spanish fleet (recently dispatched from Spain to crush the Cubans) by American warships a few weeks later that did it? Needless to say, the Cuban revolutionaries had no warships.

Also, Raul is a monetary policy expert;

The Cuban President also noted that financial speculation, the privileges of Bretton Woods and the unilateral suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold are increasingly asphyxiating. “We need a transparent and equitable financial system.”

He's a gold bug. Naturally, he should have the authority to decide;

...that it is unacceptable that less than a dozen emporiums, mainly American, determine what is read, seen or heard across the planet.

Raúl added that the Internet must have an international, democratic and participatory governance, especially in regards to the generation of content. He also paraphrased one of Aesop's Fables and said the Internet serves for the best but also the worst.

As we said, that Barack's buddy.