“Now we are going to launch an offensive against corruption, immorality, vice, gambling and robbery; against illiteracy, diseases and hunger. We are going to launch a simultaneous offensive, as the one that ended up with the downfall of the dictatorship.”
Quotes
“Humanity needs these kinds of answers. Humanity is growing, humanity is multiplying. What isn’t growing, however, is the earth’s surface. Humanity shall have to do everything in its power to increase its productivity per unit of surface, make as much of the earth or its surface productive, avail itself of all natural resources, all of science’s resources, for only those who are not revolutionaries, those who haven’t the slightest notion of the potential of humanity’s intelligence and willpower, can conceive of a world in which humanity starves”.
"We the Non-Aligned Movement countries insist that it is necessary to eliminate the abysmal inequality that separates the developed countries from the developing countries. We are fighting for that in order to abolish the poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy that still plague hundreds of millions of human beings. We strive for a new world order, based on justice, equity and peace (...)"
"(...) 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".
"(...) that everything that today contributes to underdevelopment and poverty is tantamount to a flagrant attack on the ecology".
"Let the ecologic debt be paid and not the foreign debt. Let hunger disappear and not man."
“I am firmly convinced that the current economic order imposed by the wealthy countries is not only cruel, unjust, inhuman and contrary to the inevitable course of history but also inherently racist. It reflects racist conceptions like those that once inspired the Nazi holocaust and concentration camps of Europe, mirrored today in the so-called refugee camps of the Third World, which actually serve to concentrate the effects of poverty, hunger and violence. These are the same racist conceptions that inspired the monstrous system of apartheid in Africa.”
“The economic crisis also means the aggravation of major problems that are far from being solved: poverty, hunger and disease, which kill tens of millions of people in the world every year; illiteracy, lack of education, unemployment, and the exploitation of millions of children through child labor and prostitution; the trafficking and consumption of drugs, which mobilizes and absorbs hundreds of billions of dollars; money laundering; the lack of drinking water; the scarcity of housing, hospitals, communications, schools and educational facilities.”
"As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger."
“It is the primary duty of the overburdened leaders of our complex world --among many other obligations and without forgetting hunger, poverty, underdevelopment, the diseases that decimate entire regions, the climate changes and other calamities-- to meditate and reflect on the causes and the sources of the dangerous pandemic of terrorism and to apply really effective methods to fight it.”
“The decadent imperialist capitalist system in its phase of neoliberal globalization can no longer offer any solutions for the huge problems facing humanity, which has quadrupled in number in barely a century. That system has no future. It is destroying nature and expanding hunger. Our noble and humane experience in numerous fields will be useful to many peoples in the world.”
“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.”