Fidel Castro
Leader of Cuba from 1959, when, leading the 26th of July Movement, he helped overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista turning Cuba into the first socialist state in the Western Hemisphere until his resignation in February of 2008.
The Alliance for Progress is an alliance between one millionaire and many beggars.
If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains.
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.
I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution.
Weapons for what? (?Armas, para qué?) To fight against whom? Against the revolutionary government, that has the support of the whole people? … Weapons for what? Hiding weapons for what? To blackmail the President of the Republic? To threaten to break the peace here? To create organizations of gangsters? Is it that we are going to return to gangsterism? Is it that we will return to daily shootouts in the capital? Weapons for what?
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.
I wanted to meet you for many reasons, above all, because you are a very brave man.
The most honest, courageous politician I have ever met.
This man more than superseded my every expectation I had...if you live with a man under duress (this is before the victory…) he is I think…he will rank in history with some of the greats.
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun.
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!
Condemn me, it does not matter: history will absolve me.
I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers.
Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.
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, illnesses, poverty or hunger.
I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life.
Let us yield a bit. Let us grant socialism a few more years. Socialism is so obsolete, it is dying by itself.… Did I say socialism? I assure you on my honor this was not a mental slip. This was a slip of the tongue. Do not forget that. Capitalism—and I say it with such gusto—capitalism is so obsolete that it is dying by itself.
I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason.
We have a theoretical concept of the Revolution which is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.