Fidel Castro

“Cuba never had advisors in Vietnam. The military there knew very well how to conduct their war.”

“Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”

“Chavez, who came out of the ranks of the Venezuelan Army, is methodical and tireless. I have observed him over the course of 17 years, since his first visit to Cuba. He is an extremely humanitarian and law-abiding person; he has never taken revenge on anybody.”

“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.”

“Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.”

“I am a just man.”

“At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.”

“No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.”

“NATO's brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.”

“Nothing in the world is irreversible, not even capitalism.”

“The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization.”

“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.”

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

“There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by, and the problem will remain the same.”

“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.”

“The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.”

“Following the missile crisis, detente started to gain ground between the United States and the Soviet Union, so the international political climate improved after that.”

“Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist.”

“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.”

“Every country must be absolutely free to adopt the type of economic, political and social system that it considers convenient.”