“Forgive me for using the term ‘fat little brother’. It is not a criticism, rather a suggestion that he do some exercises and go on a diet, don’t you think? I’m doing this for the gentleman’s health.”

I can assure you that my first and foremost interest is my country. This is not a personal matter. We are not people driven by a wish to be in the government since it is for us the least attractive work, even though we are politicians.

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.

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

No government can sell its nation on the backs of its people.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history.

We need a Nuremberg to put on trial the economic order that they have imposed on us, that every three years kills more men, women and children by hunger and preventable or curable diseases than the death toll in six years of the second world war.

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

The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution.

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.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

The Alliance for Progress is an alliance between one millionaire and many beggars.

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, illnesses, poverty or hunger.

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

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

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.