 Good evening and welcome to the White House. This has been a special time for us. Today we've had the opportunity to exchange views and get to know President Lushinsky, an individual whose strength of conviction and personal bravery help give birth to democracy in his country. Tonight we honor you, Mr. President, for what you've done, for what you're doing, and for the kind of man you are. In this beautiful setting, the hard sacrifices of our own founding fathers seem so long ago. Yet all of what we have has been built on the foundation they laid. President Lushinsky remembers well Venezuela's fight for political freedom. He was part of it. As a young man, he committed himself to the cause of democracy. He was arrested and tortured by the dictatorship. And Mr. President, I'm told the beatings left welts on your back similar to the stripes of a tiger. Well, you had the spirit of a tiger and you never gave up your ideals. Venezuela is free today because it has people of such character. Last year you celebrated 25 years of continuous democratic government in Venezuela. Commemorating that, you said, we have discovered that democracy and liberty go together inextricably together. It was fitting that last year was also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Simone Bolivar, a Venezuelan who struggled gave independence to the hemisphere. Today you carry on the work of this truly all-American man. And when we say American, we mean every one of us from the North Slope of Alaska to the tip of Dihara to Del Fuego. All of us are Americans in this hemisphere. I'd like to thank you, Mr. President, for what your country is doing for the cause of democracy in this hemisphere. Your support during the Grenada crisis was most appreciated. Your efforts in Central America and the Caribbean are of great importance to the future of freedom there. Your personal guidance to me in the years ahead will be as invaluable as it has been today. We're proud to stand with you and to have you and your countrymen as our friends. Mr. President, you represent in so many ways the deep ties between our two peoples. Today, instead of welcome, we should have said welcome back for you lived with us during your time of exile, studying medicine and working in Bellevue Hospital in New York. As a political figure, you've been concerned about the freedom and progress of your people. As a physician, you understand human suffering. This understanding is reflected in the energetic commitment that you've made to battling the flow of narcotics through Venezuela and the Caribbean region. As you're aware, the drug abuse problem is something that your dinner partner Nancy and I feel strongly about. Nancy has spent many hours here trying to help the victims of drug addiction, especially young people. For your efforts to stop illegal drugs before they reach our shore, you have our personal thanks. Americans know there's a special spirit in Venezuela, and that spirit is hard to miss when you have Tony Armas hitting towering home runs like they were the easiest thing to do. Well, the free people of Venezuela and the United States are on the same team, and we're up to bat. So in keeping with the lessons Tony Armas has been teaching us, let's set our sights high, work as a team, and assure democracy and improving economic well-being for all the people of the Americas. Now, will you all join me in a toast to President Luginski, the people of Venezuela, and the things that we can and will accomplish together? Venezuela is an integrated country of terraces, of religions, of ambitions. The United States and Venezuela are land of possibilities. That's how we've always understood it, and not in vain the United States and Venezuela have a common path and a common destination. Everything has come together, by the way, today to make us feel proud and happy. These Americans who know and learn so much every day have even seemed to have been disposed of the velocities of the weather, of the atmospheric time, to conjugate an extraordinary environment for us. Even President Reagan has had the purpose of setting us up on this great table. Next to his wife is her angel of the guard, delicate and magnificent. And next to Patricia Cisneros, another Venezuelan angel of ours, who, fortunately, as a very representative of our woman, has also come to our side. I had thought of saying here a few words, more or less on occasion, but the generosity and the heat of which the President has said have encouraged me to make copies of my old parliamentary resources. However, something that I was thinking of saying here I must declare, and it is that, on occasions like this, one certainly doubts that in such a friendly ceremony, one has to say the right words for the moment. I am in the United States on a visit to the State, as the head of the government, as President of the Republic of Venezuela. Thus, I must say, on this occasion, that we, the little ones, have given the discrepancy occult. Sometimes, discrepancy of the strong has become a consolation for the weak. Sometimes we discrepancy to mark the difference, or simply to reaffirm our aspiration to the exercise of autonomy of thought and action. There are occasions, really, to discern, to express our points of view different, or to celebrate our coincidences, which is also perfectly legitimate. Even when the United States is the most powerful country on Earth, along with those divergences that could be pointed out, we have convergences. Legitimate, I repeat, and I want to affirm it here with perfect frankness, with perfect pride, and with perfect authenticity. However, in a ceremony like this, it is more intelligent and, pardon me, and also more humane to give life to how much it unites us, to how much it identifies us, and to leave aside what can be separated from this great world power from a conscious country of its dimension and its possibilities like ours. On this occasion, I want to get away from transcendent reflections because I do not want to take the risk of appearing alone when you should not. I am not a personal enemy of loneliness, but perhaps that is why I think that it should be left for more suitable occasions. There are those who cannot be separated from it and who want to be alone every hour and every minute. Thank you, God. That is not our case. Neither yours nor mine, Mr. President. We are ordinary men, fortunate. Somehow, one has to gain benevolence to history, even if it is with discretion. I have come to the United States on this occasion and to this mansion of the presidents as portavos and as representatives of a friend country and a friend town. I have come to express our points of view on bilateral problems of two friendly nations, on the problems of our hemisphere, to which we are not indifferent, and on the world problems with respect to which Venezuelans do not have much influence, but nevertheless affect us in degree. The greatest pride of our Venezuelans may be to feel ourselves in a country without prejudice, without dogmas, without intolerances, as I expressed with great pride here on the table, Mr. Reagan. That is why, despite our, I think that the delay in some economic or social areas, we feel, despite that, to say that we are a country of the future, because the future will be for those like us who have an open mind and a willing heart. I said that everything has been conjugated today as for a celebration, and it is precisely today that we have fulfilled the year exactly the same. I obtained a triumph of the same dimension of yours, Mr. President. A very important triumph, only in our case, allow me to mark the difference with vanity until Minnesota was present. I have felt very gifted today, gifted by you, Mr. President, by your kindness, by your finesse, by your gallant and kind expressions, and I repeat, for having given me the opportunity to spend a while with your beautiful and distinguished wife, very representative of the North American woman whom we admire a lot. Allow me, finally, Mr. President, to use this scenario, surrounded by so many common friends to congratulate him for his victory, to wish him a government of extraordinary projections in the nation, which is what his people expect, and to wish him, too, as a citizen of the world, that his executives as President of the United States contribute, as I am certain that that is his deep desire to peace, to solidarity, to the coexistence of men on this planet that is of everyone. You were the protagonist today of an interesting incident that I want to be the first to find. I want to have that privilege, privilege of reporter. You told me when descending from the tribune where we both go to your country, to my country and to the world that you would like to hear us, that you kept in your shelter the speech with which you received the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, the one I was going to direct to me, I had him in his shelter, as we say, the Venezuelans, in such a way that I was to the point that you would call me excellent, Mr. Duque. I have never had those ambitions, by the way, but you have to see what face they would have put in Venezuela some people. In any case, Mr. President, allow me once more to thank you for this magnificent reception. You have been so generous that you have invited very distinguished friends of yours that I know a lot about your deep affection and also to very distinguished and appreciated my friends. People of great value and of great value in Venezuela. I want to personalize all of those compatriots who tonight are here for their will in Marisol Escobar an extraordinary woman, a magnificent sculptor who has kneaded between his hands full of light and history the image of Bolívar and who left her there in the United Nations so that she would live forever. And you, but also to applaud all of those. Mr. President, Mrs. Reagan, I understand this fully and this is why I believe