What is this, what does it mean, why do youths come to this? Is there frustration? How is it possible that a young person cannot see that his life should have a very different goal and that he should not escape responsibility?

HOW CAN A young person look, in the case of Mexico, at Hidalgo, at Juarez, at Zapata, at Villa, or at Lazaro Cardenas? How not to understand that these men were also young but that they made of their lives a constant and permanent struggle?

How can the young person not know that his future is limited by the economic reality which characterizes the dependent countries? Because if there is something that should worry us, the ones who govern, it is the growth in the number of unemployed college people in our societies.

How many thousands of young people that graduate from the technical schools and the universities cannot find work? I read a little while ago a study by an important international organization that said that in Latin America by the end of this decade we will need, in theory, close to six million new professional people, this in a continent where the unemployment has reached the level that I have mentioned. Young people must understand, then, that they are facing these facts and they must contribute to the modifying of material conditions in order not to have joblessness among the educated. We cannot have professionals with the degree of architect who do not build housing, or physicians who cannot attend the sick because the sick have no money with which to pay them. What we need are more physicians to defend human capital, which is worth more in our countries.

I repeat--in order to finish my speech--please excuse me for its length--I am a man who went to a university, but I have learned much more in the university of life. I have learned about the proletarian mothers in the shantytowns; I have learned about the peasant, who, without speaking to me, told me about the more than hundred years of exploitation experienced by his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather; I have learned about the worker, who in the factory is a number, or used to be a number and meant nothing as a human being; and I have learned of the great multitudes who have had the patience to wait.

BUT INJUSTICE cannot continue to be in the way, closing the possibilities for the future to the small nations of this and other continents. For us in Latin America the borders should be abolished and solidarity grow with respect to self-determination and the end of foreign intervention. We accept the fact that there can be different philisophical conceptions and forms of government but there is a mandate which is born out of our own reality and which obliges us--in the case of this continent--to unify. And looking farther away, beyond Latin America, we understand that in Africa there are still millions and millions of human beings whose lives are inferior to the most poor and backward people on our continent.

It is necessary to understand that the struggle is a unified one on a world scale; that in the face of imperialist insolence the exploited nations can only give an aggressive, united answer.

THE MOMENT has come to realize clearly that those who died fighting in other places to make their lands independent countries, as is happening in Vietnam, died for us also.

Without saying that youth will be the revolutionary spark and the essential factor of revolutions, youth will be crucial. Youth is crucial because youth has a clearer conception of life, youth has not surrendered to the vices caused by years of bourgeois prosperity, youths must understand that they must be studious and hard-working. The young person must go to the factory or to the land. You have to do voluntary work; it is good that the medical student learn how much weight the peasant must carry on his back and the long distances he must carry it. It is good that the one who is going to be an engineer learn about the heat of the machine where the worker often spends long long years of his obscure existence in an unhealthy atmosphere. Youth must study and work because voluntary work links, ties and closes the bonds between the one who is going to be a professional and the one who by heritage has calloused hands because he has worked the earth for generations.

Thank you, president and friend, for giving me the opportunity to strengthen my own convictions, and giving these students the opportunity to strengthen their convictions with relationship to the tasks before them in Mexico.

Thank you for understanding the drama of my country which is, as Pablo Neruda said, a silent Vietnam. There are no occupation troops nor powerful war planes clouding the open skies of my country, but we are economically blockaded, we have no international credit, we cannot buy machinery, we don't have enough to buy food, and we lack medicine. And in order to be able to defeat those who do these things to us, it is crucial that people understand who are their friends and who are their enemies.

I know by what I have lived, that Mexico has been and will be--thank you for this--a friend of my country.

"My country is, as Pablo Neruda said, a silent Vietnam. There are no occupation troops nor powerful warplanes clouding the open skies of my country, but we are economically blockaded, we have no international credit, we cannot buy machinery, we don't have enough to buy food, and we lack medicine."