08/16/2026
One hundred years after Fidel Castro’s birth, an excerpt from his prescient 1992 speech “Tomorrow Will Be Too Late” at the Rio Earth Summit.
“An important biological species — humankind — is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat.
We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction.
They were spawned by the former colonial metropolis. They are the offspring of imperial policies which, in turn, brought forth the backwardness and poverty that have become the scourge for the great majority of humankind.
[…]
Third World countries, yesterday’s colonies and today nations exploited and plundered by an unjust international economic order, cannot be blamed for all this.
The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it the most. Because today, everything that contributes to underdevelopment and poverty is a flagrant r**e of the environment.
[…]
Unequal trade, protectionism and the foreign debt assault the ecological balance and promote the destruction of the environment.
If we want to save humanity from this self-destruction, wealth and available technologies must be distributed better throughout the planet. Less luxury and less waste in a few countries would mean less poverty and hunger in much of the world.
Stop transferring to the Third World lifestyles and consumer habits that ruin the environment. Make human life more rational. Adopt a just international economic order.
Pay the ecological debt, not the foreign debt.
Eradicate hunger and not humanity.
[…]
Now that the supposed threat of communism has disappeared and there is no more pretext to wage cold wars or continue the arms race and military spending, what then is preventing these resources from going immediately to promote Third World development and fight the ecological destruction threatening the planet?
Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit.
Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”
— Fidel Castro, Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992
