- I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world's problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.
- Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity.
- Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.
- The question is one of fighting the causes and not just the effects. This revolution is bound to fail if it doesn't succeed in reaching deep inside them, stirring them right down to the bone, and giving them back their stature as human beings. Otherwise, what's the use?
- Let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.
- Passion is needed for any great work, and for the revolution passion and audacity are required in big doses.
- We made friends with a Chilean worker couple who were communists. The couple numb with cold, huddling together in the desert night... They didn't have a single miserable blanket to sleep under, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto [Alberto Granado] and I wrapped the other one around us as best as we could. It was one of the coldest experiences I have ever had; but also one which made me feel a little closer to this strange, for me, human species.
- This journey has only served to confirm this belief, that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race with remarkable ethnographic similarities, from Mexico down to Magellan Straits.
- When I began to study medicine most of the concepts I now have as a revolutionary were then absent from my warehouse of ideals. I wanted to be successful, as everyone does. I used to dream of being a famous researcher, of working tirelessly to achieve something that could, decidedly, be placed at the service of mankind, but which was at that time all about personal triumph. I was, as we all are, a product of my environment.
- I now know by an unbelievable coincidence of fate that I am destined to travel.
- Our first experience on unpaved roads was alarming: nine spills in a single day. However, lying on camp beds, the only beds we'd know from now on, beside La Poderosa ["The Powerful One", the name of companion Alberto Granado's motorbike], our snail-like abode, we looked into our future with impatient joy. We seemed to breathe more freely, a lighter air, an air of adventure. Faraway countries, heroic deeds, beautiful women whirled round and round in our turbulent imaginations.
- Against brute force and injustice the People will have the last word, that of Victory.
- [on women fighters] In the tough life of the fighter, a woman is a comrade who brings the qualities peculiar to her gender but with the ability to work just as hard as a man. She can fight, she is weaker, but no less resistant than a man.
- How easy it is to govern when one follows a system of consulting the will of the people and one holds as the only norm all the actions which contribute to the well being of the people.
- The people's heroes cannot be separated from the people, cannot be elevated onto a pedestal, into something alien to the lives of that people.
- The only passion that guides me is for the truth...I look at everything from this point of view.
- This revolution has always relied on the willingness of the Cuban people.
- If you can tremble with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world, then we are comrades.
- Our efforts are focused on the push for unity amongst the world's underdeveloped nations in order to present a coherent front.
- [in 1961, on the Cuban revolution] We are face to face with history and quite simply we must not be afraid! We must maintain the same enthusiasm and faith that we have up to now.
- And if it were said of us that we're almost romantics, that we are incorrigible idealists, that we think the impossible: then a thousand and one times we have to answer 'yes we are'.
- [in 1964, on the Cuban revolution] Revolutions, accelerated radical social changes, are made of circumstances; not always, almost never, or perhaps never can science predict their mature form in all its detail. They are made of passions, of man's fight for social vindication, and are never perfect. Neither was ours.
- It's one of those times when one has to take big decisions; this type of struggle affords us the chance to become revolutionaries, the highest stage of human development, and it also gives us the chance to graduate as men.
- To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We execute from revolutionary conviction!
- [while addressing the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1964] Executions? Certainly we execute! And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the death against the revolution's enemies!
- [on his mission in the Congo in 1965] The human element for the revolution in the Congo failed. The people have no will to fight. The revolutionary leaders are corrupt. In a word... there was nothing to do. We cannot, all by ourselves, liberate a country that does not want to fight.
- Much more valuable than rural recruits for our Cuban guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.
- If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.
- Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates! Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work, and military service. Youth should learn to think and act as a mass!
- We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.
- We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.
- What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.
- My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid color of gunpowder and blood.... I'd like to confess , Papa, at the moment I discovered that I really like killing.
- If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York We must never establish a peaceful coexistence.
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