"The men who have fallen in our three wars of independence today join forces with the men who have fallen in this war. And we can say to all those who have fallen in our struggles for freedom that at last the time has come for their dreams to be fulfilled."
Quotes
“It is important that, as from today, that the people know and understand that the Revolution could not be a task of one, two, or three days, that the evils that affect us could not be eradicated overnight, and that it would be necessary to work very hard. Just as the war was not won in a single day, […], the Revolution would also have to be made step by step, little by little, and without any other maxim but that of the final victory.”
"This has been perhaps the first revolution in history in which not a single prisoner of war has been murdered; in which no wounded have been abandoned, in which no-one has been tortured; because that was the standing order established by the rebel Army".
"And it was the people who won this war, because we had no tanks, we had no planes, we had no heavy artillery, we had no military academies, we had no recruitment and training camps, we had no divisions, or regiments, or companies, or platoons, or even squads".
"(...) when we no longer have the enemy before us, when the war is over, we ourselves are potentially the only enemies of the Revolution".
“They can make our people disappear from the face of the earth, but they can never defeat it; because our people with their reason, with their heroism, with their dignity, with their shame and their greatness of spirit is an invincible people, and it is a people that must be respected.”
"When the philosophy of plundering is gone, the philosophy of war shall be no more!"
“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 rumble of weapons, menacing language, marking arrogance on the international scene, must cease. Enough already with the dream that the world’s problems can be resolved with nuclear weapons. Bombs may kill the starving, the ill and the ignorant, but they cannot kill hunger, disease or ignorance.”
"(...) that everything that today contributes to underdevelopment and poverty is tantamount to a flagrant attack on the ecology. As a result, tens of millions of men, women and children perish every year in the Third World, far more than in each of the two world wars. The unequal terms of trade, protectionism and the foreign debt are also an assault on the ecology and facilitate the destruction of the environment".
“A world legal order should be established against genocide and war crimes, with rigorous and precise rules, along with a fully independent body of justice under the supervision of the United Nations General Assembly, and never under the Security Council, as long as veto power remains in effect granting exceptional privileges to just five countries, including the hegemonic superpower, which has used this power more than the rest of the permanent members of the Council combined”.
“Racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia are not naturally instinctive reactions of the human beings but rather a social, cultural and political phenomenon born directly of wars, military conquests, slavery and the individual or collective exploitation of the weakest by the most powerful all along the history of human societies.”