Young Castro Quotes

“The problem with erecting a political regime on people power, Alexis de Tocqueville and others had long since observed, is that the people’s desire for equality does not always jibe with liberty, toleration, and minority rights. Careful listeners might have detected tension between Castro stoking popular enthusiasm (“What is legal right now is what the people say is legal”), while counseling restraint.”
― Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary

“At best, democratic elections confronted voters with a dispiriting question, namely, which representatives of the ruling class shall represent us?”
― Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary

“In short, by this time, Castro had concluded that the nation’s political, social, and cultural problems required real solutions beyond the reach of individual conscience, no matter how well-meaning. The crisis in housing, education, and health care were “problems for the state to resolve.” The way to address inequality was not through philanthropy but by taxing “the owners of 5th Avenue and Country Club mansions, recreational farms, aristocratic clubs, inheritance, and luxury.” Only then could Cuba ensure that no patient died because a rain shower had put off a fundraising drive, or because some soaking-rich countess had taken ill. It was past time for the very rich to lapse into extinction—“like Siboney Indian chiefs and manatees.”
― Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary

“Another was A. J. Cronin’s novel The Stars Look Down, a contrast of two young men from mining families whose growing consciousness of exploitation leads them in very different directions, with one fighting in Parliament for the rights of miners, the other ascending the ladder of mine ownership.”
― Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary

“Elected president of Venezuela for a brief term in 1948, Gallegos regarded modernization as indispensable to Venezuela’s prosperity, while insisting that measures be taken to preserve the country’s social and cultural traditions, a challenge on Castro’s mind.22”
― Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary

“A. J. Cronin’s Keys of the Kingdom, seemed equally momentous. Cronin provided an unforgettable model of “the man of true merit,” who, upon seeing vain, selfish, and corrupt individuals constantly exulted by a misguided public, nevertheless sticks to his guns and to what he knows is right.”
― Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary

“In choosing resistance over material comfort and political office, the rebels rose to the level of Céspedes, Maceo, Gómez, and Martí, Castro said, before going on to cite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s proposition that to renounce one’s freedom was to renounce one’s status as a man.27”
― Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary