"Still engraved in the minds of hundreds of millions of persons are also the horrible images of human beings who, in Guantánamo, a Cuban occupied territory, walk down in silence, being submitted for months, and even for years, to unbearable and excruciating tortures. Those are persons who were kidnapped and transferred to secret prisons with the hypocritical connivance of supposedly civilized societies."
“In Cuba, the social and human nightmare denounced in 1953, which gave rise to our struggle, had been left behind just a few years after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. Soon, there were no longer (…) undernourished, barefoot, parasite-ridden children, without schools or teachers, even if their schooling took place beneath the shade of a tree. They no longer died in massive numbers from hunger, disease, from lack of resources or medical care. No longer were the rural areas filled with unemployed men and women.”
"Can the empire and the system responsible for all this really talk to the world about human rights? Human rights within a system where a large part of the population is unemployed, where women are prostituted, where children are abandoned? The numbers of abandoned children in Latin America are impressive, they number millions, many millions. How can this system offer hope to mankind? How can this system speak of consideration for mankind?
That’s why we have so much faith in socialism, and we have so much confidence in socialism and such deep socialist convictions".
"The United States government is using unimaginable economic means to defend a right that violates the sovereignty of all the other countries: to keep on buying raw materials, energy, advanced technology industries, the most productive lands and the most modern buildings on the face of our planet with paper money".
"In his speech, Obama portrays the Cuban revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the exact same argument which, almost without exception, U.S. administrations have used again and again to justify their crimes against our country. The blockade, in and of itself, is an act of genocide. I don’t want to see U.S. children inculcated with those shameful values. An armed revolution in our country might not have been needed without the military interventions, Platt Amendment and economic colonialism visited upon Cuba.