“The Americas is far too much on guard to be subdued again. These peoples have become all too aware of their destiny to resign themselves again to the subjugation and wretched abjection in which we have been living for more than a century”.
Quotes
“I have faith in this wonderful awakening of our continent. I have absolute faith in the future of this continent. I have faith and I can affirm right here that I am certain that the future of the Americas will be totally different from what it has been so far. Everything depends on our faith, everything depends on our own effort, and everything depends on us."
“Those of us who have read about the history of the Americas, who have meditated more than once about it, from the time when we acquired the first political notions and learned the first concepts about what this continent was like, its origin and its history, have found it very difficult to understand why our America has reached the present status; (…) why have we lived so estranged from each other; why have we lived so indifferently to those who many a time have been separated from us only by a river, or an imaginary line, or a mountain, or an inlet, when we all were essentially one and the same thing.”
“Cuba was the last country in the Americas to get rid of Spanish colonialism, of the Spanish colonial yoke, and this is said with no animosity toward His Excelllency the representative of the Spanish government. And, as Cuba was the last to get free, it had to fight the hardest”.
“As great as the epic of Latin American independence was, as heroic as that struggle was, today's generation of Latin Americans has been given an even greater and more decisive epic for humanity. ”.
“No people of Latin America is weak, because it is part of a family of 200 million brothers who suffer the same miseries, harbor the same feelings, have the same enemy, all dream of the same better destiny, and count on the solidarity of all the honest men and women of the whole world”.
“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, without housing, without schools, without industries, the submission to imperialism, the renunciation of national sovereignty and the betrayal of the homeland”.
“And in the face of the objective and historically inexorable reality of the Latin American revolution, what is the attitude of US imperialism? To prepare to wage a colonial war with the peoples of Latin America; to create the apparatus of force, the political pretexts and the pseudo-legal instruments signed with the representatives of the reactionary oligarchies to repress with blood and fire the struggle of the Latin American peoples”.
“The peoples of the Americas freed themselves from Spanish colonialism at the beginning of the last century, but they did not free themselves from exploitation. The feudal landowners assumed the authority of the Spanish rulers, the Indians continued in painful servitude, the Latin American man in one form or another remained a slave and the minimal hopes of the peoples succumbed under the power of the oligarchies and the strap of foreign capital”.
“One day, when the revolution is triumphant in all the rest of the countries of Latin America, we shall unite with the other peoples and we shall form a community of Latin American peoples. We need the revolution for that; we need socialism for that.”
"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".
“Trust in Cuba! Cuba is not just defending its own sovereignty over there in that trench: we understand that from that trench we are also defending the interests of other Latin American peoples.”