“I reaffirm my conviction that Cuba will march forward, that Cuba has a great destiny and a great people deserving the glory they are earning with their heroism in time of war, their virtue in time of peace and the courage they will show again a thousand times if again a thousand times it were necessary to take up arms”.
Quotes
“They can make our people disappear from the face of the earth, but they can never defeat it; because our people with their reason, with their heroism, with their dignity, with their shame and their greatness of spirit is an invincible people, and it is a people that must be respected.”
“We are, simply, a country that has lived up to the moment it is living, a people that, when it was necessary, gathered all the heroics it has inside, all the tenacity, all the braveness, all the nobility, all it has good inside so it could resist all dangers, so it could face all contingencies”.
“Our revolution is one of these events which will make history and the people who are bringing about the revolution and the generation which is undertaking the revolution will be talked about in the future with admiration by the coming generations in Cuba, America and the entire world”
“If behind the free flag, if behind the redeeming Revolution there were not a firm and heroic people like this one, the homeland would neither be free nor the flag would be sovereign, nor would the Revolution march forward with the unwavering firmness with which it marches.”.
"The point is that it is not only the warrior what we admire in Che or the man capable of great feats. And what he did, and what he was doing, that fact in itself of facing with only a handful of men an entire oligarchic army, instructed by the Yankee advisers supplied by Yankee imperialism, supported by the oligarchies of all neighboring countries, that fact in itself constitutes an extraordinary feat".
“How useful it is to rummage through our peoples’ extraordinary history! So many things to be learned, so many lessons, so many examples! What a never-ending source of heroism! Because there have never been a people on this continent that have fought more for their freedom than the Cuban people!”
“How well we know the Yankees! Had we given way one single time to the demands of the imperialists, the Cuban Revolution would not exist. What has held the imperialists back is the heroism of our people, the price they know they have to pay for an aggression on our country.”
“[…] you should never have regrets over heroism; you should never have regrets over justice; you should never have regrets over courage and bravery, because precisely the courageous and the resolute people, the brave people have done the most beautiful things in history.”
“If our land did not have sufficient honor and glory, as it has conquered during such a long time, this honor and glory of having fought […] against that mighty empire would suffice, and the fact that our Revolution is still here and it will continue to be, upright and invincible.”
“There is still much that our increasingly united, better-educated and stronger people can do. We will not rest in our heroic and worthy struggle. We will honor every objective we sworn in Baraguá. We will win the epic battle of ideas.”
“Once and for all, they crushed the absurd idea that the suffering endured, and the blood and tears spilled throughout almost a hundred years of struggle for independence and justice against Spanish colonialism and its slavery-based model of exploitation, and later against imperialist domination and the corrupt and bloody governments imposed on Cuba by the United States, were to serve for the rebuilding of a neocolonialist, capitalist and bourgeois society.We did it at the exact and precise moment in history, not a minute before and not a minute later, and we were daring enough to attempt it”.
Speech delivered by Fidel Castro, on the 40th Anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution