Fidel Castro Quotes

Fidel Castro inspires with fierce belief that small groups can spark big change and resist consumerism.

50 quotes

1. Condemn me, it does not matter: history will absolve me.

2. Ideas do not need weapons, if they can convince the great masses.

3. This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell.

4. 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!

5. A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past. [1]

6. 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. [2]

7. I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.

8. I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.

9. Armas para que? ('Guns, for what?')

10. 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.

11. They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

12. On what moral grounds can the rulers of a nation in which millionaires and beggars exist; Indians are exterminated; Blacks are discriminated against; women are prostituted; and huge numbers of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated, speak of human rights? How can the representatives of a capitalist and imperialist society based on the exploitation of man by man, combined with egoism, individualism, and a complete lack of human solidarity, do this? How can those that train and provide military supplies to the bloodiest, most reactionary, and most corrupt governments in the world, such as those of Somoza, Pinochet, Stroessner, the guerrillas in Uruguay, Mobutu, and the shah of Iran, just to name a few, mouth this slogan? How can the leaders of a state whose intelligence agencies organized assassination attempts against the leaders of other countries and whose armies dropped explosives in Vietnam equivalent to hundreds of atom bombs, such as those that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and who murdered millions of Vietnamese without even deigning to apologize to the country or pay indemnity for the lives lost - the leaders of a state that has traditionally intervened in Latin America, subjects the people of this part of the world to its exploiting yoke, and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of children every year due to illness and starvation - how can they speak of human rights? In short, how can the imperialist government that forcibly maintains a military base in our territory and subjects our people to a criminal economic blockade speak of human rights?

13. I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I 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.

14. I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

15. I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.

16. I would not vote for the mayor. It's not just because he didn't invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.

17. 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.

18. In the Third World, there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words, one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty.

19. Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

20. More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

21. The Cuban people refuse to be forced into consumerism, and for that we are the most democratic nation on the planet!

22. The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.

23. The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

24. Perseverance will give us our victory.

25. If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, then I would win the gold medal.

26. I've heard people say Jesus was a communist, who the hell cares?

27. The most honest, courageous politician I have ever met. - Jesse Jackson during a 1984 visit to Havana.

28. Long live the Cuban Revolution. Long live comrade Fidel Castro... Cuban internationalists have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious imperialist campaign designed to destroy the advances of the Cuban revolution. We too want to control our destiny... There can be no surrender. It is a case of freedom or death. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people. - Nelson Mandela

29. Something must be done to save humanity! A better world is possible!

30. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action.

31. None of us has any personal interest above the interests of the country. Our country is more important than our careers.

32. Ideas do not need weapons.

33. I don't think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail.

34. The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing - that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world - is what I wish for all.

35. We do not deny the possibility of peaceful [political] transition, but we are still awaiting the first case.

36. You Americans keep saying that Cuba is ninety miles from the United States. I say that the United States is ninety miles from Cuba and for us, that is worse.

37. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

38. We must establish a new world order based on justice, on equity, and on peace.

39. The first thing dictators do is finish free press, to establish censorship. There is no doubt that a free press is the first enemy of dictatorship.

40. No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists! This time the revolution is for real!

41. The greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.

42. 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.

43. It doesn't sound too good to say I am the son of a landowner, so let us rather say I am the grandson of exploited Galician peasants.

44. Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty.

45. England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.

46. I am someone who's been in politics for 43 years and I know what I'm doing and what I should do. Have no doubt that I know how to tell the truth and to do so elegantly.

47. The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

48. Today, the entire country is an immense University.

49. Some time ago, the United States was an English colony. If an Englishman were asked if the United States would be independent, he would have said no, that it would always be an English colony.

50. Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet.