The Declarations of Havana Quotes

“In consequence, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims before America:

the right of peasants to land;

the right of the worker to the fruit of his labor;

the right of children to receive education;

the right of the sick to receive medical and hospital care;

the right of the young to work;

the right of students to receive free instruction, practical and scientific;

the right of Negroes and Indians to 'a full measure of human dignity';

the right of woman to civil, social and political equality;

the right of the aged to secure old age;

the right of intellectuals, artists and scientists to fight through their work for a better world;

the right of States to nationalize imperialist monopolies as a means of recovering national wealth and resources;

the right of countries to engage freely in trade with all other countries of the world;

the right of nations to full sovereignty;

the right of people to convert their fortresses into schools and to arm their workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, women, the young, the old, all the oppressed and exploited; that they may better defend, with their own hands, their rights and their future.

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― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“When men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can keep them isolated: neither walls of prisons nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity, will sustain them all.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“U.S. imperialism's avowed policy of sending soldiers to fight the revolutionary movement in any Latin American country, to kill workers, students, peasants, to kill Latin American men and women, has no other purpose than to maintain its monopolistic interests and the privileges of the treacherous oligarchies which support the monopolies.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“[T]he wave of anger, of demands for justice, of claims for rights, which is beginning to sweep the lands of Latin America, will not stop. That wave will swell with every passing day. For that wave is composed of the greatest number, the majorities in every respect, those whose labour amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now they are awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected. For this great mass of humanity has said, 'enough!' and has begun to march. And their giant march will not be halted until they conquer true independence-- for which they have died in vain more than once. Today, however, those who die will die like the Cubans at Playa Giron. They will die for their own, true and never-to-be-surrendered independence. Patria o Muerte! Venceremos!”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“No nation in Latin America is weak-- because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbour the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world. Great as was the epic of Latin American independence, heroic as was that struggle, today's generation of Latin Americans is called upon to engage in an epic which is even greater and more decisive for humanity. For that struggle was for liberation from Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded by the armies of Napoleon. Today the call for struggle is for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist centre, from the strongest force of world imperialism, and to render humanity a greater service than that rendered by our predecessors.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“In every society are men of base instincts. The sadists, brutes, conveyors of all the ancestral atavisms go about in the guise of human beings, but they are monsters, only more or less restrained by discipline and social habit. If they are offered a drink from a river of blood, they will not be satisfied until they drink the river dry.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“The ruling classes are entrenched in all positions of state power. They monopolize the teaching field. They dominate all means of mass communication. They have infinite financial resources. Theirs is a power which the monopolies and the ruling few will defend by blood and fire with the strength of their police and their armies.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“the United States is preparing a bloody drama for Latin America”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“They contend, in their frenzy, that Cuba exports revolutions. There is room for the idea in their commercial, sleepless and pawnbroker minds, that revolutions can be bought or sold, rented, loaned, exported or imported as one more commodity. Ignorant of the objective laws which rule the development of human society, they believe that their monopolist, capitalist and semi-feudal regimes are eternal. Educated in their own reactionary ideology - a mixture of superstition, ignorance, subjectivism, pragmatism and other aberrations of the mind - they hold an image of the world and of the march of history which accords with their exploiting class interests. They presume that revolutions are born or die in the brains of individuals or by virtue of divine laws, and that the gods are on their side.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“6) The National General Assembly of the people of Cuba - confident that it is expressing the general opinion of the peoples of Latin America - affirms that democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy; with discrimination against the Negro; with disturbances by the Ku Klux Klan; nor with the persecution that drove scientists like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived the world for years of the marvelous voice of Paul Robeson, held prisoner in his own country, and sent the Rosenbergs to their death against the protests of a shocked world including the appeals of many governments and of Pope Pius XII.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“In the actual historic conditions of Latin America, the national bourgeoisie cannot lead the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Experience shows that in our nations that class, even when its interests are in contradiction to those of Yankee imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it, for it is paralysed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the cry of the exploited masses. Facing the dilemma of imperialism or revolution, only its most progressive layers will be with the people.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees' hate of the Cuban Revolution? What is it that rationally explains the conspiracy, uniting for the same aggressive purpose the most powerful and rich imperialist power in the contemporary world and the oligarchies of an entire continent, which together are supposed to represent a population of 350 million human beings, against a small country of only seven million inhabitants, economically underdeveloped, without financial or military means to threaten the security or economy of any other country? What unites them and stirs them up is fear. What explains it is fear. Not fear of the Cuban Revolution but fear of the Latin American revolution.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“What is the history of Cuba but the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world? At the end of the last and the beginning of the present century a handful of economically developed nations had finished partitioning the world among themselves, subjecting to its economic and political domination two-thirds of humanity, which was thus forced to work for the ruling classes of the economically advanced capitalist countries.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“I am compelled to plead my own defence before this Court. There are two reasons: first, because I have been deprived almost entirely of legal advice; second, because only he who has been outraged as deeply as I, and who has seen his country so forsaken, its justice so reviled, can speak on an occasion like this with words made of the blood of his own heart and the very marrow of truth.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“In South America a governing creole elite, ruling in most cases with US political and military support, held the continent with relative ease. Rebellions, such as that led by Sandino in Nicaragua, were isolated and crushed. Physical and cultural repression of the indigenous population (with the exception of Mexico) was regarded as normal. Populist experiments (Argentina and Brazil) did not last too long. Few thought of Cuba as the likely venue for the first anti-capitalist revolution. (Introduction by Tariq Ali)”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“The United States, unlike its European cousins, had always preferred the indirect mode of domination, one which soon became the norm: formally independent and sovereign states, but heavily dependent on their metropolitan masters... The function of these formally independent states was to serve the economic needs of the imperial powers, at the cost of their own political and economic sovereignty. This often resulted in a plantation culture ruled by the production of a single commodity-- sugarcane, in the case of Cuba-- or the extraction of mineral and oil resources, as in Africa and the Middle East.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana