“Never had a people given such a lofty example of civility: not one henchman was dragged through the streets, not one henchman was tortured in the way they used to do, not one henchman was mistreated. We asked the people not to touch them, that justice would be dealt, and the people believed in us. They didn’t drag anyone, they didn’t touch a hair on anyone’s head, because they believed in us.”
Quotes
“And our Revolution stemmed from the struggle against injustice and against tyranny, looking at the way in which our comrades were chased, assassinated and tortured everyday; and our people were educated in the most profound hatred against crime, injustice, torture and all forms of abuse against human beings […]. Our people were educated in those principles, and those principles became our people’s asset and culture. If there is something which has characterized our Revolution it has been our loyalty to principles.”
"What Cuba has done for the human being, it has done with extraordinarily humane methods. In this blockaded country, there has never been a case of a banished person throughout its history; in this blockaded country, there are no death squads, which even kill children who live in the streets; in this blockaded country, no one can mention a single case of political assassination. And something else, as I tell many people: in this country, which struggles against that empire, there is not a single case of torture, not a single case (...)"
"It was not enough for Bush to offend the name of Cuba by installing a horrible torture center similar to Abu Ghraib on the territory illegally occupied in Guantánamo, horrifying the world with this procedure. The cruel actions of his predecessors seemed not enough for him. It was not enough to force a poor and underdeveloped country like Cuba to spend 100 billion dollars. To accuse Posada Carriles was tantamount to accusing himself".
(...)
" It was not enough to send a mercenary invasion on the Bay of Pigs (...)"
"It was not enough to have the Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of an all-consuming thermonuclear war, at a time when there were bombs 50 times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
"It was not enough to introduce in our country viruses, bacteria and fungi to attack plantations and flocks; and incredible as it may seem, to attack human beings. Some of these pathogens came out of American laboratories and were brought to Cuba by well-known terrorists in the service of the United States government".
"(...) the enormous injustice of keeping five heroic patriots imprisoned for supplying information about terrorist activities; they were condemned in a fraudulent manner to sentences that include two life sentences and they stoically withstand cruel mistreatment, each of them in a different prison".
"You accuse Cuban revolutionaries of being torturers. I seriously urge you to find a single one of the more than a thousand prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs fighting who had been tortured. I was there, not in some protected position at a distant general command post. I personally captured a number of prisoners with the help of some assistants; I walked in front of armed squads who were still lying under cover of the forest’s vegetation, paralyzed by the presence of the Chief of the Revolution. I’m sorry that I have to mention this because it might appear to be boasting, and that is something I honestly detest".
"His accusation against internationalist Cuban revolutionaries --using the nickname Fidel to identify one of them who was capable of “torturing a prisoner to death”-- is totally lacking in any ethics.
Allow me to remind you, Mr. McCain: The commandments of your religion forbid you from lying. Your years in prison and the wounds you received as a result of your attacks on Hanoi do not excuse you from the moral duty of truth".
"Has McCain ever thought about the anti-terrorist Five Cuban Heroes who were imprisoned in solitary cells just like the ones he says he hates, forced to appear before a jury from Little Havana for crimes they never committed, with three of them sentenced to one and even two life sentences, and the others to 19 and 15 years in prison? Does he know that the United States authorities received information that could prevent death by terrorism of U.S. citizens?
Is he aware of the activities of Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, the men responsible for blowing up a Cuban airliner in mid-flight, killing its 73 occupants?
Why doesn’t he talk about that to the cadets at Annapolis?
The Cuban heroes are about to complete 10 years in prison. They have never murdered or tortured anyone. Don’t accuse them now of being in Vietnam torturing American pilots".
" It is a real fact that Bush and his group are much more trapped in their foreign policy errors than even Nixon when he resigned in 1972. The bloody Iraqi War and its rejection by the U.S. people, the toll in human lives, the extremely high number of wounded and maimed for every death in the military adventure, all reveal a situation full of contradictions: the deteriorated image of the United States and the impossibility of giving up the wars of conquest for raw materials, the dollar and the price of gold, currency devaluations and inflation, consumerism and the inability to supply themselves with consumer goods, production of ethanol and the world shortage of food, fascist methods and democratic demagoguery, torture practices and secret prisons and human rights, maximum environmental pollution of the country and the species’ right to survival, the benefits of science for health and the use of the same to massively liquidate or invalidate human beings, the brain drain and underdevelopment of poor countries, the price of oil and the ever-greater wasting of energy, the November elections and growing numbers of Latinos dying on the border. The list would be endless. It is, in essence, a contradiction between life and death".
“We should never trust imperialism because it is treacherous and capable of anything. It tortures in Guantanamo; it tortures in the Iraqi prisons and in the special centers set up in former socialist countries; it uses white phosphorous, and then it claims that “it is the most innocent and legitimate weapon.”
"Still engraved in the minds of hundreds of millions of persons are also the horrible images of human beings who, in Guantánamo, a Cuban occupied territory, walk down in silence, being submitted for months, and even for years, to unbearable and excruciating tortures. Those are persons who were kidnapped and transferred to secret prisons with the hypocritical connivance of supposedly civilized societies."
"Our northern neighbor is a centre of planetary power; it is the richest and most powerful nation, possessing a number of nuclear warheads that ranges between 5 and 10 thousand that can be exploded on any place in the planet with utmost accuracy. One would have to add the rest of his warfare equipment: chemical, biological and electromagnetic weapons as well as a huge arsenal of equipment for land, naval and air combat. These weapons are in the hands of those who claim they have the right to use torture".