“ The people were being kept ignorant, because it is only over ignorant people that the political cliques could keep themselves in power; only over ignorant people could bad governments keep themselves in power; only over ignorant peoples could a bloody tyranny set itself up.”
Quotes
“…Solidarity among individuals is inseparable from the solidarity among peoples, just as capitalist egoism is inseparable from individualism, nationalism, imperialist ambitions and the wars of aggression and depredation.”
"Can anyone be surprised then that the Conference should be obliged, for reasons not arising from any political prejudice but from the objective analysis of the facts, to point out that United States policy plays a fundamental part in preventing the establishment of just and complete peace in the region, by allying itself with and backing Israel and by working to obtain partial solutions favoring Zionist aims and ensuring the fruits of Israeli aggression at the cost of the Arab peoples of Palestine and of the entire Arab nation?"
“Imperialism is the one that needs weapons, since it is bereft of ideas. In order to maintain this opprobrious system as well as all those situations that have been described here, it needs weapons; it has to maintain all those situations by resorting to the use of force. But if there are ideas, if ideas in fact exist, we can defend those ideas; we can make those ideas to succeed. Ideas do not require weapons as long as they are able to conquer the big masses. Nobody should think that the contradiction between Socialism and Capitalism could be solved by force; one has to be mad to think that way. And the imperialists are the ones who think that way. That is why they keep their military basis everywhere in the World. They threaten the whole world; they intervene anywhere.”
“In these crucial years, the most powerful capitalist power having the most resources in all times has permitted itself the luxury of living like a parasite off the savings of the rest of the world which has not only seen itself forced to finance its fiscal and trade deficit as never before, but also an arms race without parallel in history.”
"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".
"The power to the north had always been hostile to our struggle, since a long time before it had targeted our country with the ‘Manifest Destiny’ to make it part of its territory in its quest for expansion.
At a given point, the decline of the Spanish Empire, over which the sun never set, facilitated the blow to smash Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam given by the new imperial power. It sought excuses, it used deceit and lies, and recognized that to all intents and purposes the Cuban people were free and independent, and with this it sought the backing of its valiant combatants to support the interventionist war".
"In his speech, Obama portrays the Cuban revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the exact same argument which, almost without exception, U.S. administrations have used again and again to justify their crimes against our country. The blockade, in and of itself, is an act of genocide. I don’t want to see U.S. children inculcated with those shameful values. An armed revolution in our country might not have been needed without the military interventions, Platt Amendment and economic colonialism visited upon Cuba. The revolution was the result of imperial domination. We cannot be accused of having imposed it upon the country. The true changes could have and ought to have been brought about in the United States. Its own workers, more than a century ago, voiced the demand for an eight-hour work shift, which stemmed from the development of productive forces".
"What does the empire decide to do in order to compete with Cuba in our hemisphere? To deploy an enormous ship turned into a floating hospital that works ten days in each country. It can assist a number of people daily but it cannot solve a country's problems. It does not compensate for the brain-drain, and it cannot train the specialists who are needed so that real medical services may be offered on any day of the week and year. All of the world's aircraft carriers, which today are instruments of military intervention deployed across the world's oceans, working as hospitals, could not offer those services to the millions of people treated by Cuban doctors in remote corners of the planet, where women go into labor, children are born and there are sick people in urgent need of attention".
“The conditions exist for Obama to use his talents in a constructive policy that could put an end to the one that has failed for almost half a century. On the other hand, our country, which has resisted and is willing to resist whatever it takes, neither blames Obama for the atrocities of other U.S. administrations nor doubts his sincerity and his wishes to change the United States policy and image. We understand that he waged a very difficult battle to be elected, despite centuries-old prejudices”.