"Leaving aside the problems afflicting human beings today, our Homeland had the privilege of being the cradle of one of the most extraordinary thinkers born in this hemisphere: Jose Marti. (...) It would not be possible to appreciate the scope of his greatness without bearing in mind that the drama of his life was written with such extraordinary personalities as Antonio Maceo, an everlasting symbol of revolutionary firmness and the protagonist of the Baragua Protest, and Maximo Gomez, a Dominican internationalist and a teacher of Cuban combatants in the two wars of independence in which they took part. The Cuban Revolution, that for more than half a century has endured the battering of the most powerful empire that ever existed, was the result of the teachings of those predecessors."
Quotes
“What transforms a president into a historical personage, who has been able to reach that position because of his merits, does not lie in the person, but in the need for him at a determinate moment in the history of his nation.”
"That brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind. NATO took on that global repressive role as soon as the USSR, which had served the United States as an excuse for its creation, ceased to exist".
“The merits of the Cuban Revolution can be measured by the fact that such a small nation has for so long been capable of putting up a resistance against the hostile policy and criminal actions carried out against our people by the most powerful empire ever in the history of mankind, the same that was in the habit of handling the countries of the hemisphere in its own way thus it underestimated a small, dependent and poor nation located a few miles off its coasts. This resistance would never have been possible without the dignity and ethics that have always characterized the policies of Cuba, a country harassed with revolting lies and slanders. Alongside ethics, a culture and conscience were built that made possible the feat of more than five decades of resistance. This was not a particular merit of its leaders but basically of its people”.
Without convictions about the value of conscience and its capacity to prevail over instincts, it would not be possible to even speak of a hope for change in any period of the very short history of man.