“Honor is not negotiable; the homeland is not negotiable; dignity is not negotiable; independence, sovereignty, history and glory are not negotiable!”In the closing ceremony of the first International Congress on Culture and Development
Quotes
“Our country could be swept off the Earth, but it could never be conquered and submitted.”
“Our country could be swept off the Earth, but it could never be conquered and submitted.”
“The importance of the Bay of Pigs does not lie in the size of the battle, or the number of combatants, or the heroic events which took place there; the enormous historical importance of the Bay of Pigs is not what happened but what didn’t happen thanks to the Bay of Pigs!”
[…] “History points out and indicates that if all of us taking part in this struggle fulfill our duty, one day we shall come back to our homeland not only with the satisfaction of having cooperated to ensure Angola’s revolution and independence, but also to the independence of Namibia, the defeat of fascism, the disappearance of Apartheid. We would have contributed to the independence and safety and dignity of all the peoples of Africa”.
“Independence is not a flag, or an anthem, or a coat of arms; independence is not a question of symbols, but independence depends on development, independence depends on technology, it depends on science in the world today. How can we achieve that without education?”
“A people are nothing without honour, without decorum, without independence and without dignity, never mind the life of a people!”
“I say that this is not a unipolar world, because there is at least a piece of land --and it is not the only one—where the Yankees do not rule, where the Yankees will not rule. And if they were to try to one day, it would have to be on our ashes, on our bones, on our blood.”
“Let us imitate the example of those who were our predecessors. Let us do what Bolívar, San Martín, Artigas, O'Higgins, Sucre, Juárez, Morazán and Martí would have done in like circumstances, so that Our America takes an honourable place in a world where we all have a right to live.”
“Máximo Gómez. Humble son of this people, knew how to transform himself into the outstanding and cherished son of the Cuban people by the right earned through his struggle for the independence of Cuba, to which he contributed his might and his machete, his military genius and his valour, a remarkable political talent and profound revolutionary philosophy.”
“Once and for all, they crushed the absurd idea that the suffering endured, and the blood and tears spilled throughout almost a hundred years of struggle for independence and justice against Spanish colonialism and its slavery-based model of exploitation, and later against imperialist domination and the corrupt and bloody governments imposed on Cuba by the United States, were to serve for the rebuilding of a neocolonialist, capitalist and bourgeois society.We did it at the exact and precise moment in history, not a minute before and not a minute later, and we were daring enough to attempt it”.
Speech delivered by Fidel Castro, on the 40th Anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution
"Even though, after the opportunistic intervention by the nascent U.S. empire, Cuba was ceded by the colonial power to the United States, and the nascent empire imposed a constitutional amendment on us that gave it the right to intervene, the Cuban people today are a free people, who defend their independence".