“Our elections are the antithesis of those held in the United States, not on Sundays but on the first Tuesday of November. Being very rich or having the support of lot of money is what matters the most there. Huge amounts are later on invested in publicity, specialized in brain washing and the creation of conditioned reflexes”.
Quotes
“The empire has created conditions conducive to violence and internecine conflicts”.
"When we proclaimed the Land Reform Law, Eisenhower decided what had to be done (...) Because of that hasty decision, our sugar quota was suspended in December 1960, and later redistributed among other producers in this and other regions of the world as punishment. Our country became blockaded and isolated.
Worst of all was the lack of scruples and the methods used by the empire to impose its domination over the world. They brought viruses into the country and destroyed the best sugarcane; they attacked the coffee, the potatoes and also the swine. (...) The Yankees resorted to pests to wipe out the best. Even worse: they brought in the hemorrhagic dengue virus (...) We don’t know whether they used other viruses –perhaps they didn’t because they were afraid of the proximity of Cuba".
"You accuse Cuban revolutionaries of being torturers. I seriously urge you to find a single one of the more than a thousand prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs fighting who had been tortured. I was there, not in some protected position at a distant general command post. I personally captured a number of prisoners with the help of some assistants; I walked in front of armed squads who were still lying under cover of the forest’s vegetation, paralyzed by the presence of the Chief of the Revolution. I’m sorry that I have to mention this because it might appear to be boasting, and that is something I honestly detest".
"His accusation against internationalist Cuban revolutionaries --using the nickname Fidel to identify one of them who was capable of “torturing a prisoner to death”-- is totally lacking in any ethics.
Allow me to remind you, Mr. McCain: The commandments of your religion forbid you from lying. Your years in prison and the wounds you received as a result of your attacks on Hanoi do not excuse you from the moral duty of truth".
"When the Revolution triumphs in Cuba on January 1st, 1959, almost 15 years after the explosion of the first nuclear weapons, and we proclaim an Agrarian Reform Act based on the principle of national sovereignty, consecrated by the blood of millions of combatants who died in that war, the United States response was a program of illegal deeds and terrorist attacks against the Cuban people, signed by the President of the United States himself, Dwight D. Eisenhower".
"The final pull out from Vietnam was disastrous. An army which was half a million strong, trained and armed to the teeth, could not hold back the thrust of the Vietnamese patriots. Saigon, the colonial capital, today called Ho Chi Minh City, was embarrassingly abandoned by the occupation forces and their accomplices, some of them holding to helicopters. The United States lost more than 50 thousand of their precious sons and daughters, not counting those that were wounded. They had spent 500 billion dollars in that war without taxes, always distasteful in their own right. Nixon unilaterally revoked the commitments of Bretton Woods setting the foundations of today’s financial crisis. Their only achievement was a Republican Presidential candidate 41 years later".
"When the invaders landed there, three roads crossed the marsh, some facilities had already been built and others were being built for tourism, even an airport in the vicinity of Giron Beach, the last stronghold of the enemy forces which our combatants took by assault on the evening of April 19, 1961. I have told that story before. We were at the point of recovering it in less than 30 hours. Diversion maneuvers by the U.S. Marines delayed our crushing tank attack in the early morning of the 18th. (...) From our first victorious battle, on January 17, 1957, it became our tradition to look after the enemy’s wounded. The history of our Revolution records that fact".
"Has McCain ever thought about the anti-terrorist Five Cuban Heroes who were imprisoned in solitary cells just like the ones he says he hates, forced to appear before a jury from Little Havana for crimes they never committed, with three of them sentenced to one and even two life sentences, and the others to 19 and 15 years in prison? Does he know that the United States authorities received information that could prevent death by terrorism of U.S. citizens?
Is he aware of the activities of Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, the men responsible for blowing up a Cuban airliner in mid-flight, killing its 73 occupants?
Why doesn’t he talk about that to the cadets at Annapolis?
The Cuban heroes are about to complete 10 years in prison. They have never murdered or tortured anyone. Don’t accuse them now of being in Vietnam torturing American pilots".
"McCain shone in his participation at a hearing on Cuba which he held on May 21, 2002, at the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, Foreign Trade and Tourism of the Science and Transportation Committee; there he reiterated that our country poses a threat to the United States because of its capacity to produce biological weapons, something James Carter demonstrated to be ridiculous. As for the proposals to relax the travel to Cuba policy, in October of 2003 McCain introduced a motion to interrupt the debate on these topics".
"(...) in the United States today there are five Cuban prisoners, separated one from the other by thousands of miles. They have no area that can be sarcastically called the “Hanoi Hilton”. Their suffering and the injustice of which they are victims will be known the world over; don't doubt it for a minute".
" It is a real fact that Bush and his group are much more trapped in their foreign policy errors than even Nixon when he resigned in 1972. The bloody Iraqi War and its rejection by the U.S. people, the toll in human lives, the extremely high number of wounded and maimed for every death in the military adventure, all reveal a situation full of contradictions: the deteriorated image of the United States and the impossibility of giving up the wars of conquest for raw materials, the dollar and the price of gold, currency devaluations and inflation, consumerism and the inability to supply themselves with consumer goods, production of ethanol and the world shortage of food, fascist methods and democratic demagoguery, torture practices and secret prisons and human rights, maximum environmental pollution of the country and the species’ right to survival, the benefits of science for health and the use of the same to massively liquidate or invalidate human beings, the brain drain and underdevelopment of poor countries, the price of oil and the ever-greater wasting of energy, the November elections and growing numbers of Latinos dying on the border. The list would be endless. It is, in essence, a contradiction between life and death".