Fidel Castro Quotes

I was not chosen to be president to restore capitalism to Cuba. I was elected to defend, maintain and continue to perfect socialism, not destroy it.

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.

Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution

Thorough consideration should be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro

It wasn't until Castro marched triumphantly into Cuba that you might say the whole thing grew into a Marxist revolution.

Fidel Castro is loved down into the children. The Revolution won't die!

I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter.

We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.

We only need one, in the same way that Lenin only needed one.

Marxist revolutions generally happened in countries that otherwise could not have carried out an industrial revolution.

Precisely fifteen years ago, at this very hour, you could still hear the echoes of the last shots of the battle that smashed one of Yankee imperialism's most sinister and traitorous actions against a Latin American people. Giro'n went down in history as the first defeat of Yankee imperialism on this continent …. The option between the past and the future, reaction or progress, treason or loyalty to principles, capitalism or socialism, imperialist domination or liberation, was what was decided at Giro'n on April 19, 1961.

A revolutionary is not the revolution.

I don’t deny that Cuba poverty exists, but at least the peasants there have an illusion of progress, whereas the Bolivian lives without hope.

Who, if not the revolutionary intelligentsia, could promote the political development of the working class?

We cannot let the present government go on there [Cuba].

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.

What's happening in Cuba is not a failure of the Cuban people. It's a failure of Fidel Castro and the Communists.

I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

I lived in Cuba - I was there for one year in the 1950s. We built the famous nightclub, which is still there, Tropicana, and a restaurant, Montecatini, that I opened is still there. I was there when the U.S. ambassador said everyone must leave because Castro was arriving the next morning.

The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

In Cuba, I didn't even have a bicycle.

Few living figures could contribute as much as Castro to our understanding of the second half of the 20th century.

I grew up in Cuba under a strong, military, oppressive dictatorship. So as a teenager, I found myself involved in a revolution. I remember during that time, a young, charismatic leader rose up, talking about hope and change. His name was Fidel Castro.

The workers and peasants had created their own institutions to administer the cities in republican Spain, formed their own armed workers' squads to patrol the streets, and established a remarkable revolutionary militia force to fight the Francista [fascists of General Franco] forces -- a voluntaristic militia in which men and women elected their own commanders and in which military rank conferred no social, material, or symbolic distinctions.