“Ideas are and always will be the most important weapon of all. Our experience has taught us that if one day our country were to be attacked and even occupied by powerful forces, each and every man or woman, wherever they may be, can be an army. When a combatant or group of combatants are left cut off or isolated, they can and should assume responsibility for their own actions and continue fighting”.
“To correct matters in their country, Cubans had been fighting for a long time. But there was a greater force which prevented us from correcting things in our country. This force was the imperialist penetration of the United States in our homeland. It was this force which frustrated our full independence. It was this force which prevented Calixto García and his brave soldiers in Santiago de Cuba from succeeding. It was this force which prevented the liberation army from undertaking revolution in the early days of the republic.
"Forty-five years have passed since the assault on the Moncada. Our country had been struggling for its independence and its rights for more than a century. Maceo, Gómez and other fighters struggled from 1868 until 1898. They suffered the humiliation of not being able to hoist their flag in this heroic city, of not even being able to enter it after 30 years of a self-sacrificing, admirable and heroic struggle. But the day came when those flags were hoisted and their ideas triumphed, ideas which were ever-changing and which never stopped evolving into something better.