Reading your message filled me with emotion. None of you had been born when the Revolution triumphed. The ideas that this message beautifully express sprang from history's deepest furrow. Their roots are sustained by every act of sacrifice and heroism of an admirable people, who was able to overcome all obstacles. They find fertile ground, too, in the example and the values created by other peoples.

What is a life bereft of ideas worth? Marti once said that “trenches of ideas are more valuable than trenches of stones”. Are ideas born of a man? Do they perish with him? Ideas have come into being all throughout the history of the human species. They will exist as long as our species does. Never before has the latter faced as serious a threat, owing to the combination of society's political underdevelopment and the fruits of technology, which appears limitless and whose capacity for self-destruction is beyond reason. Genocidal wars, climate change, hunger, thirst, inequality are everywhere we look.

Human beings need to cling to a hopeful prospect, to seek a means of survival in science itself, and it is only fair to look for it and offer it to them. There would be no room, in that brighter future, for the horrible injustices bred by today's developed capitalist system under a worldwide dictatorship.

“To be or not to be”, I believe Shakespeare wrote in one of his plays. That is the alternative facing young people now. To ignore this would be opting to live in the most idyllic of worlds but for a handful of decades, which are less than few seconds in the history of time.

If young people fail, everything will fail. It is my deepest conviction that young Cubans will struggle to prevent this. I have faith in you.