“This country … abounds in that Cuba is a heaven in the spiritual sense of the word, and we prefer to die in heaven than serve in hell”
“North Americans don't understand... that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity”
“The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong”
"Today, the entire country is an immense University"
Castro on Revolution
“A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past”
“I began the revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I would do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action”
“The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters”
“If all roads lead to Rome, we can only wish for thousands of roads to lead to Revolutionary Rome!”
“Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution! The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues!”
Castro on Capitalism
“I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition”
“More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World”
“My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious”
“They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?”
"Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty"
Castro on Imperialism
“As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger”
Castro on the United States
“With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?”
“It's important that our people know that they (the U.S. mission) aren't here just to give out visas but rather to wage war, to openly conspire against Cuba, openly and without hiding it”
“If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism”
"There's no need for other media outlets to report on the address by the president of the United States; just let Bush do the talking. For a country that can read, write and think, no one can make a more eloquent criticism of the empire than Bush himself”
Castro on Religion
“When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening, I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me”
Castro on Castro
"History will absolve me"
“I was a man who was lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba's political crisis . . . discovering Marxism . . . was like finding a map in the forest”
"I have concluded - maybe a little late - that speeches must be short"
Castro on Nuclear Weapons
"I hold the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all people with an elementary sense of responsibility, that no country, large or small, has the right to possess nuclear weapons"
Castro on Nuclear Weapons
"I hold the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all people with an elementary sense of responsibility, that no country, large or small, has the right to possess nuclear weapons"
