Fidel’s
message to the students
Dear university students and
other guests,
I am very pleased by the
presence at this meeting of the minister of Higher Education, of the rectors of
the universities in
I well remember that November
17th of 2005. We were celebrating International Students’ Day. You,
the university students, had decided that I should speak on that day. They told me it was the 60-year anniversary
of my starting university studies at the end of 1945. At that time I was
just a bit younger than I am today; I was your age. But together we have
lived through a phase of life.
I thought that that meeting
we had at the
I liked that group. They were
not promoting any “cultural revolution”; they wanted to hear a reflection once
more about the ideas put forth that day.
That meeting was already
theirs. It seemed to me that a lot of
time would pass between September 10th and November 17th;
other things were going through my mind and I answered: “We’ll see each other
on that day”.
Nevertheless I
knew that that speech raised some worries, given the moment we were living,
facing a powerful enemy that was threatening us more and more, blockading our
economy with an iron will and making efforts to sow discontent, promoting the
violation of laws and the illegal departures from our country, taking away a
youthful, cultural and technically well-educated work force reserve. Many of them were later led
to illicit activities and crime.
There was also the fact of my
tendency to be self-critical and ironic about our actions. Even though my words were stinging, I
defended principles and made no concessions.
I was remembering all that,
but not the exact words I had used, the bulk of the arguments wielded and the
considerable length of the speech.
I asked the Council of State
Archives for a textual copy and I was looking at 115 single-spaced pages which implied more than 200 as these barely go for
more than 40.
Work has been
intense in the last few weeks, and dedicated to many tasks; among these
meetings with interviews with the principal editor of the Global Research
website, Michel Chossudovsky, the overwhelming
electoral victory of the far-right in the US and, within it, that of the
fascist group the Tea Party, the unprecedented economic crisis, the currency
wars closely followed by the G-20 Summit Meeting in Seoul, the APEC Summit in
Yokohama, Japan and within two days, the NATO Summit in Portugal on November 19
and 20, something that must be followed closely.
In spite of that, I was not
resigning myself to postponing or suspending the date of our meeting.
Bolstered by the original
text, I was picking out the main ideas of the speech that I had given then, in
order to present them with the very same words I used at that time. In the interest of brevity, I omitted
numerous examples that were backing up the opinions I held.
I must confess
that the timeliness of the ideas expressed surprised me; 5 years later they are
more current than they were then, since many of them had to do with the future,
and events have gone on as they were foreseen, only that today, with the
knowledge available about phenomena such as climate change, the economic crisis
that surpasses any previous one, the dangers of war and the drifting off of
imperial power towards fascism demand the maximum of dedication and effort from
our university youths in the ideological battle.
One of the first ideas I
expressed was:
“The combination of factors that made life possible
occurred after billions of years on planet Earth, this very fragile life form
that can only survive between a few limited degrees of temperature, between a
few degrees below zero and a few degrees above zero…”
“I was trying to recall how those universities
were, what we did, what our concerns were.
We were concerned about this island, [...] There was no talk then of globalization;
there was no television or Internet; instant communication were not possible
from one end of the planet to the other; [...] In my time, back in 1945, our passenger planes
could hardly make it to
“…there had been a terrible war that took the lives
of some 50 million people. I am speaking
of the time in 1945 when I entered the university, on September 4th. Well, I started on that date, and you, of
course, have taken the liberty to celebrate the anniversary any day of that
year.”
Later on, I asked: “What kind of world is this? What kind of
world is this where a barbaric empire proclaims its right to launch pre-emptive
attacks on 60 or more countries, and is capable of bringing death to any corner
of the globe, using the most sophisticated weapons and killing techniques?”
“Even today, the empire is threatening to attack
“There is already an international debate on what
day and at what time a pre-emptive attack will be launched on the research
centers for production of nuclear fuel and on whether it will be the empire
that does it, or its satellite
“…and Iran is demanding its right to produce nuclear fuel
just like any industrialized nation and not be obliged to destroy the reserves
of a raw material, which can be used not only as an energy source but also as a
raw material for numerous products such as fertilizers, textiles and many
others currently used worldwide.”
“…. Let’s see
what happens if they decide to bomb
“We have never considered producing nuclear weapons. We have a different type of nuclear weapon: it’s our ideas [...] Our nuclear weapon is the invincible power of moral weapons. [...] nor have we ever considered seeking
biological weapons [...] weapons that defeat
death, that defeat AIDS and cancer that we dedicate our resources.”
“…anywhere in the world you can find a secret prison where defenders of
human rights are tortured. They are the same people who order their little
lambs to vote in
“…. This morning there was news
about the use of live phosphorus in Fallujah. It is
there that the empire discovered that a nation, to all intents and purposes
unarmed, could not be defeated and the invaders found themselves in the
situation of not being able to leave or to stay. If they leave, the combatants would return;
if they stay, these troops would be required in other locations. Over 2,000
young
“…enlisting in the army has become an employment opportunity. The ones who
enlist are the unemployed and very often they try to
enlist greater numbers of Afro-Americans to fight their unjust war. However, news is coming out that fewer
Afro-Americans are enlisting in the army, despite their high levels of
unemployment and their marginalization…”
“They are chasing after Latinos, immigrants, who
cross the border trying to escape hunger; this is a border where more than 500
emigrants die every year, many more in only 12 months than those who died
during the 28 years of the Berlin Wall.”
“Young people entered this University exactly like
that. It must be remembered that this University was not for the poor, it was
for the middle class, for the rich, although young people tended to rise above
class ideas and many of them were capable of struggling, as in fact they did
throughout the history of
“Eight students were executed in 1871. They were like the seeds of the
noblest of sentiments and of the rebellious spirit of our people...”
“Mella was one of them, also coming from the middle
class because the children of farmers who could neither
read nor write …”
“…I mentioned Mella. I could have mentioned Guiteras, or Trejo who died [...]who died in one of those demonstrations on
September 30…”
“…when the Batista tyranny returned with a vengeance, many students fought
and many students died, and that young man from Cardenas, Manzanita
as he was called, always smiling, always jovial, always affectionate with
everyone, became well-known for his bravery, his integrity [...] when he
faced the police.”
“If you visit the house where [Jose Antonio] Echevarria lived –Jose Antonio, we’ll call him—you’ll see
that it is a good house, an excellent house. You could see how the students
were often oblivious of their social or class origins; at that
age of so many hopes and dreams.
“At that university, there was only one medical
faculty, and one teaching hospital, yet, many students
received prizes and awards, first prize in medicine and even in surgery without
ever having operated on anybody.”
“Some made it [...]That’s how there were good doctors, not a huge numbers of good doctors [...] they were unemployed and with the triumph of
the Revolution, that’s where they went, straight to the USA and Cuba was left
with half of all her medical doctors, 3,000 of them, and 25% of her
professors. We started at that point,
until we got to where we are today, standing up almost like the capital of
world medicine.”
“…the country [...] have more than 70,000 medical doctors.”
“We came to the university at the end of 1945 and we began the armed
struggle in Moncada on July 26th, 1953, [...] only eight years later, and the Revolution
triumphed five years, five days and five months after Moncada,
after a long journey by way of prison, exile and fighting in the mountains.”
“…not even being too knowledgeable about the laws of gravity. We headed
upwards, struggling against the empire which was
already the most powerful one [...] when another super-power also existed. [...] marching upwards, gaining experience, seeing
our people and the Revolution gain in strength, until this point where we are
today.”
“…the human being is the only one capable [...] of rising above all instincts [...] Nature fills us with instincts; it is
education that fills us with virtues …”
“…in spite of the differences between human beings, they can become as one
in a single instant or [...]they can be a million strong just through their ideas.”
“Ideas make us a combatant people on a collective and not just an
individual basis; ideas make us a mass of revolutionaries. Then, the people can
never be defeated…”
“…
“I think it was Agramonte,
others say it was Céspedes, who responded to the
pessimists when he had just 12 men with him: [...] with these 12 men I can make a nation [...] what we call a revolutionary conscience [...] nation is born of love for the homeland and
love for the world; and we cannot forget that the homeland is humanity, a
statement made more than a hundred years ago.”
“Never forget those who for years were our working
class, going through decades of sacrifice, suffering the attacks of mercenary
bands in the mountains, invasions like Girón,
thousands of acts of sabotage that killed our sugar cane workers, our
industrial and factory workers, those in the merchant marine or in the fishing
industry, those who were suddenly attacked
with cannons and bazookas, only because they were Cuban, only because
they wanted to be independent, only because they wanted to improve the lot of
our people…”
“
“…I believe that this humanity and all the great things it is capable of
creating must be preserved while it is still possible to do so.”
“…this admirable and marvelous nation. Yesterday, it
was but a seed and today it is a mighty tree with deep roots. Yesterday, it was filled with noble potential and today it is filled with
true nobility. Yesterday, it dreamed of knowledge and today that knowledge is
real, when we are just beginning in this huge university that today is
“…new cadres are springing up, young cadres.”
“As you know, we are presently waging a war against corruption, against
the re-routing of resources, against thievery …”
“…But don’t you think for a moment that stealing resources and materials
is just a present-day illness, nor is it an exclusive phenomenon of the Special
Period. The Special Period aggravated
it, because in this period we saw the growth of much inequality and certain
people were able to accumulate a lot of money.”
“. In the times I’m
referring to, we needed
“In this battle against vice there will be no truce for anyone and we
shall be thoroughly scrupulous. We will
appeal to everyone’s sense of honor. We
are sure of one thing; every human being possesses a healthy dose of
honor. When one looks in the mirror, one
is not always the harshest of judges, even though, in my opinion, the first
responsibility of a revolutionary is to be extremely severe with oneself.”
“Criticism and self-criticism, it’s all very good, as it did not exist in
the past. However, if we are going to
war we need weapons of greater caliber; we must carry out criticism and
self-criticism in the school room, in the party cells and then outside the
party cells, in the municipality and finally in the entire country.”
“Afterwards, we might have other questions. How much are we earning? And if the question
deals with how much we are earning, we might begin to understand the dream of
everyone being able to live on their salary or on their adequate pension. “
“I can assure you that we have become aware of this. The entire life is
a learning process, right up to our last breath…“
“Here is a conclusion I’ve come to after many years:
among all the errors we may have committed, the greatest of them all was that
we believed that someone really knew something about socialism, or that someone
actually knew how to build socialism. It
seemed to be a sure fact, as well-known as the
electrical system conceived by those who thought they were experts in
electrical systems. [...]be idiots if we think, for example, that economy is an exact and eternal
science and that it existed since the days of Adam and Eve, and I offer my
apologies to the thousands of economists in our country.
“All sense of dialectics is lost when someone
believes that today’s economy is identical to the economy 50 or 100 or 150
years ago, or that it is identical to the one in Lenin’s day or to the time
when Karl Marx lived. Revisionism is a
thousand miles away from my mind and I truly revere Marx, Engels
and Lenin.”
“When I was a student, once I learned what utopian
communism was, I realized that that’s what I was a utopian communist because
all my ideas took off from the idea: “This is not good, this is bad, this is a
crime. How can we possibly have an
overproduction crisis and hunger at the same time, when there is more coal,
more cold, more unemployed, because there is more
capacity to create wealth? Wouldn’t it
be simpler to produce and distribute the wealth?’
“Just as Karl Marx thought in the period of the Critique
of the Gotha Program, it seemed like limits for abundance were inherent in the social
system; it seemed that just as production forces developed, they
could produce everything that the human being needed to satisfy all his
essential requirements almost limitlessly, be they material, cultural, etc.”
“When he wrote political books like The 18th Brumaire and the Civil War in France, he was a
genius with a crystal clear interpretation.
His Communist Manifesto is a classic. You can analyze it and be more or less
satisfied with this and with that. I
moved on from utopian communism to a communism that was based on serious
theories of social development …”
“In our real world, which must be changed, every
revolutionary tactician and strategist has the obligation to conceive of a
strategy and a tactic that will lead to the fundamental objective, to change
the real world. No divisive tactic or
strategy can be a good one. “
“I had the privilege of meeting the followers of the Liberation Theology
once when I visited Allende in
“The world is desperately crying out for unity and if we cannot achieve a
minimum of unity, we are not going to go anywhere.”
“Above all, Lenin studied State issues; Marx
did not speak of the worker-peasant alliance because he lived in a country that
had a highly developed industrial base; Lenin recognized the under-developed
world, he was aware of the country where 80 to 90 percent were peasants, and
even though it had considerable strength in its railroad workers and in some
other industries, Lenin saw with utmost clarity the necessity to forge a
worker-peasant alliance. No one before had spoken of this; they had philosophized, but they hadn’t talked about this. The first socialist revolution,
the first real attempt at a just and egalitarian society, takes place in a huge
semi-feudal, semi-under developed country.
None of the previous societies slave-based, feudal, medieval or anti-feudal,
bourgeois, or capitalist could ever propose the existence of a just society
even though much was said about liberty, equality and
fraternity. “
“Throughout history, the first serious human
attempt to create the first just society began less than 200 years ago…”
“One could never have arrived at a strategy through
dogma. Lenin taught us a lot, because
Marx taught us to understand society. Lenin taught us to understand the State
and the role of the State. “
“… when the
“…I would tell them: “You cannot ask us our
opinion, as it will be you fighting the battle, and you alone who will die, not
us. We know what we are going to do and
what we are prepared to do: but these are decisions which each one must make
for themselves.” That was the highest expression of our respect for the other
movements. We have never attempted to impose ourselves on the
basis of our knowledge and experience, or the enormous respect they show
for our revolution which motivated them to listen to our point of view. “
“I believe that the experience of that first
socialist State, a State that should have been fixed and not destroyed, was a
bitter one. You may be
sure that we have thought many times about that incredible phenomenon where one
of the mightiest powers in the world disintegrated the way it did; for this was
a power that had matched the strength of the other super-power and had paid
with the lives of more than 20 million of her people in the battle against
fascism. “
“Is it that revolutions are doomed to fall apart,
or that men cause revolutions to fall apart?
Can either man or society prevent revolutions from collapsing? I could immediately add to this another
question: Do you believe that this
revolutionary socialist process can fall apart, or not? (Exclamations of: “No!!”)
Have you ever given that some thought?
Have you ever deeply reflected about it? “
“Were you aware of all these inequalities that I
have been talking about? Were you aware
of certain generalized habits? Did you
know that there are people who earn forty or fifty times the amount one of
those doctors over there in the mountains of Guatemala, part of the “Henry
Reeve” Contingent, earns in one month? It could be in other faraway reaches of Africa, or at an altitude
of thousands of meters, in the Himalayas, saving lives and earning 5% or 10% of
what one of those dirty little crooks earns, selling gasoline to the new rich,
diverting resources from the ports in trucks and by the ton-load, stealing in
the dollar shops, stealing in a five-star hotel by exchanging a bottle of rum
for another of lesser quality and pocketing the dollars for which he sells the
drinks. “
“I could also explain why we no longer cut cane today;
there are no cane cutters here and the heavy machinery destroys the sugar cane
fields. The abuses of the developed world and the subsidies have led to sugar
prices that were scraping the bottom of the trash bins, on the world markets.
In the meantime,
“So, we are now coming to the point of asking
ourselves this question –I have already reached this point myself, some years
ago-- in the face of this super-powerful empire that stalks us and threatens
us, that has transition plans and military action plans in this specific
historical moment. “
“They are awaiting a natural and absolutely logical
event, the death of someone. In this
case, they have honored me by thinking of me.
It might be a confession of what they have not been able to do in a long
time. If I were a vain man, I could be
proud of the fact that those guys admit that they are
waiting for me to die, and this is the time.
They are waiting for me to die, and everyday they invent something new:
Castro has this, he’s suffering from that, and now the
latest is that they say Castro has Parkinson’s disease. “
“Yes, it’s true, I had a very bad fall and I’m
still in rehab for this arm (He shows the arm), and its improving. I’m very grateful for the circumstances which
caused me to break my arm, because now I’m forced to be even more disciplined,
to work more, to dedicate more time (almost 24 hours a day) to my job. I had been doing this ever since the Special
Period began, and now I dedicate every second to my work and I fight harder
than ever...”
“That’s a little like the guy (I was making
reference to Forbes Magazine) who discovered that I was the wealthiest man in
the world. “
“I asked you a question, comrade students; don’t
worry, I haven’t forgotten, and I’d like to believe that you will never forget
it. It is the question that I ask in view of
historical experiences we have known, and I ask you all, without
exception, to reflect on it: Can the revolutionary process be irreversible, or
not? Which are the ideas or the degree
of conscience that would make the reversal of the revolutionary process
impossible? “
“A leader has a tremendous power when he enjoys the
confidence of the masses that put full trust in his abilities. The consequences of errors committed by those
in authority are terrible, and this has happened more than once during the
revolutionary processes. “
“Such is the stuff for meditation. One studies
history, one meditates on what happened here and there, on what happened today
and on what will happen tomorrow, on where each country’s processes will lead,
what path our own process will take, how it will get there, and what role Cuba
will play in this process. “
“That was why I commented that one of our greatest
mistakes at the beginning of, and often during, the Revolution was believing that someone knew how to build socialism. “
“What kind of a society would this be, how
worthy of joy could we be when we assemble on a day like today, in a place like
this, if we were not minimally aware of what we need to know, so that on our
heroic island, this heroic people, this nation which has written pages in the
history books like no other nation in the history of mankind can preserve the
Revolution? Please, do not
think that this who is speaking to you is a vain man or a charlatan, or someone
inclined to bluff. “
“Forty-six years have passed and the history of
this country is known and the people of this nation know it well. They also
know their neighbor very well, the empire, with its size and its power, its
strength and its wealth, its technology and its control over the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund, all the world of finances. That country has
imposed on us the most incredibly iron-clad blockade,
which was discussed at the United Nations where 182 nations supported
“It would have been naïve of us to think, or to ask
for, or to expect that one super-power would fight against the other, in this
day and age of modern technological development, to intervene in this island
“Today, we possess much more than those seven guns.
We have a people who have learned to handle weapons; we have an entire nation which, in spite of our errors, holds such a high
degree of culture, education and conscience that it will never allow this
country to become their colony again. “
“This country can self-destruct; this Revolution
can destroy itself, but they can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves,
and it would be our fault. “
“I have been fortunate to have lived many years. That is not a special merit but rather, it is an exceptional
opportunity to share with you everything that I am telling you, young leaders,
all the leaders of the masses, all the leaders of the workers’ movement, the
Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the women’s groups, the farmers,
the veterans of the Revolution, organized throughout the country, hundreds of
thousands who have struggled through the years carrying out glorious
internationalist missions…”
“…it is impressive to see people from the most
humble backgrounds in this country transform into 28,000 social workers and
thousands of university students, university students!! What a force!
And soon we shall also be seeing those who
graduated a while ago in the Sports Coliseum. “
“The coliseum teaches us about Marxist-Leninism; it
teaches us about social classes. A short while ago, about 15,000 doctors and
medical students, some of them from
“The image of those 15,000 white coats all together
on graduation day can never be forgotten. That was the day that the “Henry
Reeve” Contingent was created following in the tradition of many doctors who
have been to places where exceptional events have taken place, in a time span
much too brief to even imagine. “
“Allow me to tell you that today, human capital is
practically superior to almost all of the others put together, and it is
advancing very quickly to become the country’s most valuable resource. I’m not exaggerating. “
“They have discovered private gas stations,
supplied with oil from these trucks. “
“We all know that many of the state owned trucks go
all over the place, and sometimes they visit a relative, a friend, a family or
a girl-friend. “
“I remember the time, several years before the
Special Period, I saw a brand new Volvo front-loader
on
“Some things you’ll see, Mio Cid –I think it was
Cervantes who said this— that would make the stones talk. “
“…this is some of what has been happening. In
general, we all know, and many have said: “The
Revolution can’t do that; no, it’s impossible; no, nobody can fix that.” But yes, the people are going to fix it this time, the
Revolution is going to fix it, any way we can. Is it merely an ethical matter?
Yes, it is above all an ethical matter; but even more, it is a vital economic
matter.
“
“Our nation is one of those that waste the most
combustible energy in the world. We had
proof of it right here, and you very honestly pointed it out; it is very
important. No one knows the cost of
electricity; no one knows the cost of gasoline; no one knows its market
value. I was about to tell you that it
is very sad when a ton of oil can cost 400 dollars and a ton of gasoline can
cost 500, 600, 700 or on occasion 1000;
this is a product which does not get cheaper. Whenever that happens it
is circumstantial, and it does not last long…”
“Take a look at our nickel mines,
leaving great holes where once there used to be a lot of nickel. This is happening to oil; the great oil
fields have all been found and every day there is less
of them. This is a subject about which we have had to think long and hard...”
“…if I remember correctly, there were around 3,000
entities that were handling convertible currency and were managing their
profits with generous expenditures in convertible currency, buying this and
that, painting their houses, buying a new car and getting rid of the old
clunker. We realized that, given the
conditions this country is living in, such habits must be broken…”
“Quite simply, we had to shut down sugar mills or
we were going to disappear down the Bartlett Trench. The country had many, many economists and it
is not my intention to criticize them, but speaking with the same honesty I
used to describe the errors of the Revolution, I would like to ask why we hadn’t discovered that maintaining production levels of
sugar would be impossible. The USSR had collapsed, oil was costing 40 dollars a barrel, sugar
prices were at basement levels…so why did we not rationalize that industry
instead of sowing 20,000 caballerias that
year, equivalent of almost
“The
“Maybe it was all necessary, for we have committed
many errors. It is these errors that we
are trying to correct, if you will, that we are in the
process of correcting. “
“…without abuse of power! for
nothing would ever justify the abuse of power. We must be audacious enough to
tell the truth, but not all of it, because we don’t
need to say everything at once. Political battles follow certain tactics, with
adequate information, following their own path. [...] Don’t worry about what the bandits are saying or
what the news services will report tomorrow or the day after: he who laughs
last, laughs best. “
“It’s not just a matter of printing bills and
distributing them without having them backed up with merchandise or services…”
“We ended up giving away the houses, some people
bought theirs, they were the owners, they had paid 50 pesos a month, 80 pesos,
or, if the money was sent to them from Miami, it amounted to about 3 dollars;
some sold theirs in 15 000 or 20 000 dollars, when they had originally paid
less than 500. “
“Can the country resolve its housing problem by
giving away houses? And who will get them, the
proletariat or the humble people? Many humble people were given houses for free and then they sold them to the new rich. How much
can the new rich spend on a house? Is this socialism? “
“Maybe it’s down to necessity at a certain moment
in time, maybe it’s a mistake, because the country suffered a shattering blow
when overnight the great power fell and we were left alone, all on our own, and
we lost all the markets on which to sell our sugar and we stopped getting
supplies, fuel, even the wood with which to give a Christian burial to our
dead. And everyone
thought: ‘This will fall apart’, and the idiots still believe that it is all
going to fall apart here and that if it doesn’t fall apart now it will fall
apart later. And the more illusions they entertain and the more they think, the
more we should think, the more we should draw our own conclusions, so that this
glorious people who has so trusted all of us is never defeated. “
“The empire shall not come here to set up secret
jails in which to torture progressive men and women from other parts of this
continent that are today rising to fight for the second and final independence! “
“Before we go back to living such a repugnant and
miserable life there better not be any memory, even the slightest trace, of us
or our descendents. “
“They had fooled the world. When the mass media
grew in full force it took control of peoples’ minds
and exercised its power through not only lies, but also conditioned response. A
lie isn’t the same as a conditioned response: a lie
affects one’s knowledge whereas the conditioned response affects one’s ability
to think. And being misinformed isn’t the same as
having lost the ability to think, because responses have been created for you:
‘This is bad, that is bad; socialism is bad, socialism is bad’, they say, and
all the ignorant people and all the humble people and all the exploited people
are saying: ‘Socialism is bad’. ‘Communism is bad’. And
all the poor people, all the exploited people and all the illiterate people are
repeating it: ‘Communism is bad’. “
“‘Cuba is bad, Cuba is bad’, the empire has
said it, it has been said in Geneva, it has been said all over the place, and
all the exploited people around the world, all the illiterate people and all
those who don’t receive medical care, or education or have any guarantee of a
job, or of anything are saying: ‘The Cuban Revolution is bad, the Cuban
Revolution is bad’. “
“What are they talking about? What can the
illiterate people do? How can they know if the International Monetary Fund is
good or bad, or that interest is higher, or that the world is being ceaselessly
subjugated and pillaged by a thousand different
methods put into practice by this system? They don’t
know.
“
“They don’t teach the masses to read and
write, yet they spend a million dollars on publicity every year; but it isn’t
the fact that they spend it, it’s the fact that they spend it on creating
conditioned responses, because someone bought Palmolive, someone else bought
Colgate, and someone else bought Candado soap, just
because they were told to a hundred times over, because they associated the
products with a pretty image and this sowed its seed and carved its place in
the brain. They who talk so
much of brainwashing, it is they who carve their place, who mould the brain,
who take away from the human being his capacity to think; it would be less
serious if they were taking away the ability to think from someone who had been
to university, who could read a book. “
“What
can the illiterate read? What means have they of realizing
that they are being conned? What means have they of knowing that the
biggest lie in the world is the one that claims that the rotten system that
reigns over there and what they have in
many places, if not almost all of the countries that copied that system is a
democracy? [...]This is what, in the end, makes everyone much
more revolutionary than they were when they were unaware of many of these
things, when they only knew about elements of injustice and inequality. “
“At the moment, while I’m talking to you about
this, I’m not theorizing, although it is necessary to theorize; we are working,
we are moving towards full changes in our society. “
“The price of oil nowadays is not in keeping with
any supply and demand rule; it conforms to other factors like the shortages,
the extensive squandering by the rich countries, and it’s not a price that is
anyway in keeping with economic rules either. The reason behind it is the
shortage of this product together with the increasing and extraordinary demand
for it. “
“We invite everyone to take part in a great battle,
it’s not just a fuel and electricity battle, it’s a battle against larceny,
against all types of theft, anywhere in the world. I repeat: against all types
of theft, anywhere in the world. “
“I’m not against anyone, but neither am I against the truth. I don’t believe any lies, I’m sorry, but I’m telling them all
now that they are going to loose the battle, and it won’t be an act of
injustice or abuse of power. “
“In total you spend
1.9 dollars for 300 kilowatts of electricity; that is to say, 0.63 cents of a
dollar for one Cuban kilowatt of electricity. How amazingly
brilliant! “
“How much do the Cuban people spend because
of that dollar that is sent to you from over there? Because
that wasn’t a dollar that you earned, or a peso, by working for it [...];
it was sent to you by a healthy person, who studied free of charge right from
primary school, who isn’t ill, they are the healthiest citizens that go to the
United States, where there is an Adjustment Act, and where the sending of
remittances is also prohibited. “
“Obviously, you didn’t spend any of what they
sent you on medicine, for medicine here are subsidized, if you bought it in the
drugstore, that is, what wasn’t stolen and resold, and then you spent 10% of
what it costs in hard currency. If you went to the hospital and had an ankle or
even heart operation, your operation could cost 1000, 2000,
“One day, the Revolution will be able to trace the
location of every truck anywhere, using the most sophisticated technical
instruments. Nobody will be able to take that truck to pay a visit to
auntie or to the sweetheart. Not that there is anything wrong with looking
after your private business, but it cannot be done in a vehicle used for work…”
“We have to apply maximum rationality to salaries,
prices, pensions. There should be zero over-spending and wastage.
We are not a capitalist country where everything is left
to chance. “
“Subsidies and free services will be considered
only in essentials. [...] “What are we going to pay all this with?”[...] Everything that is within our reach,
everything belongs to the people, the only thing not to be
allowed is egotistical and irresponsible wastage of our wealth. “
“I really had no intention of getting
involved in a dissertation on such sensitive matters, but it would have been a
crime not to take advantage of the moment and tell you some of the things
related to the economy, to the material life of the country, to the future of
the Revolution, to revolutionary ideas, to the reasons why we began this
struggle, to the colossal strength we possess today, the country we are today
and we may continue to be, which is much more than we are now. “
“I have been speaking to you with all the trust
that I can. “
“…the country will have much more but it will never
be a consumer society. It will be a society of knowledge, of culture, of
the most extraordinary human development imaginable, development in art,
culture, science [...] with a breadth of liberty that no one will be
able to dismantle. We know this already, we don’t
need to proclaim it, but it is worth remembering. “
“Nobody should have the right to manufacture
nuclear weapons. There should be no privileges for imperialism to impose
its hegemonic rule and to take the natural resources and raw materials away
from the nations of the
“There must be an end to stupidity in the world,
and to abuse, and to the empire based on might and terror. It will
disappear when all fear disappears. Every day there are more fearless countries. Every day there will be more
countries that will rebel and the empire will not be able to keep that infamous
system alive any longer. “
“It’s only fair to struggle for that and that is
why we must use all our energy, all our effort and all our time to be able to
say with the voice of millions, or hundreds of thousands of millions of
people: It is worthwhile to have been born! It is worthwhile to have
lived!
“
This way I ended my speech,
which I ratify today once again.
Thank you.