“…the country will have much more but it will never be a consumer society. It will be a society of knowledge, of culture, of the most extraordinary human development imaginable, development in art, culture, science [...] with a breadth of liberty that no one will be able to dismantle. We know this already, we don’t need to proclaim it, but it is worth remembering.“
Quotes
"Even though it hurts our modesty, it is a bitter duty to say that our blockaded, threatened and slandered country has shown that Latin American peoples can live without either violence or drugs. It can even live, and that’s what has happened for more than half a century, without relations with the United States. That is something we haven’t shown; they have. "
“What transforms a president into a historical personage, who has been able to reach that position because of his merits, does not lie in the person, but in the need for him at a determinate moment in the history of his nation.”
“At this moment, humankind is facing serious problems without precedent. The worst is that to a large degree the solutions shall depend upon the richest and most developed countries, the countries that shall reach a situation which they are really in no condition to face unless the world they have been trying to mould for their egoistic interests crumbles around them and which inevitably leads to disaster.”
“No country on its own should look for or can come up with answers to the problems that the world faces today.”
“I have never doubted the ethics that usually characterize the people, independent of the policy of governments.”
“We are not in favour of war, but in favour of peace among all the peoples.”
“While food prices triple, real estate fortunes and the treasures of the aristocratic minority reach millions of millions of dollars.”
"Wastage and the capitalist consumer societies in their neo-liberal and imperialist phase are taking the world into a blind alley, where climatic change and the growing cost of foods lead billions of people towards more acute poverty levels".
"The most important thing about the Olympic movement is the conception of sport as a instrument for education, health and friendship among peoples; a real antidote for vices such as drugs, smoking, abusing alcoholic beverages and the acts of violence that so affect human society".
“Imperialism will always have several cards up its sleeve to subdue our island even if it has to depopulate it, depriving it from young men and women to whom they offer the scraps of the goods and natural resources it ransacks from the world.”.
“Throughout history and barely one and a half century ago -- before robots and machines took over our modest tasks with a minimum energy cost-- none of the phenomena that today shake mankind and inexorably rule each and every person --men and women, children and elders, young and adult, farmers and factory workers, manual workers or intellectuals-- existed. The prevailing trend is to move to the cities, where the creation of jobs, transportation, and basic living conditions demand huge investments to the detriment of food production and other more rational ways of life.”.