"We must consolidate our achievements, we should study, work, struggle and fight in the spirit of our heroic comrades in Uvero, in the glorious days of the huge enemy offensive, in the battles and the events that we have recalled today".
"From day one of the revolutionary victory our country has never set obstacles to the legal emigration of Cuban citizens to the United States or to any other country. At the time of the triumph of the Revolution many people in Cuba, like in the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America, who endured poverty and underdevelopment, wanted to migrate to seek for better paid jobs and better living conditions than they could find in their countries subjected to centuries of exploitation and plundering. Until 1959, an extremely limited number of visas were issued to Cubans.
"You ignorants! Do you not understand that Cuba is impregnable, that its Revolution is indestructible, that its people will never bow down or surrender? Do you not realize that our patriotism and internationalism are as deeply rooted in our minds and hearts (...)".
"The Cuban Revolution does not merely confide in the moral integrity and patriotic and revolutionary spirit of its people, and in the survival instinct of the human species, whose very existence is threatened. It also believes and confides in the traditional idealism of the American people that can only be led into unjust wars and shameful aggressions on the basis of vulgar deceit".
"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.
"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.
"When the Revolution triumphs in Cuba on January 1st, 1959, almost 15 years after the explosion of the first nuclear weapons, and we proclaim an Agrarian Reform Act based on the principle of national sovereignty, consecrated by the blood of millions of combatants who died in that war, the United States response was a program of illegal deeds and terrorist attacks against the Cuban people, signed by the President of the United States himself, Dwight D. Eisenhower".
"(...) and if one day it becomes necessary to fight a foreign enemy or a movement that attacks the Revolution, it won't be some limited engagement, it'll be the entire people that fight"
"(...) when we no longer have the enemy before us, when the war is over, we ourselves are potentially the only enemies of the Revolution".
“The Revolution is beginning now. Our Revolution will be no easy task, but a harsh and dangerous undertaking …”