"We are prepared to do without anything, including life, except our country’s dignity and sovereignty. We are not the ones attacking, being hostile to or blockading the United States. We are not demanding that its constitution and political and economic system be changed. We show the strictest respect for the rights of other countries. Our rights must also be respected".
"Namely, that there can be no culture without sovereignty".
"We achieved full political sovereignty for the first time on January 1, 1959 when, after sweeping away the bloody tyranny imposed from abroad, the Cuban people began governing the nation. Since then, this noble and heroic people have not failed one single day to defend its right to development, justice, peace and liberty.".
"(...) the first human right is the right to think, the right to believe, the right to live, the right to know, the right to know dignity, the right to be treated like other human beings, the right to be independent, right to sovereignty as a people, right to dignity as a man".
“It should be clearly stated that the principle of sovereignty cannot be sacrificed to an abusive and unfair order that a hegemonic superpower uses, together with its own might and strength, to try to decide everything by itself”.
“With a pitiless blockade lasting for almost 60 years, and those who have died in mercenary attacks on Cuban ships and ports, an airliner full of passengers exploded in mid-flight, mercenary invasions, multiple acts of violence and force? Nobody could be so naive as to think that this noble and self-sacrificing people would renounce glory and their rights, and the spiritual richness they have earned with the development of education, science and culture”.
“We have rather a powerful adversary: our closest neighbor the United States. We warned them that we would resist the blockade even though it would mean a very high cost for our country. There is no greater price to pay than that of capitulating to an enemy who is attacking you without right or reason”.
“The peoples think that the only thing incompatible with the destiny of Latin America is misery, feudal exploitation, illiteracy, starvation wages, unemployment, the policy of repression against the masses of workers, peasants and students, discrimination against women, blacks, indigenous people and mestizos, the oppression of the oligarchies, the plundering of their wealth by the US monopolies, the moral suffocation of their intellectuals and artists, the ruin of their small producers by foreign competition, the economic underdevelopment, the peoples without roads, without hospitals, witho
“Cuba would not be where it is today, nor would our homeland occupy the place it does today in the minds of the other peoples of the world, if behind the homeland, if behind the sovereign flag of the homeland, if this people were not behind the Revolution, if this people were not behind the Revolution.”
“We shall defend sovereignty as something sacred while some are very weak and others very powerful and while not everybody is willing to relinquish it in favour of a universal sovereignty”.