“The problem is not just one of freedom; the problem is not just that everyone should have the freedom to speak, to write, to vote, to meet together, the problem is that they should also have the right to live.”
Quotes
"We aspire not only to a communist society but to a communist world in which all nations will have equal rights. We aspire to a communist world in which no nation will have the right to veto. And we aspire that the communist world of tomorrow will never display the same picture of a bourgeois world torn by internal squabbles. We aspire to a free society of free nations in which all the countries, large and small, will have equal rights.”
"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".
“Put and end to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people that is taking place while the world stares in amazement. May the basic right to life of that people, children and youth, be protected. May their right to peace and independence be respected; then, there will be nothing to fear from UN documents”.
“All throughout history, almost every action intended to attain national independence, including that of the American people, was carried out with the use of weapons and nobody ever questioned, or would question, that right. But, the deliberate use of weapons to kill innocent people must be definitely condemned and eradicated for it is as unworthy and inhuman as it is repulsive, the same as the historic terrorism perpetrated by the oppressing states”.
“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.”
“Our world order appears to have been designed to foster the egoism, individualism and dehumanization of humanity.”
"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. The revolution was the result of imperial domination. We cannot be accused of having imposed it upon the country. The true changes could have and ought to have been brought about in the United States. Its own workers, more than a century ago, voiced the demand for an eight-hour work shift, which stemmed from the development of productive forces".
“In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity”.
“Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the peoples on the planet”.
"(...) under the aegis of the Yankee empire, no security guarantee exists for any other country. In the UN one can repeat time and time again the unanimous rejection of the economic blockade on Cuba, or any other measure such as the right of the Palestinian people to their constitution as a state, but unless such a right, or any other, fits in with the empire’s interests, it has no validity whatsoever".