"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. After that, for obvious reasons, the gates were wide opened and that is how an important number of Cubans began settling in the United States".
Quotes
"La Ley de Ajuste Cubano no solo constituye una ley asesina, sino también una ley terrorista, de un terrorismo de la peor especie, que mata conscientemente y sin el menor remordimiento a niños inocentes".
"The Cuban Adjustment Act will become a major irrefutable moral argument. There will always be people everywhere willing to risk their lives to emigrate illegally, but there will never be any justification to encourage them to do it. That is a crime against humanity and an expression of hateful contempt for human life".
"We have offered our sincere cooperation in the struggle against drug traffic, human traffic and any other form of international crime. It is simply due to political arrogance that such cooperation has been either refused or limited to a minimum".
While many recognize the tremendous advances that our country has made in health care, education and sports, as if these were the only objectives, or the final objectives of our struggles or our lives, we would have to add: We are striving for something much more noble, we are striving for justice for all.
“Cuba has twice as many doctors per capita as all of the highest developed nations. No country has given, or is giving, more support to other peoples’ health care services, free of charge, than Cuba and no other has saved more lives. Thus, our people do not have, nor could it have, any inclination to become a bio-weapons producer.”
"In Cuba we have never cultivated hatred against the American people or blamed them for the aggressions perpetrated by the governments of that country. That would have run contrary to our political doctrines and our internationalist conscience, both well-proven throughout many years, and increasingly rooted in our ideas."
"Relations between the Cuban people and the American people, although very much influenced for decades by a barrage of distorted and manipulated propaganda, have been improving every day (…)".
“Cuba is increasingly becoming a country with not only great intellectual and artistic talents but also with many educators, scientists and hundreds of thousands of people capable of producing wealth with their learned minds. This is but a proof of what can be done despite the inherited underdevelopment and the longest economic and financial blockade that any people has ever endured! ”
"The criminal blockade he has promised to tighten will only multiply the honor and glory of our people against which their wicked plans will smash, I assure you".
“They were born 83 years apart. The first was already a legendary figure when the second entered the world. If one of them proclaimed that whoever tried to take possession of Cuba would have to gather up the dust of its soil soaked in blood, if he did not perish in the struggle, the other soaked Bolivian soil with his blood trying to prevent the empire from taking over America”.
General Antonio Maceo, Cubans today, brought up on your immortal example, would like to have shared with you the honour of being with you that glorious day when you said to the representative of Spanish colonial power: We want no peace without independence.