“Throughout its lifetime, the Revolution has taught the people, training hundreds of thousands of teachers, doctors, scientists, intellectuals, artists, computer engineers and other professionals with university and post-graduate degrees in dozens of professions. This storehouse of wealth has allowed us to reduce infant mortality to low levels, unthinkable in any Third World country, and to raise life expectancy as well as the average educational level of the population up to the ninth grade.”
Quotes
“What the people in our country need most is knowledge, if what we want to do is create conscience.”
“Our world order appears to have been designed to foster the egoism, individualism and dehumanization of humanity.”
“Once demagoguery and lies are definitely exposed and defeated, the world will find excellent allies in the American people”.
“New knowledge is not in the hands of the poor nations who today make up three-quarters of the world’s population. It is in the hands of a privileged group of wealthy and developed capitalist powers, associated with the most powerful empire ever to exist, built on the bases of a globalized economy, governed by the very laws of capitalism described by Marx and thoroughly studied by him. Nowadays, as humankind still suffers from these realities due to the very dialectics of events, we must confront these dangers.”
“We are dealing with imperial capitalism’s vulgar appeal to individual egoism, as it was preached almost 240 years ago by Adam Smith to be the cause of the nation’s wealth, meaning everything should be handled by the market. That would create limitless wealth in an idyllic world.”
“In peoples’ history, it has been subjective factors that have brought forward or delay outcomes, independently of the leaders’ worth.”.
"When we proclaimed the Land Reform Law, Eisenhower decided what had to be done (...) Because of that hasty decision, our sugar quota was suspended in December 1960, and later redistributed among other producers in this and other regions of the world as punishment. Our country became blockaded and isolated.
Worst of all was the lack of scruples and the methods used by the empire to impose its domination over the world. They brought viruses into the country and destroyed the best sugarcane; they attacked the coffee, the potatoes and also the swine. (...) The Yankees resorted to pests to wipe out the best. Even worse: they brought in the hemorrhagic dengue virus (...) We don’t know whether they used other viruses –perhaps they didn’t because they were afraid of the proximity of Cuba".
"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".
“I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis the self-flagellation. We should always be prepared for the worst variable”.
“Later, in my necessary retreat, I was able to recover the full command of my mind as well as the possibility for much reading and meditation. I had enough physical strength to write for many hours, which I shared with the corresponding rehabilitation and recovery programs. Basic common sense indicated that such activity was within my reach. On the other hand, when referring to my health I was extremely careful to avoid raising expectations since I felt that an adverse ending would bring traumatic news to our people in the midst of the battle. Thus, my first duty was to prepare our people both politically and psychologically for my absence after so many years of struggle. I kept saying that my recovery “was not without risks.”
"Today, with everything at risk, we have not been transformed into belligerent people. We are determined supporters of that unity among peoples which Marti named Our America".