Latin American revolutionaries

"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."

"The 26th of July Movement is not a tendency within the party, it is the revolutionary apparatus of Chibas's organization, a grass-roots movement, from which it emerged to fight against the dictator, while the Ortodoxo Party was lying helpless and divided. From then on, our revolutionary thesis has been the thesis of our party's masses; they had expressed their feelings unequivocally, from then on, the masses and the eladers have gone different ways."

"The 26th of July Movement is the revolutionary organization of the humble, by the humble, for the humble. The 26th July Movement is the hope of redemption for the Cuban working class, who can hope for nothing from the political cliques; it is the hope of land for the peasants who live like pariahs in the country whose freedom their grandfathers won; it is the hope of going back home for the emigres who had to leave their country, here they could not live or work, and it is the hope of daily bread for the hungry and of justice for the forgotten."

"Weapons for what? (¿Armas, para qué?) To fight against whom? Against the revolutionary government, that has the support of the whole people? ... Weapons for what? Hiding weapons for what? To blackmail the President of the Republic? To threaten to break the peace here? To create organizations of gangsters? Is it that we are going to return to gangsterism? Is it that we will return to daily shootouts in the capital? Weapons for what?"

"I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun."

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

"The American people, I think, is good people. Yes, they are—they have not to charge with the guilty of all the lies, that publicity...the people of United States is good people, harmonious people, wonderful people. United States people is very good people."

"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 first duty of the revolutionaries is to tell the truth. Fooling the people, promoting illusions, always brings the worst consequences, and I believe that the people should be warned against excessive optimism. How did the Red Army win the war? By telling the truth. How did the dictatorship lose the war? By deceiving the soldiers."

"A revolution is not a trail of roses.... A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past."

"Fellow workers and peasants, this is the socialist and democratic revolution of the working people, with the working people, and for the working people. And for this revolution of the working people, by the working people, and for the working people we are prepared to give our lives."

"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."

"I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life."

"It is necessary that each Marxist-Leninist understand that he can contribute to Marxism-Leninism with an atom of his experience, that every solution he finds, every experience he acquires, in the act of solving a problem, will be one more experience with which he enriches Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism has been enriched so much precisely by the experience of millions and millions of Marxist-Leninists acting in the reality of life."

"We believe that Marxism-Leninism is an incontestable truth."

"Kim Il-sung, one of the most prominent, bright and heroic socialist leaders of the present day, whose history is one of the most beautiful thing a revolutionary may have written in the service of the cause of socialism."

"Che brought the ideas of Marxism-Leninism to their freshest, purest, most revolutionary expression."

"The death of a fighter is not a reason to mourn, if we believe, as we have always believed, as our people have believed and as revolutionaries of every era have believed, that no true man, no true revolutionary dies in vain."

"Marx and Lenin represent precisely the two human personalities that will mark the passage between prehistory and the history of mankind."

"Fascism, with its violence, gets rid of everything: it attacks universities, it closes them and crushes them; it attacks intellectuals, represses them and persecutes them; it attacks political parties; it attacks trade union organizations; it attacks all mass and cultural organizations. Therefore, nothing is more violent, more retrograde and more illegal than fascism."

"Marxism-Leninism is an explanation of historical events; Marxism-Leninism is a guide for action, Marxism-Leninism is the ideology of the proletariat, which must guide, make its action conscious to overthrow exploiters, to establish a classless society."

"Marxism-Leninism is the ideology of the working class, the most complete political doctrine, the most accurate explanation of social and historical problems."

"Marxism-Leninism is the denial of the exploitation of man by man, that has been precisely the source of crimes, wars, oppressions and calamities that humanity has suffered over millennia."

"The figure of Lenin is a giant in history and his luminous ideas represents the common heritage of revolutionary fighters in every corner of the Earth."

"Comrade Ho Chi Minh, in a genious way, combined the struggle for national independence with the struggle for the rights of the masses oppressed by the exploiters and the feudals. He saw that the path was to combine the patriotic feelings of peoples with the need of freedom from social exploitation. National liberation and social liberation were the two pillars on which his doctrine was based. Furthermore, he saw that underdeveloped countries, in those conditions because of capitalism, could make a leap in history, building their economy along the path of socialism, saving themselves from the sacrifices and the horrors of capitalism."

"President Ho Chi Minh, understanding the extraordinary historical importance and the consequences of the glorious October Revolution, and assimilating Lenin's luminous thought, saw clearly that in Marxism-Leninism we could find the teaching and the path that had to be followed to find a solution to the problem of the peoples oppressed by colonialism."

"Fascism appears in the world precisely after the October Revolution; fascism appears in the world as a tool against Marxism-Leninism. Capitalist and imperialist countries created the conditions for the rise of fascism in the world; and the whole fascist campaign, since its first appearance in Europe, was based on anti-communism, on communists' slaughter and on the destruction of the Soviet Union."

"Marxism-Leninism is ultimately deeply internationalist and, at the same time, deeply patriotic."

"Democratic Korea, its leaders and its people will always live in our feelings of revolutionaries, patriots and fighters for the triumph of socialism."

"Marxism-Leninism is the richest doctrine in ideas of justice, freedom, equality, fraternity among men."

"I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution."

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

"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!"

"If we wanted to express how we'd like our revolutionary combatants, our militants, our men, to be, we should say without hesitation of any kind: that they be like Che! If we wanted to express how we'd want the men of future generations to be, we should say: that they be like Che! If we wanted to say how we'd want our children to be educated, we should say without faltering: we want them to be educated in Che's spirit! If we wanted a model of a man, a model of a man who does not belong to this time, but who belongs to the future instead, I'd heartily say that this model without a single stain on his conduct, attitude or behavior, is Che! If we want to express how we want our children to be, we must say with all the heart of vehement revolutionaries: we want them to be like Che!"

"Scorn relations with the imperialist Government of the United States, a Government of genocide and decadence .. We have supported, we are supporting and we shall support revolutionary movements in Latin America. .. We feel very well outside the O.A.S., in fact better than inside. The O.A.S. is an organization that is bound to disappear."

"You know my eyes are not very strong. So every day to make them stronger I force myself to look at the sun. I find it very hard. But do you know what I find harder? That is to look into the blue of your eyes."

"We have a theoretical concept of the Revolution which is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters."

"What was fascism in Italy, in Germany? The exaltation of racial prejudices. Instead of fighting racial prejudice, which is what a revolution does, fascism exalts prejudice and turns it into hatred."

"With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?"

"The economic management and planning system was not set up so that we can play at capitalism; and some people are shamefully playing at capitalism; we know this, we see it, and this must be set right."

"It is really impressive what a filth system capitalism is, that can't guarantee its own people employment, nor health, nor adequate education; that cannot prevent youth from being corrupted by drugs, gamble, and all kind of vices."

"We cannot ignore Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the useless use of nuclear weapons, an absolutely unnecessary use that, in any case, could have been employed against some military facilities that fell, however, on civilian populations of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, to establish the era of the atomic terror in the world."

"Las ideas no necesitan ni de las armas, en la medida en que sean capaces de conquistar a las grandes masas. (Ideas do not need weapons, to the extent that they can convince the great masses.)"

"I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason."

"Let us yield a bit. Let us grant socialism a few more years. Socialism is so obsolete, it is dying by itself.... Did I say socialism? I assure you on my honor this was not a mental slip. This was a slip of the tongue. Do not forget that. Capitalism—and I say it with such gusto—capitalism is so obsolete that it is dying by itself."

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

"Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the moral, nor the ethics, nor the will to solve the problems of poverty."

"Capitalism produces beasts, socialism produces men."

"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, illnesses, poverty or hunger."

"Ho Chi Minh was, is and will be an eternal example."

"This country ... abounds in that Cuba is a heaven in the spiritual sense of the word, and we prefer to die in heaven than serve in hell."

"Capitalism is a system based on blind, destructive and tyrannical laws imposed on the human species."

"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."

"Soon, I'll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without a truce to obtain them."

"They corrupt the morals of young girls and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this is a bourgeois liberal regime? NO! There is nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!"

"Revolution is the sense of the historical moment; it is changing everything that must be changed; it is full equality and freedom; it is being treated and treating others like human beings; it is emancipating ourselves, by ourselves and with our very own efforts; it is challenging the dominant powerful forces within and outside of the social and national arena; it is defending the values one believes in at the cost of any sacrifice; it is modesty, selflessness, altruism, solidarity and heroism; it is fighting with audacity, intelligence and realism; it is never telling a lie or violating ethical principles; it is the profound conviction that there is no force on earth that can crush truth and ideas. Revolution is unity, it is independence, it is fighting for our dreams of justice for Cuba and the world that is the basis of our patriotism, our socialism and our internationalism."

"The USSR self-destructed in an incredible way. The responsibility for that self-destruction undoubtedly lies in the hands of the country's leaders, those who led that nation. Now, some of them were aware they were destroying it and others were not. That is what I was trying to say, more or less, and we saw it all from the beginning. I cannot say Gorbachev played a role in which he was aware of the destruction of the USSR because I have no doubt that Gorbachev intended to fight to improve socialism. We approved of Soviet efforts to improve socialism in the USSR. But we could not approve of, and never would have agreed to, not only the destruction of socialism in the USSR, but also the destruction of the USSR itself. That inflicted terrible damage on all peoples of the world and created a bad situation for the Third World in particular. Imperialism would have been able to disintegrate the Soviet Union, had the Soviets not destroyed themselves, had those responsible for the strategies and tactics and for the country's political and government policies not destroyed the country. In other words, socialism did not die from natural causes: it was a suicide, socialism was murdered. That is what I meant."

"I believe Stalin made big mistakes but also showed great wisdom. In my opinion, blaming Stalin for everything that occurred in the Soviet Union would be historical simplism, because no man by himself could have created certain conditions. It would be the same as giving Stalin all the credit for what the USSR once was. That is impossible! I believe that the efforts of millions and millions of heroic people contributed to the USSR's development and to its relevant role in the world in favor of hundreds of millions of people."

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

"I want to be fair above all else, so I can't blame all the soldiers for the shameful crimes that stain a few evil and treacherous military men. But every honorable and upright soldier who loves his career and his uniform is duty bound to demand an to fight for the cleansing of this guilt, to avenge this betrayal and to see the guilty are punished. Otherwise the soldier's uniform will forever be marked of infamy instead of pride."

"It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there can be no offense."

"Let me tell you a story: Once there was a republic. It had its constitution, its laws, its freedoms, a president, a congress and courts of law. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom."

"Poor country! One morning the citizens woke up dismayed; under the cover of darkness, while the people slept, the ghost of the past had conspired and had seized the citizenry by its hands, its feet, and its neck. That grip, those claws were familiar: those jaws, those death-dealing scythes, those boots. No, it was no nightmare; it was a sad and terrible reality: A man named Fulgencio Batista had just perpetrated the appalling crime that no one had expected."

"I sincerely believe revolution to be the source of legal right; but the nocturnal armed assault of March 10 could never be considered a revolution."

"I now come to the close of my defense, but I will not end it as lawyers usually do, asking that the accused be freed. I cannot ask for freedom for myself while my companeros are already suffering in the ignominious prison of the Isle of Pines. Send me there to join them and to share their fate. It is understandable that honest people should be dead or in prison in a republic where the president is a criminal and a thief."

"I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my companeros. Condemn me, it does not matter: history will absolve me."

"Much has been said of the universal desire for peace, which is the desire of all peoples and, therefore, the desire of our people too, but the peace which the world wishes to preserve is the peace that we Cuban have been missing for quite some time.... Are we, the Cuban delegates, the representatives of the worst type of Government in the world? Do we, the representatives of the Cuban delegation, deserve the maltreatment we have received? And why our delegation? Cuba has sent many delegations to the United Nations, and yet it was we who were singled out for such exceptional measures: confinement to the Island of Manhattan; notice to all hotels not to rent rooms to us, hostility and, under the pretense of security, isolation."

"Now, to the problem of Cuba. Perhaps some of you are well aware of the facts, perhaps others are not. It all depends on the sources of information, but, undoubtedly, the problem of Cuba, born within the last two years, is a new problem for the world."

"For many, Cuba was something of an appendix of the United States. Even for many citizens of this country, Cuba was a colony of the United States. As far as the map was concerned, this we not the case: our country had a different color from that of the United States. But in reality Cuba was a colony of the United States.. It was not because of its origins; the same men did not colonize the United States and Cuba. Cuba has a very different ethnic and cultural origin, and the difference was widened over the centuries."

"Cuba was the last country in America to free itself from Spanish colonial rule, to cast off, with due respect to the representative of Spain, the Spanish colonial yoke; and because it was the last, it also had to fight more fiercely."

"Spain had only one small possession left in America and it defended it with tooth and nail. Our people, small in numbers, scarcely a million inhabitants at that time, had to face alone, for almost thirty years, an army considered one of the strongest in Europe..."

"For thirty years the Cubans fought alone for their independence; thirty years of struggle that strengthened our love for freedom and independence."

"But Cuba was a fruit — according to the opinion of a President of the United States at the beginning of the past century, John Adams —, it was an apple hanging from the Spanish tree, destined to fall, as soon as it was ripe enough, into the hands of the United States."

"Spanish power had worn itself out in our country. Spain had neither the men nor the economic resources to continue the war in Cuba; Spain had been defeated. Apparently the apple was ripe, and the United States Government held out its open hands."

"Several apples fell in to the hands of the United States. Puerto Rico fell — heroic Puerto Rico, which had begun its struggle for independence at the same time as Cuba. The Philippine Islands fell, and several other possessions. However, the method of dominating our country could not be the same. Our country had struggled fiercely, and thus had gained the favor of world public opinion. Therefore the method of taking our country had to be different."

"The Cubans who fought for our independence and at that very moment were giving their blood and their lives believed in good faith in the joint resolution of the Congress of the United States of April 20, 1898, which declared that “Cuba is, and by right ought to be, free and independent.”... But that illusion was followed by a rude awakening. After two years of military occupation of our country, the unexpected happened... a new law was passed by the United States Congress... stated that the constitution of the Cuba must have an appendix under which the United States would be granted the right to intervene in Cuba's political affairs and, furthermore, to lease certain parts of Cuba for naval bases or coal supply station."

"...Under a law passed by the legislative body of a foreign country, Cuban's Constitution had to contain an appendix with those provisions. Our legislators were clearly told that if they did not accept the amendment, the occupation forces would not be withdrawn. In other words, an agreement to grant another country the right to intervene and to lease naval bases was imposed by force upon my country by the legislative body of a foreign country... Then began the new colonization of our country, the acquisition of the best agricultural lands by United States firms, concessions of Cuban natural resources and mines, concessions of public utilities for exploitation purposes, commercial concessions of all types. These concessions, when linked with the constitutional right — constitutional by force — of intervention in our country, turned it from a Spanish colony into an American colony..."

"The National General Assembly of the Cuban people condemns large scale landowning as a source of poverty for the peasant and a backward and inhuman system of agricultural production; it condemns starvation wages and the iniquitous exploitation of human work by illegitimate and privileged interests; it condemns illiteracy, the lack of teachers, of schools, doctor and hospitals; the lack of old-age security in the countries of America; it condemns discrimination against the Negro and the Indian'; it condemns the inequality and the exploitation of women; it condemns political and military oligarchies, which keep our peoples in poverty, prevent their democratic development and the full exercise of their sovereignty; it condemns concessions of the natural resources of our countries as a policy of surrender which betrays the interests of the peoples; it condemns the governments which ignore the demands of their people in order to obey orders from abroad; it condemns the systematic deception of the people by mass communications media which serve the interests of the oligarchies and the policy of imperialist oppression; it condemns the monopoly held by news agencies, which are instruments of monopolist trusts and agents of such interests; it condemns the repressive laws which prevent the workers, the peasants, the students and the intellectuals, the great majorities in each country, from organizing themselves to fight for their social and national rights; it condemns the imperialist monopolies and enterprises which continually plunder our wealth, exploit our workers and peasants, bleed our economies to keep them in a backward state, and subordinate Latin American politics to their designs and interests."

"In short, The National General Assembly of the Cuban People condemns the exploitation of man by man, and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by imperialists capital."

"Therefore, the National General Assembly of the Cuban People proclaims before America, and proclaims here before the world, the right of the peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruits of their labor; the right of the children to education: the right of the sick to medical care and hospitalization; the right of young people to work; the right of students to free vocational training and scientific education; the right of Negroes, and Indians to full human dignity; the right of women to civil, social and political equality; the right of the elderly to security in their old age; the right of intellectuals, artists and scientists so fight through their works for a better world; the right of States to nationalize imperialist monopolies, thus rescuing their national wealth andresources; the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of peoples to convert their military fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers -- because in this we too have to be arms-conscious, to arm our people in defense against imperialist attacks -- their peasants, their students, their intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, women, young people, old people, all the oppressed and exploited, so that they themselves can defend their rights and their destinies."

"Some people wanted to know what the policy of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba was. Very well, then, this is our policy. (ovation)"

"This is not some special law or guideline for artists and writers. It is a general principle for all citizens. It is a fundamental principle of the revolution. Counterrevolutionaries, that is, the enemies of the revolution, have no rights against the revolution, because the revolution has one right: the right to exist, the right to develop, and the right to be victorious."

"In other words: Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing. Against the revolution, nothing, because the revolution also has its rights, and the first right of the revolution is the right to exist, and no one can oppose the revolution's right to exist. Inasmuch as the revolution embodies the interests of the people, inasmuch as the revolution symbolizes the interests of the whole naion, no one can justly claim a right to oppose it."

"The revolution cannot seek to stifle art or culture since one of the goals and fundamental aims of the revolution is to develop art and culture, precisely so that art and culture truly become the patrimony of the people."

"Our conclusion is that the compañeros of the National Council of Culture are as concerned as all of you are about achieving the best conditions for the development of creative work by artists and intellectuals. It is the duty of the revolution and the revolutionary government to see that there is a highly qualified agency that can be relied upon to stimulate, encourage, develop and guide - yes, guide - that creative spirit."

"You have the opportunity to be more than spectators, you can be actors in the revolution, writing about it, expressing yourselves about it. And the generations to come, what will they ask of you? You might produce magnificent artistic works from a technical point of view, but if you were to tell someone from the future generation, 100 years from bow, that a writer, an intellectual, lived in the era of the revolution and did not write about the revolution, and was not a part of the revolution, it would be difficult for a person in the future to understand this. In the years to come there will be so many people who will want to paint about the revolution, to write about the revolution, to express themselves on the revolution, compiling data an information in order to know what it was like, what happened, how we used to live."

"The capitalist system of production, once it had given all it was capable of giving, became an abysmal obstacle to the progress of humanity."

"All reactionary classes in all historical epochs, when the antagonism between exploiters and exploited reaches its highest peak, presaging the arrival of a new social regime, have turned to the worst weapons of repression and calumny against their adversaries."

"Divisionism, a product of all kinds of prejudices, false ideas and lies; sectarianism, dogmatism, a lack of breadth in analyzing the role of each social layer, its parties, organization and leaders - these obstruct the necessary united actions of the democratic and progressive forces of our people."

"This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly bound in our suffering Latin American lands. A struggle of masses and of ideas. AN epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and and corned by imperialism; our peoples, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of tat flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers."

"The anxiety felt today is an unmistakable symptom of rebellion. The very depths of a continent are profoundly moved, a continent that has witnessed four centuries of slave, semi-slave, and feudal exploitation beginning with its aboriginal inhabitants and slaves brought from Africa, up to the nuclei of nationalities that emerged later: white, black, mulatto, mestizo and Indian, who today are made brothers and sisters by scorn, humiliation and the Yankee yoke, and are brothers and sisters in their hope for a better tomorrow."

"At Punta del Este a great ideological battle unfolded between the Cuban Revolution and Yankee imperialism. Who did they represent there, for whom did each speak? Cuba represented the people; the United States represented the monopolies. Cuba spoke for America's exploited masses; the United States for the exploiting, oligarchical, and imperialist interests; Cuba for sovereignty; the United States for intervention; Cuba for the nationalization of foreign enterprises; the United States for new investments of foreign capital. Cuba for culture; the United States for ignorance. Cuba for agrarian reform; the United States for great landed estates. Cuba for the industrialization of America; the United States for underdevelopment. Cuba for creative work; the United States for sabotage and counterrevolutionary terror practiced by its agentsthe destruction of sugarcane fields and factories, the bombing by their pirate planes of the labor of a peaceful people. Cuba for the murdered teachers; the United States for the assassins. Cuba for bread; the United States for hunger. Cuba for equality; the United States for privilege and discrimination. Cuba for the truth; the United States for lies. Cuba for liberation; the United States for oppression. Cuba for the bright future of humanity; the United States for the past without hope. Cuba for the heroes who fell at Giron to save the country from foreign domination; the United States for mercenaries and traitors who serve the foreigner against their country. Cuba for peace among peoples; the United States for aggression and war. Cuba for socialism; the United States for capitalism."

"And to the Black? What "alliance" can the system of lynching and brutal exclusion of the Black offer to the fifteen million Negroes and fourteen million mulattoes of Latin America, who know with horror and rage that their brothers in the North cannot ride in the same vehicles as their white compatriots, nor attend the same schools, nor even die in the same hospitals?"

"To the accusation that Cuba wants to export its revolution, we reply: Revolutions are not exported, they are made by the people."

"For this great mass of humanity has said, "Enough!" and has begun to march. And their march of giants will not be halted until they conquer true independence = for which they have died in vain more than one. Today, however, those who die will die like the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs - they will die for their own, true, never-to-be-surrendered independence."

"Great as the epic struggle for Latin American independence was, heroic as that struggle was, today's generation of Latin Americans is called on to engage in an epic that is even greater and more decisive for humanity. That struggle was for liberation from the Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded b the armies of Napoleon. Today the battle cry is for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist center, from the strongest force of world imperialism, and to render humanity a greater than that rendered by our predecessors."

"We are united in our determination to change the present system of international relations, based as it is on injustice, inequality and oppression. In international politics we act as an independent world force."

"We aspire to a new world order, one based on justice, fairness and peace; one that will replace the unjust and unequal system of prevailing today, in which, as the final summit declaration states: "Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few powers whose wasteful economies are maintained by the exploitation of workers as well as by the transfer and plunder of the natural and other resources of the peoples of Africa, Latin America, Asia and other regions of the world.""

"Human rights are very often spoken of, but we must also speak of humanity's rights. Why should some people go barefoot that others may travel in expensive cars? Why should some live only 35 years that others may live 70? Why should some be miserably poor that others may be exaggeratedly rich? I speak on behalf of the children of the world who do not even have a piece of bread. I speak on behalf of the sick who lack medicine. I speak to you on behalf of those who have been denied the right to life and human dignity."

"I would dare say that today this species is facing a very real and true danger of extinction, and no one can be sure, listen to this well, no one can be sure that it will survive this danger. Well, the fact that the species would not survive was discussed about 2,000 years ago. I remember that when I was a student I heard of the Apocalypse, a book of prophesy in the Bible. Apparently, 2000 years ago someone realized that this weak species could one day disappear."

"We are speaking of life, because whenever we speak of universities, we speak of life. What are you? If I were asked that question right now, I would have to say that you are life, you are symbols of life."

"Man is born egotistical, a result of the conditioning of nature. Nature fills us with instincts; it is education that fills us with virtues. Nature makes us do things instinctively; one of these is the instinct for survival which can lead to infamy, while on the other side, our conscience can lead us to great acts of heroism. It doesn't matter what each one of us is like, how different we are from each other, but when we unite we become one. It is amazing that in spite of the differences between human beings, they can become as one in a single instant or they can be millions, and they can be a million strong just through their ideas. Nobody followed the Revolution as a cult to anyone or because they felt personal sympathy with any one person. It is only by embracing certain values and ideas that an entire people can develop the same willingness to make sacrifices of any one of those who loyally and sincerely try to lead them toward their destiny."

"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. Whenever they said: “That’s the formula”, we thought they knew. Just as if someone is a physician. You are not going to debate anemia, or intestinal problems, or any other condition with a physician; nobody argues with the physician. You can think that he is a good doctor or a bad one, you can follow his advice or not, but you won't argue with him. Which of us would argue with a doctor, or a mathematician, or a historian, or an expert in literature or in any other subject? But we must 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."

"The students caught between the two superpowers and equally disillusioned by East and West, "inevitably pursue some third ideology, from Mao's China or Castro's Cuba." (Spender, op. cit., p. 92.) Their calls for Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh are like pseudo-religious incantations for saviors from another world; they would also call for Tito if only Yugoslavia were farther away and less approachable."

"At one point during the speech the crowd interrupted for about twenty minutes, crying, "Venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos." The entire crowd, 60 or 70,000 people, all chanting in unison. Fidel stepped away from the lectern, grinning, talking to his aides. He quieted the crowd with a wave of his arms and began again. At first softly, with the syllables drawn out and enunciated, then tightening his voice and going into an almost musical rearrangement of his speech. He condemned Eisenhower, Nixon, the South, the Platt Amendment, and Fulgencio Batista in one long, unbelievable sentence. The crowd interrupted again, "Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel." He leaned away from the lectern, grinning at the Chief of the Army. The speech lasted almost two and a half hours, being interrupted time and time again by the exultant crowd and once by five minutes of rain. When it began to rain, Almeida draped a rain jacket around Fidel's shoulders, and he relit his cigar. When the speech ended, the crowd went out of its head, roaring for almost forty-five minutes."

"One day the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away."

"He had it all in his hands, without having to turn it all over to any power, and then he goes and turns himself over to the worst of powers, the Russians."

"But a new barrier had been raised between the Superpowers. In January 1959 a revolution in Cuba led by the charismatic Fidel Castro had toppled the corrupt, US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After Eisenhower imposed a crippling embargo in retaliation for the nationalization of US landholdings, banks, and industries, Castro turned to the Kremlin. Khrushchev in February 1960 grasped the opportunity to challenge the Monroe doctrine and enter the Western Hemisphere, offering to purchase Cuban sugar, grant low-interest loans, and provide substantial arms. Eisenhower, furious at Castro’s defiance—made explicit in his fourand- a-half-hour denunciation of “Yankee imperialism” before the September 1960 meeting of the General Assembly—and the appearance of thousands of Soviet technicians and military and diplomatic personnel, broke off relations with Cuba in January 1961 and handed his successor a plan to invade the island and overthrow its leader."

"The most significant thing of... Fidel's words before the largest body of the UN was ...his attack against the brutal philosophy of war. The denunciation of many actions by the U.S. government against the Cuban Revolution and the use of force through the growing arms race were the central arguments of the speech that provoked repeated ovations and applauses. Fidel criticized how war was used to monopolize underdeveloped countries and steal their resources, and attacked U.S. policy toward Cuba and other nations in Latin America, Asia and Africa. "From the beginning of human history, wars have arisen, fundamentally, for one reason: some people's desire to deprive others of their riches. Let the philosophy of plunder disappear, and the philosophy of war will have disappeared,' he said. He also showed how the arms race has always been a big business for monopolies, which like the crows 'feed on the corpses brought by wars." The hostility of the U.S. authorities towards the Cuban delegation was sustained until the last moment, when they confiscated the aircraft in which Fidel had to return to Havana, and Nikita Khrushchev offered a plane. In January 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower's administration cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba and in April of the same year, shortly after assuming as President, John F. Kennedy ordered to invade the Bay of Pigs. The attempt failed and it turned out to be for Cuba the victory of Playa Giron."

"He is one of the most charismatic, impressive, knowledgeable, interested and interesting people I have ever met, by a long way. He has the mind of 10 men - he retains facts and figures and historical anecdotes like no one I know and he has been around so long and known all of these great figures that there is no shortage of things to talk about. I suppose he likes me because I am militant in the same movement as him. Neither of us drinks, and he long ago forbade me to smoke - he said he needs me more as a militant than as a customer of Havana tobacco. We sit and drink tea and talk at extraordinary length about everything."

"This man more than superseded my every expectation I had...if you live with a man under duress (this is before the victory…) he is I think…he will rank in history with some of the greats."

"He had trust in the people and their power, when united and organized, to change Cuba."

"Fidel is a man of tremendous personal magnetism, destined to assume the role of leader in any movement in which he takes part. He has all the characteristics typical of a great leader: audacity, force, the desire to keep his ear attuned to the will of the people. But he has other important qualities: the capacity to absorb knowledge and experience, a grasp of the overall picture in a given situation, boundless faith in the future."

"Something little known even within our own ranks was that American Communist leaders were not at all well disposed toward Castro until 1968. Before that he was regarded with much suspicion, as he was by the Soviet leaders, because he was pursuing a very independent path politically and theoretically. This was the period of the tricontinental conferences in Havana, where the major Latin American CPs were denounced for clinging to "parliamentary illusions." The Cubans were encouraging the creation of guerrilla foci in the mountains of a number of Latin American countries, policies which culminated in Che Guevara's ill-fated adventure in Bolivia in 1967. The Cuban Communist leaders were often mistaken in their political estimates, but the fact that they were acting on their own political estimates was something I had to admire-and something which naturally made them suspect in the eyes of both Soviet and American Party leaders. I had my own criticisms of some of Fidel's policies. In a KPFK broadcast early in 1968 I talked about the arrest and trial of Anibel Escalante, an old Cuban Communist leader from the days before the Fidelistas had taken over the Party. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, according to the Cuban Communist newspaper Granma, for such offenses as holding "meetings and study sessions where the Party line and the measures taken by the Revolution were criticized and revolutionary leaders maligned." I used Escalante's case (which, ironically, had an anti-Soviet twist-he was also accused of distributing materials "obtained at TASS and Novosti agencies") as an example of why socialist societies needed a strong system of checks and balances to protect against arbitrary abuses of power. "Once again," I said, "as in the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, inner-party disagreements are first defined as heresy and then as criminal actions against the state." Inner-party democracy, I argued, was not a luxury to be dispensed with lightly: "It is an absolute necessity if there is to be a growth of ideas and of humans commensurate with the objectives of a new society." After Che's death, Castro shed his illusions about the imminence of revolutionary victory in Latin America, just as the Bolsheviks had drawn some hard lessons from the failure of a European revolution in 1919. Cuba was going to be isolated for the foreseeable future, and I think that realization made Fidel more amenable to pressures from the Soviet Union to toe the ideological line. That became apparent after the Czechoslovakian events in 1968, when Fidel, despite some initial criticisms of Soviet actions, reversed himself and endorsed the Warsaw Pact invasion. That was enough to return the Cuban revolution to good graces in the eyes of Party leaders in the United States. These developments had an unfortunate effect on some of our younger comrades. If Fidel was adopting the same international line as Brezhnev and Gus Hall, then the line must be correct. I think this had a big effect on the thinking of young Communists like Mike Meyerson, Carl Bloice, and most important, on Angela Davis."

"The most honest, courageous politician I have ever met."

"It was no surprise that one of Nelson Mandela’s first trips outside South Africa – after he was freed – was to Havana. There, in July 1991, Mandela referred to Castro as “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people”. At the end of his Cuban trip, Mandela responded to American criticism about his loyalty to Castro: “We are now being advised about Cuba by people who have supported the apartheid regime these last 40 years. No honourable man or woman could ever accept advice from people who never cared for us at the most difficult times.”"

"Fidel Castro essentially forced these guys to leave Cuba. It wasn't really even a choice. It was either stay at home, be handed a broom and told 'have a nice life' or they could leave Cuba and continue playing baseball."

"In the eyes of Castro ... homosexuality was inherently counterrevolutionary, a bourgeois decadence."

"It wasn't long after Castro came to power that police began rounding up gay men. In 1965, the regime established prison work camps known as Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), into which it deposited homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other “undesirable” elements."

"I wanted to meet you for many reasons, above all, because you are a very brave man."

"Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution never bowed to the U.S. empire, not once in over half a century. The Cuban revolution produced the finest educational system in the Caribbean and much of the world. They sent their doctors all around the earth. The world mourns the passing of a giant. Fidel Castro Ruiz, comandante de la revolución, presente."

"He is the idea that never dies . The ones that are criticising him in a few years will not even be on Wikipedia anymore. Fidel and the cuban revolution are History."

"There have been naive predictions by some American experts who believed that Angola would become the Soviet Union's Vietnam or that Cuban expeditions in Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba. Kennan's advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the Kremlin officials laugh at your political wizards. As to Fidel Castro, he frankly scorns the United States, sending his troops to distant adventures from his country right next to yours."

"[Fidel Castro was] a brilliant person who predicted everything that has happened in the world since 2001... I made the film Comandante with the idea that it would be a historical profile of the man. The film can be seen on YouTube, but it could never be screened in theaters in the United States because they censored it and removed it a week before it was due for release...Then we made Looking for Fidel, which was possibly the most aggressive interview with Fidel. I asked him very difficult questions and that movie was screened on HBO. However, given the good job that Fidel did answering the questions they do not put it on enough on U.S. television. HBO instructed me to ask Fidel hard, tough questions, to put him on the spot. As you all know, that was not easily done and he was brilliant in his answers to all my questions. I think that's why HBO has not shown the movie again."

"Fidel made it clear in his opening remarks that the parents were important but not nearly as important as the baby. In some pictures Fidel had a big patch of wet saliva on his uniform because he had come over early to cuddle the baby. ... A very warm and charming man — I enjoyed him. ... It was very kind of him, he was very proud of what he was doing with their children in establishing them as strong citizens."

"Sexiest man I've ever met."

"Castro saw his Revolution as fitting the Marxist-Leninist perspective. The USSR had laid the foundations and built the walls but its edifice had collapsed, while Cuba, small, defenceless yet resolute Cuba, had survived. He also regarded Cuban achievement as a model in its own right for Latin America, for sub-Saharan Africa and for any other country that might care to follow it. But, much as he had done for the island, he had not succeeded in building a vibrant economy and a settled social consensus. He could not do without his brother’s large security agencies and their prisons for political dissenters. Communists could blame a lot on the long blockade of their country by the USA, and their case was more robust than when Soviet leaders had said the same about themselves in the 1920s. But, once the Cuban Revolution had been directed towards a one-party, one-ideology state, an arbitrary police dictatorship and a state-owned economy – not to mention the caudillo-style despotism of el Máximo Líder – they were bound to come up against difficulties already experienced in other communist states. Castro could lock up the opposition but could not halt the popular grumbling, the political evasions and the economic rundown. His rhetoric soared above the speeches of his communist contemporaries. But the inherent logic of communism was irrefutable. Castro in old age knew he had long since lost the fundamental struggle even though he gave no sign of understanding why. His health suddenly deteriorated in summer 2006. Without him, public life in Cuba was thrown into confusion. Speculation about Cuban politics after Castro began in earnest."

"If you look at the reporting from all of our major networks, it's very hostile when it comes to people who we deem to be enemies, whether it's Chávez or whether it's Castro or Putin. I've never seen an interview done from the American perspective where they allow the subject to express himself in what he was seeking to do, what his purpose was... Castro was very articulate, and so was Chavez, and so was Putin in his way, and I think I gave them a chance to talk and also in their native language. We never hear Putin speak in his native Russian, and we had a very good translator, interpreter working with him. I think it's crucial to understand Putin's point of view as it was Castro's, Chávez's. And also, Yasser Arafat, too.. It's not necessary to be their enemy. It's necessary to get them to express themselves. That's my point of view, and I guess you could say I'm a dramatist. And I think they're great stories. I'm very proud of those movies."

"After all, the Cuban people, together with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other leaders, fought for the same thing we are fighting for in Donbass - the right to decide their own fate. And the Cuban people won, even though all the combined forces of the West were against them. Just as they are against us now. That's why Fidel was important to us. That's why we thought and remembered him. [...] And also Fidel Castro was an example for us that he fought for an idea, not for power, oil or money. [...] The very ideas that the Cuban people stood up for are close to us and we understand them. These are the ideas that are now written on our banners: Freedom, Justice, Conscience, Equality. These are the ideas for which one must fight and for which one can die."

"The remarkable protection granted to the Army of the Andes by its Patron and General, Our Lady of Cuyo, cannot fail to be observed. I am obliged as a Christian to acknowledge the favour and to present to Our Lady, who is venerated in your Reverence's church, my staff of command which I hereby send: for it belongs to her and may it be a testimony of her protection to our Army."

"I have fulfilled the sacred promises which I made Peru; I have witnessed the assembly of its representatives; the enemy's force threatens the independence of no place that wishes to be free, and that possesses the means of being so. A numerous army, under the direction of warlike chiefs, is ready to march in a few days to put an end to the war. Nothing is left for me to do, but to offer you my sincerest thanks, and to promise, that if the liberties of the Peruvians shall ever be attacked, I shall claim the honor of accompanying them to defend their freedom like a citizen."

"I have witnessed the declaration of independence of the States of Chile and Peru. I hold in my hand the standard carried by Pizarro when he enslaved the Empire of the Incas, and I am no longer a public man. Ten years of revolution and war have been repaid to me with usury. My promises to the people for whom I have waged war have been fulfilled — to accomplish their independence and leave the choice of their rulers to their own will. The presence of an unfortunate soldier, however disinterested he may be, is not desirable in newly constituted states. On the other hand, I am tired of having it said that I wish to make myself King. In short, I shall always be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the liberty of the country, but as in the character of a simple private citizen and in no other. As for my conduct in public office, my compatriots, as is usually the case, will divide their opinions; their children will render true judgment. Peruvians, I leave you with your national representation established. If you place your entire confidence in it, count on succes; if not, anarchy will destroy you. May Heaven preside over your destinies and may you reach the summit of happiness and peace."

"El Perú es desde este momento libre e independiente por la voluntad general de los pueblos y por la justicia de su causa que Dios defiende. ¡Viva la patria! ¡Viva la libertad! ¡Viva la independencia!"

"Your coarse impudence in making me a proposition to employ my sword in a civil war is simply incomprehensible. You insolent scoundrel! Do you realize it has never been dipped in American blood?"

"La conciencia es el mejor y más imparcial juez que tiene el hombre de bien."

"One should be under no illusions as to the future of the Old World. The real contest in the present day is purely social. In a word the struggle lies between him who has nothing and him who has. Figure out the consequences of such a principle, infiltrated in the masses by the harangues of the clubs and the reading of millions of pamphlets."

"Mercedes … this is the exhaustion of death. Mariano — back to my room."

"Mi mejor amigo es el que enmienda mis errores o reprueba mis desaciertos."

"Los soldados de la patria no conocen el lujo, sino la gloria."

"Serás lo que debas ser o si no no serás nada."

"Solo quiero Leones en mi regimiento."

"De lo que mis Granaderos son capaces, solo lo sé yo, quien los iguale habrá, quien los exceda no."

"Hace más ruído un sólo hombre gritando que cien mil que están callados."

"Si hay victoria en vencer al enemigo, la hay más cuando el hombre se vence a si mismo."

"Una derrota peleada vale más que una victoria casual."

"José de San Martín … was an enigmatic figure — a revolutionary and a conservative, a professional soldier and an intellectual, a taciturn man who nevertheless was able to inspire the peoples of South America to follow his armies and accept his battle strategies. One of the great leaders in the wars for independence, he was a pivotal force in the liberation of Chile and Peru from Spanish rule."

"San Martín, the lord of war, by secret choice of God, was great when the Sun was shining on him, and even greater in the sunset. Great father of the Argentine People, Greatest hero of freedom! beneath his shadow the fatherland grows in virtue, in work, and in peace. San Martín! San Martín! may your name, the honour and glory of the people of the South, assure for ever the fates of the fatherland enlightened by your light."

"San Martin, behind the screen of the Andes, and only a hundred and fifty miles from Santiago, was forging a thunderbolt destined to shatter into fragments the edifice which Abascal had been so skilfully constructing through seven laborious years. The story of how the silent Argentine gathered and equipped the "Army of the Andes" has already been told … his marvellous march over the cloud-high passes, the descent into the plain of Aconcagua made so suddenly that the Spanish forces could not hurry up to bar his way, the prompt advance over the low transverse range which forms-the northern boundary of the plain where Santiago stands, and the overwhelming victory in the gorge of Chacabuco against the pick of the Spanish veterans, who confidently stood to the attack, never dreaming until San Martin was right upon them that his main body had had time to reach the spot. The Spanish authorities at Madrid and Lima had made the irretrievable mistake of underestimating the efficiency of his army. They thought the troops in Chile amply able to take care of any four thousand men the patriots could get together, but San Martin's army was differently provided and organised than the undisciplined masses which had been routed at Huaqui, Vilcapugio, and Rancagua. The Spanish generals were not so much surprised at his crossing the Andes as at finding the troops which reached the Chilean plains to be well furnished with artillery, cavalry, and ammunition, perfectly ready for an aggressive campaign, and a match man for man for any force that could be brought against them. The royalists lost twelve hundred of their best men at Chacabuco; only a thousand escaped from the field to fly in disorder toward Santiago."

"San Martin with his host of hardy gauchos and Chilean exiles assumed full control of the capital. He summoned an assembly of notables who promptly and unanimously elected him "Governor of Chile with plenary powers." But this was not what the far-sighted and patriotic soldier wanted. He realised that Chile could never give that unquestioning support so vital to the success of his cherished campaign against Peru so long as any stranger, even himself, governed by force. San Martin peremptorily declined the honour, but intimated that he would be glad to see his staunch friend, O'Higgins, selected dictator, and accordingly the enemy of the Carreras was placed at the head of the new Chilean government."

"Both ‪San Martín‬ and Bolívar have been accused by their enemies of plotting to make themselves kings, but most scholars agree today that there is no basis for either accusation. Bolívar, with his sense of drama, felt that to make himself monarch would mean a refutation of his entire past career. Such an attempt would render him ridiculous at the bar of history, and although he intended to keep political control in his hands, it was the control exercised by the power of a political chief, a kind of super-boss. ‪San Martín‬'s interests and talents lay in military campaigns. He had no aptitude for politics and it bewildered him. His personal ambition so often expressed in his letters, never varied. It was to hand the pacified country over to competent governing hands and then retire to Mendoza and end his days as a contented farmer. He was always the recluse, the ascetic introvert, and he was happiest in solitude. He evidently preferred some form of centralized republic, such as the Unitarios advocated, for Argentina and Chile, but for Peru he felt the feudal conditions there required a constitutional monarchy. … Few public figures have been pursued with such relentless hate, and for so little reason. He had a reserve and aloofness that was rarely penetrated and a scorn of stooping to say the popular thing that would curry favor."

"San Martin fostered a level of discipline and training unknown elsewhere in South America. … San Martin founded an officers' academy, whose syllabus included mathematics and other sciences which he considered essential, and those failing to meet his high standards were dismissed: "I only want lions in my regiment," he declared."

"A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism. The distinguishing characteristic of small republics is stability: the character of large republics is mutability."

"Among the popular and representative systems of government I do not approve of the federal system: it is too perfect; and it requires virtues and political talents much superior to our own."

"The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty."

"Colombians! My last wish is for the happiness of the patria. If my death contributes to the end of partisanship and the consolidation of the union, I shall be lowered in peace into my grave."

"The three greatest fools of History have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote . . . and me!"

"Do not compare your material forces with those of the enemy. Spirit cannot be compared with matter. You are human beings, they are beasts. You are free, they are slaves. Fight, and you shall win. For God grants victory to perseverance."

"Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"

"The most grievous error committed by Venezuela in making her start on the political stage was, as none can deny, her fatal adoption of the system of tolerance—a system long condemned as weak and inadequate by every man of common sense, yet tenaciously maintained with an unparalleled blindness to the very end."

"Venezuelans! An army of brothers, sent by the Supreme Congress of New Granada, has come to liberate you, and is now amongst you after having expelled the oppressors from the provinces of Mérida and Trujillo. We have been sent to destroy the Spaniards, to protect Americans and to re-establish the republican governments which made up the Venezuelan Confederation. The states which we have liberated are once again ruled by their old constitutions and leaders, and they fully enjoy their liberty and independence. Our sole mission is to break the chains of servitude which still oppress some of our peoples. We have no intention of passing laws or exercising power, even though the laws of war might authorize us to do so."

"Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves. - Speech spoken in Caracas on 1814, January 2nd."

"We have been ruled more by deceit than by force, and we have been degraded more by vice than by superstition. Slavery is the daughter of darkness: an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction. Ambition and intrigue abuses the credulity and experience of men lacking all political, economic, and civic knowledge; they adopt pure illusion as reality; they take license for liberty, treachery for patriotism, and vengeance for justice. If a people, perverted by their training, succeed in achieving their liberty, they will soon lose it, for it would be of no avail to endeavor to explain to them that happiness consists in the practice of virtue; that the rule of law is more powerful than the rule of tyrants, because, as the laws are more inflexible, every one should submit to their beneficent austerity; that proper morals, and not force, are the bases of law; and that to practice justice is to practice liberty."

"Let the entire system of government be strengthened, and let the balance of power be drawn up in such a manner that it will be permanent and incapable of decay because of its own tenuity. Precisely because no form of government is so weak as the democratic, its framework must be firmer, and its institutions must be studied to determine their degree of stability … unless this is done, we will have to reckon with an ungovernable, tumultuous, and anarchic society, not with a social order where happiness, peace, and justice prevail."

"Let us give to our republic a fourth power with authority over the youth, the hearts of men, public spirit, habits, and republican morality. Let us establish this Areopagus to watch over the education of the children, to supervise national education, to purify whatever may be corrupt in the republic, to denounce ingratitude, coldness in the country's service, egotism, sloth, idleness, and to pass judgment upon the first signs of corruption and pernicious example."

"The continuation of authority in the same person has frequently proved the undoing of democratic governments. Repeated elections are essential to the system of popular governments, because there is nothing so dangerous as to suffer Power to be vested for a long time in one citizen. The people become accustomed to obeying him, and he becomes accustomed to commanding, hence the origin of usurpation and tyranny."

"A perverted people, should it attaint its liberty, is bound to lose this very soon, because it would be useless to try to impress upon such people that happiness lies in the practice of righteousness; that the reign of law is more powerful than the reign of tyrants, who are more inflexible, and all ought to submit to the wholesome severity of the law; that good morals, and not force, are the pillars of the law and that the exercise of justice is the exercise of liberty."

"Liberty, says Rousseau, is a succulent food, but difficult to digest. Our feeble fellow citizens will have to strengthen their mind much before they will be ready to assimilate such wholesome nourishment."

"When I contemplate this immense reunited country, my soul mounts to that height demanded by the colossal perspective of a picture so wonderful. My imagination takes flight toward future ages and admiringly observes from them the prosperity, the splendor, and the life which will exist within this vast territory. I am carried away; and I seem to behold it in the heart of the universe, stretching along its extensive coasts between two oceans which nature has separated; but which our fatherland has united by long and wide canals. I see it serve as the bond, as the center, as the emporium of the human race. I see it sending to the ends of the earth the treasures of gold and silver which its mountains contain. I see it, through the healing virtue of its plants, dispensing health and life to afflicted men of the Old World. I see it disclosing its precious secrets to the sages who know that the store of knowledge is more valuable than the store of riches which nature has so prodigally bestowed upon us. I see it seated upon the throne of liberty, the scepter of justice in its hand, crowned by glory, showing to the Old World the majesty of the New World."

"{{Citation"

"Unlimited freedom, absolute democracy, are reefs upon which all the republics have come to grief."

"It must never be forgotten that the excellence of a government consists, not in its theoretic perfection, but in the degree to which it is adapted to the nature and character of the people for whom it is set up."

"It is not right to leave everything to the chances and hazards of an election. The masses are more prone to error than those who have been trained and tempered by education."

"The shouts of human-kind on the battlefield, or in the tumult of assemblies are protests to heaven against inconsistent legislators who have thought it possible to experiment with chimerical constitutions without suffering the consequences"

"Absolute democratic government is as much a tyranny as despotism."

"The most accomplished nation in the world, ancient or modern, was unable to resist the violence of the storms inherent in pure theories. If a European country like France, ever sovereign and independent, was not able to support the burden of unrestricted liberty, how can anyone expect Colombia to realize the delirious hallucinations of Robespierre and Marat. Could anyone even dream of such a piece of political moonshine? Legislators, see to it that the inexorable verdict of posterity does not liken you to the monsters of France!"

"We form a small human race, a world apart, surrounded by vast seas, new in the arts and sciences, though in some ways old in the customs of civil society. Our case is the most extraordinary and complex. We are neither Indians nor Europeans, but a species somewhere between the natives and the Spaniards. It is impossible to designate the human family to which we belong. Our people are rather a composite of Africa and America, which is an emancipation from Europe, since even the Spanish peninsula itself ceases to be European, due to its Moorish blood, its institutions, and its character."

"There will be a metamorphosis in the physical life of the inhabitants of America, in which a new caste will be produced, with a mixture of all races, creating the homogeneity of the people"

"To-day we are beginning to realise that the Colombian dictator was above all things a positivist, a realist. He wrote some trenchant things about codes "drawn up by gentle visionaries who, dreaming of republics away up in the clouds, have sought to attain to political perfection by taking it for granted that human nature is indefinitely perfectible". Despite his republican utterances, he was an uncompromising opponent of democracy, which he defined as "a state of things so incapable of resistance that the slightest difficulty is enough to throw it into confusion and bring it to naught"."

"And so Bolivar, being a realist in politics, was always moved to indignation when he saw the States of South America adopting cut and dried constitutions, based on abstract theory, and not created expressly to suit them. What he would have liked to see put into practice was what Latin-American writers have called the Bolivarian theory, that is to say the principle of "sociocratic heredity" on the Comtean or pre-Comtean pattern. He would have desired, taking his cue no doubt from the example of the Antonines at Rome, that, at the head of each of the Republics he had created, there should be a Life-President, who should appoint his own successor. In this manner he thought to combine absolutism and continuity, the apanage of hereditary monarchies, while discarding the hereditary principle."

"Both San Martín‬ and Bolívar have been accused by their enemies of plotting to make themselves kings, but most scholars agree today that there is no basis for either accusation. Bolívar, with his sense of drama, felt that to make himself monarch would mean a refutation of his entire past career. Such an attempt would render him ridiculous at the bar of history, and although he intended to keep political control in his hands, it was the control exercised by the power of a political chief, a kind of super-boss."

"Bolívar, the hero who brought glory to the nation. Bolívar, the military and political genius, the Liberator, the Father of His Country. Today, the main square of almost every city and town in Venezuela is named Plaza Bolívar. And each one has a statue of the Liberator. Some show him standing, some on horseback. In the city named for him, Bolívar City, which is the capital of Bolívar state, there is of course a Plaza Bolívar, with a Bolívar statue: on a high marble pedestal the Liberator appears in the guise of a Roman emperor or senator, his cape wrapped around him to look like a toga, a sword in his right hand, a law scroll in his left. All this fed what became a state religion: Bolívar as civic god. Venezuelan historians refer to it as Bolívar worship."

"In his eventful forty-seven years Bolívar said enough, wrote enough, gave enough speeches, corresponded widely enough, and changed his thinking often enough, that today you can find material in the vast Bolivarian catalog to support virtually any ideology, position, or cause. Bolívar ruled as a dictator—so Venezuelan dictators held him up as an example of how the country needed to be ruled by a firm hand. Bolívar said that elections were essential—so democrats embraced him. Bolívar warned that elections would lead to anarchy—so conservatives revered him. Outside Venezuela, both Mussolini and Franco saw Bolívar as a fascist precursor. Marx called him “the dastardly, most miserable, and meanest of blackguards.” Cuban communists honored him. Chávez hailed Bolívar as a socialist. Chávez once ordered Bolívar’s remains, entombed in the National Pantheon in Caracas, to be exhumed. He then commissioned a computer-generated portrait of the Liberator, based on digital projections from the great man’s skull. It looked a lot like the portraits of Bolívar painted by his contemporaries, but Chávez said that for the first time, modern Venezuelans were seeing Bolívar’s “true face.” This was a quaint notion. The true face of Bolívar is what you want it to be. He was a democrat. He was an autocrat. He was an egalitarian. He was an elitist. He was an abolitionist. He was a slaveholder. He was a cruel tyrant. He was a tolerant humanist. In fact, he was all those things at one time or another."

"In school, we may have learned that Simón Bolívar proposed expansion into northeastern Colombia in his quest for regional unification. What we may not have learned is that he blithely suggested that “the savages who live there would be civilized and our possessions increased,” using what we call today explicitly settler colonial terms, Indigenous peoples there perceived Colombian intruders as “Spanish” throughout the 19th century, and the return of Catholic missions at the end of the century followed the logic of state-sponsored religious “Hispanicization.”"

"¡Tierra y Libertad!"

"I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men."

"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir de rodillas."

"La tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos."

"Ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for tyranny."

"The historic January 1, 1994, indigenous uprising led by the Zapatistas in Chiapas further strengthened the new sense of self. By April 22, 1994, it seemed that the spirit of Mexico's revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata had marched straight from the mountains of Chiapas to Dolores Park, San Francisco."

"Before anything else I would like to say good day to all of the Venezuelan people, and this Boliviarian message is directed to the brave soldiers in the Parachutist Regimen of Aragua and the Armed Brigade of Valencia. Friends: For now, lamentably, the objectives we considered were not achieved in the capital. That is to say, we here in Caracas have not managed to take power. You did very well over there, but now is the time to reflect; new situations will come and the country must definitively get on the path to a better destiny. So hear my word; hear Commander Chávez, who sends you this message so that you may please reflect and put down your weapons, because now, really, the objectives that we have brought to the national level are impossible to achieve. Friends: Hear this message of solidarity. I thank you for your loyalty, your valor, your exuberance, and I, before this country and before you all, assume responsibility for this Boliviarian militant movement. Thank you."

"...the solutions for Latin America pass through the left, they have to transit the left, but they cannot remain within the framework of the left, they have to go beyond the left. Because we could hardly describe the Latin American armed forces as leftist. Trying to push them to the left (...) I think it would be a utopia. We could classify the Latin American armed forces, many Latin American soldiers, as nationalists, in this time of neoliberal denationalization. Well, you have to go through there too. The solution has to go through the left, through nationalism, through patriotism and achieve a great alliance of all these sectors [bold in the original] (...) The support of the military is vital to make a program of transformation in Latin America (...) Many left-wing intellectuals in Venezuela have not understood it (...) However, we have managed to shake the national soul, as Neruda said, we managed to put Bolívar on the table, with another sign , with a revolutionary sign."

"We do not believe in this paradigm of the Western capitalist, bourgeois democratic world. Nor do we believe in the fallen paradigm of the Soviet Union: communism, the classless society, without the State, of absolute equality. That doesn't exist. So, faced with that reality, we have proposed, after thinking and analyzing it, the need to rescue what is ours."

"…We present to our generation and our compatriots [ideas that are not finished] for the design of a long-range project, in which the ideological is fundamental, but it must be developed like all the other facets or lines of the Simón Bolívar project, which accepts experiences from any country, trend, any historical era, etc. The tree has to be a circumference, it has to accept ideas of all kinds, from the right, from the left, from the ideological ruins of these old capitalist or communist systems, and there are elements or ruins that are gigantic and we must take them."

"The model that we are designing, inventing, surely has elements of socialism, of capitalism, of the human being. From that point of view, for example, we have called the economic model humanistic... And it is made up of three broad factors: one, is the State, and the need for an effective State, which regulates, drives, promotes, etc. the economic process; the need for a market, but one that is healthy, where the laws of supply and demand are truly met relatively, not a monopolized or oligopolized market. And the third factor: the man, the human being. That is why we have talked about a humanist economics project. There are undoubtedly different elements there. It is not a pure, new, totally original model but rather it takes elements from the various models, from various currents, that have been prevailing in the world in the last 200 years. But that remains in our projects, in the transition project."

"The Bolivarian National Front would like to count on many Marxists...as long as we do not fall into political radicalism. I believe that the unity of those currents that are revolutionary Marxists, revolutionary Christian Marxists, revolutionary Bolivarians is necessary in order to seek an authentically revolutionary path but proper to our reality, proper to our idiosyncrasy, to our goals and possibilities."

"Marx collects historical currents of an era, reworks them and therein lies his genius, he contextualizes them, theorizes them and launches his thesis that gained strength and traveled half the world. I wouldn't say that Marxism is dead. A model that was tried to be put into practice collapsed and we see the result. Now, as a method of historical analysis of society, as a banner of struggles of social and political sectors of Latin America and the world, it has validity. There are things that I do not share about Marxism, especially in the praxis that was developed, but as an ideological flag I believe that it is valid and that it is still an idea-strength of revolutionary sectors, fighters."

"We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world"

"In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and in 1991 the Soviet Union fell, and then the victorious banner of neoliberalism was raised and the thesis of the end of history emerged, history is over, well, capitalism won, they said back in the early 90's, the end of history, the thesis of single thinking, there are no more alternatives. You see, a whole century has gone by and the Soviet Union is over and socialism is over, and communism is over and long live neo-liberal capitalism and all this fairy tale. Now, in Venezuela almost at the same time, a surprising parallelism, in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, but in 1989 also in Caracas a people rose up and there was a popular rebellion of very high intensity, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the poor people above all, took to the streets in rebellion. Unarmed but in rebellion What did the people of Caracas rebel against on February 27, 1989? Against the neoliberal package imposed by the International Monetary Fund."

"He was an asshole to believe them."

"I give you a replica of liberator Simon Bolivar's sword. For you who, like Bolivar, took up arms to liberate your people. For you who, like Bolivar, are and will always be a true freedom fighter. [Mugabe] continues, alongside his people, to confront the pretensions of new imperialists."

"We need to leave behind us the horrendous capitalist system that has been installed here, by those who attempted to dominate the people and to throw them into poverty. This why we are here, to put an end to this."

"For a long time my country has been divided, but by a minority that lives in extreme wealth with a majority that lives in poverty. This is a dangerous and explosive division. Above this reality that has existed for decades there is a process unfolding. We have improved literacy by 1.2 million people, which is part of an education system that helps eliminate social exclusion. There is a health program that targets 17 million Venezuelans. We have redistributed land, provided credit and created cooperatives. We are heading towards a society that includes people and that is against neoliberal exclusion and savage capitalism."

"This project forms part of a distinct vision more progressive than the capitalist model. Today (Friday) we take a step forward in the economic and social revolution."

"This Sunday, what’s at stake is not whether a man stays in power but a political model that is confronting capitalism and neoliberalism. This NO is traversing the whole continent from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego."

"When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force. The attacks on Venezuela are a sign of weakness, ideological weakness. Nowadays almost nobody defends neoliberalism. Up until three years ago, just Fidel [Castro] and I raised those criticisms at Presidential meetings. We felt lonely, as if we infiltrated those meetings."

"Just look at the internal repression inside the United States, the Patriot Act, which is a repressive law against U.S. citizens. They have put in jail a group of journalists for not revealing their sources. They won't allow them to take pictures of the bodies of the dead soldiers, many of them Latinos, coming from Iraq. Those are signs of Goliath's weaknesses."

"The south also exists... the future of the north depends on the south. If we don't make that better world possible, if we fail, and through the rifles of the U.S. Marines, and through Mr. Bush's murderous bombs, if there is no coincidence and organization necessary in the south to resist the offensive of neo-imperialism, and the Bush doctrine is imposed upon the world, the world will be destroyed."

"Everyday I become more convinced, there is no doubt in my mind, as many intellectuals have said, that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can not be transcended through capitalism itself; it must be done through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed by Washington."

"We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition."

"Privatization is a neoliberal and imperialist plan. Health can’t be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity and other public services. They can’t be surrendered to private capital that denies the people from their rights."

"If I am assassinated, there is only one person responsible: the president of the United States. If, by the hand of the devil, these perverse plans succeed...forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr. Bush. I will not hide, I will walk in the streets with all of you...but I know I am condemned to death."

"The world should forget about cheap oil. [The price] will keep going up and some day arrive at US$100 per barrel."

"I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism."

"The grand destroyer of the world, and the greatest threat … is represented by U.S. imperialism."

"But Cuba doesn’t have a dictatorship — it’s a revolutionary democracy."

"[Pat Robertson] is expressing the wishes of the US elite. If anything happens to me then the man responsible will be George W. Bush. He will be the assassin. This is pure terrorism."

"That man, the king of vacations... the king of vacations in his ranch said nothing but: "You have to flee." and didn't say how... that cowboy, the cowboy mentality."

"Knowing English is important, but for us Venezuelans I think it would also be important to know Portuguese. For that reason, we should evaluate the possibility of it being taught in our schools."

"The descendants of those who crucified Christ... have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands."

"Let the dogs of the empire bark, that's their job; ours is to battle to achieve the true liberation of our people."

"What they have implanted here, which is really a 'gringo' custom, is terrorism. They disguise children as witches and wizards, that is contrary to our culture."

"I hereby accuse the North American empire of being the biggest menace to our planet."

"It makes one sad to see the sell-out of President Fox, really it makes one sad. How sad that the president of a people like the Mexicans lets himself become the puppy dog of the empire."

"The world has an offer for everybody but it turned out that a few minorities--the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar from here and also those who in a certain way crucified him in Santa Marta, there in Colombia--they took possession of the riches of the world, a minority took possession of the planet’s gold, the silver, the minerals, the water, the good lands, the oil, and they have concentrated all the riches in the hands of a few; less than 10 percent of the world population owns more than half of the riches of the world."

"They [US officials] say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?"

"[If] we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes."

"But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war... But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?"

"I think there are reasons to be optimistic...because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning... the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?"

"What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision."

"We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world."

"Venezuela joins that struggle, and that's why we are threatened. The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere."

"...reminded us just a moment ago of the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier. And I would just add one thing: Those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event where an American citizen also died were American themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists."

"In just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner. And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government. And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to."

"Enough already with the imperialist aggression! Down with the U.S. empire! It must be said, in the entire world: Down with the empire!"

"Don’t be shameless, Mr Blair. Don’t be immoral, Mr. Blair. You are one of those who have no morals. You are not one who has the right to criticize anyone about the rules of the international community. You are an imperialist pawn who attempts to curry favor with Danger Bush-Hitler, the number one mass murderer and assassin there is on the planet. Go straight to hell, Mr. Blair."

"You messed up with me, birdie. No? You don't know much about history. You don't know much about anything, you know? A great ignorance is what you've got. You are ignorant, Mr. Danger. You are an ignorant. You are a donkey, Mr. Danger … By that I mean, you know, to say it with all its letters, to Mr. George W. Bush. You are a donkey, Mr. Bush. I'm going to tell you something, Mr. Danger. You are a coward, you know? You are a coward. Why don't you go to Iraq and command your army? It's so easy to command an army from afar. If you ever come up with the crazy idea of invading Venezuela, I'll be waiting for you in this savanna, Mr. Danger. Come on here, Mr. Danger. Come on here. Come on here, Mr. Danger. Coward, assassin, genocidal... Genocidal, you are a genocidal. You are an alcoholic, a drunk.. A drunk, Mr. Danger. You are immoral, Mr. Danger... You are the worst ever, Mr. Danger … The worst of this planet, the very worst is called George W. Bush. God save the world from this menace. Because he is an assassin. A sick man, a psychologically ill man, I know it. Personally, he is a coward. But he has a lot of power. He has a lot of power. And look at what's happening in Iraq. Yesterday the world marched against the war... 70%, according to the surveys I've seen, of your own people, Mr. Danger, are against you, against the war. You are a liar, Mr. Danger. You are killing children, Mr. Danger, who aren't responsible for your illnesses, of your complexes. Your soldiers in Iraq are bombing cities. Just yesterday we were watching images of five children who were murdered by you soldiers. They're not the murderers. You are the murderer, coward!"

"[I'm being] compared to the biggest genocide person alive, in the history of humanity, the president of the United States... killer, genocidal, immoral... who should be taken to prison by an international criminal court. I don't know to what you are referring when you compare me to President Bush. Have I invaded any country? Have Venezuelans invaded anything? Have we bombarded a city? Have we had a coup d'etat? Have we used the CIA to kill a president? Have we protected terrorists in Venezuela? That's Bush!"

"We see here a model social state like the one we are beginning to create."

"I have found yet another friend here. And with such a friend we will together form a team, like a soccer team. This will be a fighting team."

"[I admire] your wisdom and strength. [...] We are with you and with Iran forever. As long as we remain united we will be able to defeat [U.S.] imperialism, but if we are divided they will push us aside."

"Let's save the human race, let's finish off the U.S. empire"

"Israel has gone mad. It's attacking, doing the same thing to the Palestinian and Lebanese people that they have criticised - and with reason - the Holocaust. But this is a new Holocaust."

"The Devil is right at home. The Devil, the Devil himself, is right in the house. And the Devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the Devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulphur still today. Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the Devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world."

"Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation, of the kind of misery and inequality that destroys social values. If you really look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ - who I think was the first socialist - only socialism can really create a genuine society."

"Dr Insulza is quite an idiot, a true idiot. The insipid Dr Insulza should resign from the secretariat of the OAS for daring to play that role."

"Go to hell, gringos! Go home!...What does the empire want? Condoleezza said it. How are you? You’ve forgotten me, missy...Condoleezza said it clearly, it’s about creating a new geopolitical map in the Middle East...They took out Saddam Hussein and they hung him, for better or worse. It’s not up to me to judge any government, but that gentleman was the president of that country."

"The two of them [Bush & Negroponte] are criminals. They should be tried and thrown in prison for the rest of their days. If he had any dignity, the president of the United States would quit. The U.S. president doesn't have the political or moral capacity to govern."

"No se trata de estatizar toda la economía (...) No, nuestro socialismo acepta la propiedad privada. Solo que esa propiedad privada debe estar en el marco de una constitución y leyes y de un interés social."

"Critico, aunque respeto, a mis amigos que sostienen la idea marxista leninista de que no debe haber propiedad privada, porque no la comparto."

"La propiedad privada es aquella que pertenece a personas naturales o jurídicas y que se reconoce sobre bienes de uso y consumo y medios de producción legítimamente adquiridos."

"Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

"If the United States was mad enough to attack Iran or aggress Venezuela again the price of a barrel of oil could reach $150 or even $200."

"A Third World War? With an atom bomb? He said it, with an atom bomb. There would be no more world. The world would end. Humanity would no longer exist. I think he has to be put in an asylum. He has to be put in an mental asylum."

"If the "yes" vote wins on Sunday and the Venezuelan oligarchy, playing the [U.S.] empire's game, comes with their little stories of fraud, oil shipments to the United States will be halted [on Monday]."

"We're not really confronting those peons of imperialism. Our true enemy is called the North American empire and we're going to give another knockout to Bush."

"If any international channel comes here to take part in an operation from the imperialist against Venezuela, your reporters will be thrown out of the country, they will not be able to work here. People at CNN, listen carefully: This is just a warning."

"I nationalize strategic companies and get criticized, but when Bush does it, it's OK. … Bush is turning socialist. How are you, comrade Bush?"

"Every factory must be a school to educate, like Che Guevara said, to produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society."

"It doesn't smell of sulphur any more. No, it smells of something else. It smells of hope, and you have to have hope in your heart."

"I'm not loved by Hillary Clinton... and I don't love her either."

"If there was any armed aggression against Venezuela from Colombian territory or from anywhere else, promoted by the Yankee empire, we would suspend oil shipments to the United States even if we have to eat stones here. We would not send a drop more to U.S. refineries!"

"Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, 'You've got to find Chavez to kill him'."

"You should resign. It's the least you can do: Resign, along with those other spies and delinquents working in the State Department."

"Liberator of Libya, He will be remembered as a great fighter, a revolutionary and martyr. They assassinated him. It is another outrage."

"Mr. Obama decided to attack us, Now you want to win votes by attacking Venezuela. Don’t be irresponsible. You are a clown, a clown. Leave us in peace … Go after your votes by fulfilling that which you promised your people."

"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet"

"I extend from here my recognition of all who voted against us, recognition of their democratic weight."

"El socialismo bolivariano nosotros tenemos que construirlo en el marco de la Constitución Bolivariana. [...] Nosotros no tenemos prevista la eliminación de la propiedad privada, ni la grande ni la pequeña. [...] El socialismo tenemos que construirlo, los sectores de clase media, profesionales, técnicos, nos hacen falta para construir un socialismo productivo. Nosotros necesitamos a la clase media, a los profesionales, a los técnicos, a los empresarios, a los agricultores, a la juventud, que se incorpore a un debate amplio. El socialismo del siglo XXI es democracia. Nosotros no estamos hablando de la dictadura del proletariado. No."

"We have arrived again to Venezuela, Thank God. Thanks to my beloved country."

"I don't want to die. Please don't let me die."

"Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all, I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today - ethics, and moral...[Capitalism is] an infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell."

"Democracy is not just turning up to vote every five or four years, it’s much more than that, it’s a way of life, it’s giving power to the people."

"Within the framework of capitalism it is impossible to solve the challenges of fighting against poverty, misery, exploitation and inequality."

"I call on private businessmen to work together with us to build the new economy, transforming the capitalist economic model into a social, humanist and equality economy."

"Mr. Chávez is my brother, he is a friend of the Iranian nation and the people seeking freedom around the world. He works perpetually against the dominant system. He is a worker of God and servant of the people."

"The stem cell debate was an introduction to a phenomenon I witnessed throughout my presidency: highly personal criticism. Partisan opponents and commentators questioned my legitimacy, my intelligence, and my sincerity. They mocked my appearance, my accent, and my religious beliefs. I was labeled a Nazi, a war criminal, and Satan himself. That last one came from a foreign leader, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez."

"Last Friday, Chavez held a press conference with foreign correspondents in which he showed pictures of the alleged leaders of the paramilitary group. “The paramilitary incursion is a historic incident with worldwide resonance which only the local private media have tried to minimize,” said the President. The President spoke out against Capitalism, and criticized the fact that after the Cold War many on the left stopped talking about Capitalism, replacing it with the word Neoliberalism. Both terms refer to “the same assassin, perverse and stinky empire”. During his presidency, Chavez himself has spoken out against Neoliberalism, while claiming to lead a revolution to build “Capitalism with a human face”. He has only recently started to criticize Capitalism directly."

"It is difficult to fathom the level of economic and social degradation occurring today in Venezuela under chavismo, the movement founded by the late leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who died of cancer three years ago. What began as a war against the “squalid” oligarchy in order to build what he called “21st-century socialism” — cheered on as he was by many leftists from abroad — has collapsed into an unprecedented heap of misery and conflict. Unsurprisingly, Chávez was incapable of reinventing socialism as anything other than a prescription for abject failure. Ultimately, all he wound up bequeathing to his people is this century’s longest national train wreck."

"Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world"

"He was a great politician for his country and for the world as a whole."

"1.- Luis Miquilena, a political mentor who helped steer Chavez to the presidency in 1998, has done an about-face since leaving the government in 2002. This week, he described it as a "hypocritical authoritarianism that tries to sell the world certain democratic appearances". 2.- He said of him:... he is made for the confrontation... his style of governing was an almost of teenager... he is not a man furnished well mentally... he has not definite ideology... he is incendiary... he is erratic... he is unpunctual... he is disordered... is lover of luxury... he is limited... he is emotive... he was operating with total arbitrariness, as if he was handling a personal ranch... "annotate me there, to give 4 billions to this bank"… he has not rules of control... he does not know of finance... "Fidel had put in his head from a beginning, the idea that he could to be assassinated"."

"The lies peddled about Venezuela’s past make US US aggression against it possible in the present. It is worth summing up some of these key lies: Venezuela was “once prosperous” and ruined by socialism. In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth, which had generated huge export revenues since the 1920s. Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, Venezuela’s democracy was a gravely flawed system in which politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo. Chavismo ruined Venezuela’s democracy. Chávez indeed attempted to carry out a coup in 1992, but he came to power through an election in 1998, and afterward made changes through extensive democratic processes."

"In his State of the Union address on February 6, 2019, Donald Trump said: We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom—and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. Trump’s ridiculous comment was not considered controversial, because the Western media, including the anti-Trump outlets like the New York Times, have spent many years conveying a lie: that Venezuela had been very prosperous and democratic until Hugo Chávez, and then his successor Nicolás Maduro, came along and ruined everything. If readers believe that, then they may indeed wonder, “Why shouldn’t the US government help Venezuelans return to that prosperous state?”"

"A tropical Mussolini."

"But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps. In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt governing elite, promising to build a more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.” When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new constituent assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed the chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his allies won those, too. Chávez’s populism triggered intense opposition, and in April 2002, he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed, allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic legitimacy. It wasn’t until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps toward authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later, when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In 2004, the government blacklisted those who had signed the recall petition and packed the supreme court, but Chávez’s landslide reelection in 2006 allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The chavista regime grew more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges, and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in power indefinitely. When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in 2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the media and deployed the vast machinery of the government in its favor. After Chávez’s death a year later, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, won another questionable reelection, and in 2014, his government imprisoned a major opposition leader. Still, the opposition’s landslide victory in the 2015 legislative elections seemed to belie critics’ claims that Venezuela was no longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy."

"you asked about Hugo Chávez a while ago. I mean, there’s a whole lot going on in Latin America, and there’s an overall push to the left overall — not every country, and not everything, but I find it very encouraging, you know?"

"The history of Venezuela and oil flows through Mene Grande like the crude oil through the silver pipe. The first oil workers’ strike occurred here (and was put down here) in 1925. In 1976, during the country’s first petrodelirium, when oil prices quadrupled, President Carlos Andrés Pérez came to Mene Grande to declare the nationalization of the oil industry. Three decades later, in the midst of an even bigger boom, President Hugo Chávez came here to announce a second nationalization, changing the terms by which foreign oil companies operated in Venezuela and giving the government a controlling stake in everything that happened in the oil fields. There were information boards at the edge of the parking lot commemorating the dual nationalizations; in their telling, Chávez got all the glory. Chávez had died a year earlier, in 2013, after fourteen years as president. A former soldier, he called himself a socialist and a revolutionary and he delighted in thumbing his nose at the United States, the imperial power to the north, to which he sold most of his country’s oil. His successor was Nicolás Maduro, a less talented politician who styled himself as the ideological heir of the man he called the eternal comandante. In Maduro’s short time as president, there had been waves of protest, the economy had begun to contract, inflation was soaring, and shortages of food and other goods were becoming acute."

"At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Venezuela, the authoritarian populist Hugo Chávez and his disciple Nicolás Maduro initiated a similar policy of massive spending, corruption and nationalization. The difference was that Chávez had control over the world’s largest oil reserves at a time when oil prices were soaring, so he received almost $1,000 billion that could keep that policy afloat for a little longer. That was enough for Chávez to be the left’s favourite demagogue for a while. Bernie Sanders said that the American dream was more alive in Venezuela than in the US. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn praised Chávez for showing that ‘the poor matter and wealth can be shared’. Oxfam called Venezuela ‘Latin America’s inequality success story’. In an open letter to ‘Dear President Chávez’, luminaries of the Left such as Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and others state that they ‘see Venezuela not only as a model democracy but also as a model of how a country’s oil wealth can be used to benefit all of its people.’ On paper, that $1,000 billion was enough to make every extremely poor individual in Venezuela a millionaire. But still, it is not much money if you do not invest it productively and if you destroy the ability to create new wealth with nationalization and price controls. When the price of oil began to fall only slightly, it became obvious that the business sector was in a shambles and the oil industry had been demolished by corrupt mismanagement and underinvestment. The result was one of the worst economic disasters to have occurred anywhere in the world in peacetime. Between 2010 and 2020, Venezuela’s average income plummeted by an incomprehensible 75 per cent. South America’s richest country suddenly turned into South America’s poorest country with breadlines and a mass exodus from an increasingly tyrannical state. Around seven million Venezuelans have fled the crumbling country, an unbelievable 25 per cent of the country’s population. Since then, Venezuela has been less frequently mentioned as the hope of the international working class."

"This is the story of Venezuela in black and white, the story not told in The New York Times or the rest of our establishment media. This year’s so-called popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor... Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor.... The putsch in Venezuela is run by the wealthy, internationally connected minority operating by a regime-change plan designed by neocon retread John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser — a plan to control Venezuela and its oil, as Bolton openly proclaims."

"The events... were a direct result of the 1998 elections, when the poor and disenfranchised of Venezuela elected Hugo Chavez by a landslide as their president. He immediately instituted drastic measures, taking control of the courts and other institutions and dissolving the Venezuelan Congress. He denounced the United States for its "shameless imperialism," spoke out forcefully against globalization, and introduced a hydrocarbons law that was reminiscent, even in name, to the one Jaime Roldos had brought to Ecuador shortly before his airplane went down. The law doubled the royalties charged to foreign oil companies. Then Chavez defied the traditional independence of the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, by replacing its top executives with people loyal to him... By taking over the industry, Chavez had thrust himself onto the world stage as a major player."

"By December 2002, the situation in both Venezuela and in Iraq reached crisis points... Then came the news that they had succeeded; Chavez had been ousted.... If Mr. Reich, and the Bush administration were celebrating the coup against Chavez, the party was suddenly cut short. In an amazing turnabout. Chavez regained the upper hand and was back in power less than seventy-two hours later. Unlike Mossadegh in Iran, Chavez had managed to keep the military on his side, despite all attempts to turn its highest-ranking officers against him. In addition, he had the powerful state oil company on his side. Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) defied the thousands of striking workers and made a comeback..."

"Chavez tightened his government's grip on oil company employees, purged the military of the few disloyal officers who had been persuaded to betray him, and forced many of his key opponents out of the country. He demanded twenty-year prison terms for two prominent opposition leaders, Washington-connected operatives who had joined the jackals to direct the nationwide strike. In the final analysis, the entire sequence of events was a calamity for the Bush administration. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Bush administration officials acknowledged Tuesday that they had discussed the removal of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for months with military and civilian leaders from Venezuela... The administration's handling of the abortive coup has come under increasing scrutiny. It was obvious that not only had the EHMs failed, but so had the jackals. Venezuela in 2003 turned out to be very different from Iran in 1953. I wondered if this was a harbinger or simply an anomaly and what Washington would do next."

"At least for the time being, I believe a serious crisis was averted in Venezuela — and Chavez was saved — by Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration could not take on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Venezuela all at once. At the moment, it had neither the military muscle nor the political support to do so. I knew, however, that such circumstances could change quickly, and that President Chavez was likely to face fierce opposition in the near future."

"I think that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela might not have survived his presidency... had we not been in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we were so diverted. We — the economic hit men tried to overthrow him, you know, a few years ago and were successful for about 48 hours. But then he had control over the oil company, and he was very, very popular. So he got back into office. At that point, had we not been involved in Iraq, I strongly suspect that we would have done something much more aggressive, as we’ve done so many other times. When the economic hit men fail, we take more drastic steps. Because we were so involved in Iraq, we didn’t do that. This gave great support to all of the other movements in Latin America. And these other candidates, people like Evo Morales, really looked to Hugo Chavez as an example of someone who’s had the staying power. He’s been able to stay there, despite the fact that the (G.W. Bush) administration has spoken so strongly against him and is so angry."

"President Hugo Chávez was a fundamental pillar for sports in my country. He promoted many methods for sport to reach the lowest levels and for children to see that sport was important for health, for human values."

"The good news is that we're not doing too badly. There have been major victories. Here in Latin America you have had so many-in Bolivia, you have Cochabamba. In Peru, there was the uprising Arequipa, In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is holding on, despite the U.S. government's best efforts."

"Hugo Chavez was a leader that understood the needs of the poor. He was committed to empowering the powerless. R.I.P. Mr. President."

"I liked [Chavez]. He's very warm and very gracious. And he's a bear. I've always said that if he looked like Woody Allen he'd play a lot better with the world press. I think men are threatened by his physicality."

"Even Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's socialist president, found this a stunning move for a nominally market economy to take. "Bush is to the left of me now," he said. "Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks.""

"Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism... delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving."

"Chavez's first decade... saw Venezuelan GDP more than double... both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved... under Chavez's brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted... its "extreme poverty" rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent... left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America... college enrollment... more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time... the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled."

"When... a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela's did... especially when said country has valuable oil resources... [Venezuela] came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism... a high crime prompting a special punishment."

"Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela's policies that so rapidly reduced poverty?...Are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez's grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution? Such questions need to be asked. The problem is that...at the moment Chavez's name is invoked, the conversation is inevitably terminated, ending any possibility of discourse. That is by design - it is what the longtime caricaturing and marginalizing of Chavez was always supposed to do. But maybe now [that Hugo Chavez has passed away]...a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin."

"Men will not forget that Pancho Villa was loyal to the cause of the people."

"The country must be governed by someone who really loves his people and his land, who shares wealth and progress. I have all that, only that I am ignorant. ""

"I, Pancho Villa, was a loyal man that destiny brought the world to fight for the good of the poor and that I will never betray nor forget my duty.""

"Companions of arms and lords. Do not believe that the one who is going to speak to them is a philosopher, I am a man of people, but you will understand that these men when they speak, speak with the heart."

"I am not an educated man. I never had an opportunity to learn anything except how to fight.."

"(Q: Did people in your family tell stories about their own lives?) Some of the stories had to do with animals. My father told about black ghost dogs, espantos, and Mamágrande Ramona told rabid coyote stories and stories of Pancho Villa coming across the border and raiding the pueblos."

"The brutality and uncouthness of many of the revolutionary leaders has not prevented them from becoming popular myths. Villa still gallops through the north, in songs and ballads; Zapata dies at every popular fair. … It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death."

"Tengo el deber de informarle que Pancho Villa se encuentra en todas partes y en ninguna a la vez."

"Hated by thousands and loved by millions."

"Also in the north were tough, mounted guerrilla fighters—bandits who took up the cause of the revolution, in some cases as paid mercenaries. The most brilliant of these was Pancho Villa. Villa was the only revolutionary leader to get good American press. Even Madero was criticized bitterly for suggesting a minuscule tax on the Mexican oil that was controlled and imported to the United States by American oil companies. But Pancho Villa had little of the "anti-Americanism" of which Washington suspected all the others. He did personally rape hundreds of women and murder according to whim, and he was a racist who killed Chinese people whenever he found them working in mining camps. His lieutenants were even more murderous and sadistic, devising hideous tortures. But General Villa was not anti-American. Ten thousand men rode with Villa, mostly in the northern state of Chihuahua. They robbed and raided, did as they wanted, and once won a spectacular military victory for the revolution at Zacatecas."

"In 1913 John Reed, a young Harvard graduate already making a name for himself as a radical muck-raking journalist, spent four months with the rebel Mexican leader Pancho Villa. Reed happened to show him a pamphlet with the latest rules of war which had been agreed at the Hague Conference of 1907. Villa, reported Reed, spent hours going over it: ‘It interested and amused him hugely.’ Villa wanted to know more about the conference and whether there had been a Mexican representative there. Above all he found the whole endeavour absurd: ‘“It seems to me a funny thing to make rules about war. It is not a game. What is the difference between civilised war and any other kind of war?”’ Villa had put his finger on one of the several paradoxes that confront us when we think about war. How can we talk at all about controlling and managing something where violence is the tool and the domination, if not the total destruction of the enemy, the goal?"

"Dubbed El Centauro del Norte (‘The Centaur of the North’), Pancho Villa has acquired a quasi-romantic reputation as a Mexican folkhero that masks his true legacy. Villa's intelligence, charisma and military effectiveness made him a major player in the revolutionary politics of his day, but his violence, ambition and cold-blooded brutality mark him out as the archetype of the South American caudillo."

"Many Mexicans today remember Villa with pride for the part he played in the revolution, and for standing up to the American superpower. Yet, this is to ignore the reality that Villa was a homicidal warlord for whom the revolution served as a convenient excuse to justify his crimes. At his death, Villa was reputed to have said, ‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something’"

"Antonio dreams of owning the land he works on, he dreams that his sweat is paid for with justice and truth, he dreams that there is a school to cure ignorance and medicine to scare away death, he dreams of having electricity in his home and that his table is full, he dreams that his country is free and that this is the result of its people governing themselves, and he dreams that he is at peace with himself and with the world. He dreams that he must fight to obtain this dream, he dreams that there must be death in order to gain life. Antonio dreams and then he awakens…. Now he knows what to do and he sees his wife crouching by the fire, hears his son crying. He looks at the sun rising in the East, and, smiling, grabs his machete. The wind picks up, he rises and walks to meet others. Something has told him that his dream is that of many and he goes to find them."

"The storm is here. From the clash of these two winds the storm will be born, its time has arrived. Now the wind from above rules, but the wind from below is coming…. The prophecy is here. When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the country in peace, the world will no longer be the world but something better."

"As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains."

"Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying "Enough!" He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable — this is Marcos."

"Love is like a teacup that every day falls to the ground and breaks to pieces. In the morning the pieces are gathered and with a little moisture and a little warmth, the pieces are glued together, and again there is a little teacup. He who is in love spends life fearing that the terrible day will come when the teacup is so broken that it can no longer mended."

"La libertad es como la mañana. Hay quienes esperan dormidos a que llegue, pero hay quienes desvelan y caminan la noche para alcanzarla."

"The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world. Take care and do not forget ideas are also weapons."

"The prince has consequently issued orders: "Attack them! I shall supply the army and media. You come up with the ideas." So, right-wing intellectuals spend their time insulting their left-wing counterparts, and because of the Zapatista movement's international impact, they are now busy rewriting our story to suit the demands of the prince."

"We treat the children like children. It is the powerful with their war that treats them like they are adults. We talk to them. We teach them that the word, together with love and dignity, is what makes us human beings. We don't teach them how to fight. Well, yes, but only how to fight with their words. They learn. They know that the reason we are in all this is so that they won't have to do the same. And they talk and they also listen. Contrary to what you say, we teach the children that words don't kill but that yes it is possible to kill words and, along with them, the act of being human."

"We teach them that there are so many words like colors and that there are so many thoughts because within them is the world where words are born. That there are different thoughts and we should respect them. That there are those who pretend their way of thinking should be the only way and they persecute, jail, and kill (always hidden behind the reasons of the State, illegitimate laws, or "just causes") thoughts that are different then their own. And we teach them to speak the truth, that is to say, to speak with their hearts. Because the lie is another form of killing words."

"We teach them to speak and also to listen. Because when people only talk and don't listen, they end up thinking that what they say is the only thing that is worth anything. ... Speaking and listening to words is how we know who we are, where we come from, and where our steps are going. Also it's how we know about others, their steps, and their world. Speaking and listening to words is like listening to life."

"In previous armies, soldiers used their time to clean their weapons and stock up on ammunition. Our weapons are words, and we may need our arsenal at any moment."

"Little by little the Chiapnaneco world is beginning to divide. The wind from above assumes its old forms of arrogance and haughtiness. The police and Federal Army close ranks around money and corruption. The wind from below once against travels the ravines and valleys; it is beginning to blow strongly. There will be a storm..."

"The moon is my button of gilded silver, dented and poorly sewn onto the black shirt of the mountain. In the grand house of the calendar, Mat appears as a conjunction of the double and humid page of August and September. Perhaps that is why the sun travels the day spreading sweat, and suffocating heat, while during the night the moon fills its pages with the sleeping wind."

"Mexican Brothers and Sisters, We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery; then during the War of Independence against Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil, and later the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz denied us the just application of the Reform laws and the people rebelled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like us."

"We have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don't care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is peace nor justice for ourselves and our children. But today, we say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH."

"We also ask that international organizations and the International Red Cross watch over and regulate our battles, so that our efforts are carried out while still protecting our civilian population. We declare now and always that we are subject to the Geneva Accord, forming the EZLN as our fighting arm of our liberation struggle. We have the Mexican people on our side, we have the beloved tri-colored flag highly respected by our insurgent fighters. We use black and red in our uniform as our symbol of our working people on strike. Our flag carries the following letters, "EZLN," Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and we always carry our flag into combat."

"To the People of Mexico: We, the men and women, full and free, are conscious that the war that we have declared is our last resort, but also a just one. The dictators have been applying an undeclared genocidal war against our people for many years. Therefore we ask for your participation, your decision to support this plan that struggles for work, land, housing, food, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace. We declare that we will not stop fighting until the basic demands of our people have been met by forming a government of our country that is free and democratic."

"Marcos is a revolutionary who writes long meditative letters to Eduardo Galeano about the meaning of silence; who describes colonialism as a series of 'bad jokes badly told', who quotes Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and Borges. Who writes that resistance takes place 'any time any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes resignation has woven for them and cynicism has dyed grey.'"

"Marcos has spread the Zapatista word through riddles. Revolutionaries who don't want power. People who must hide their face to be seen. A world with many worlds in it. A movement of one 'no' and many 'yesses'. The phrases seem simple at first, but don't be fooled. They have a way of burrowing into the consciousness, cropping up in strange places, being repeated until they take on a quality of truth—but not absolute truth: a truth, as the Zapatistas might say, with many truths in it."

"Marcos is A new kind of hero, one who listens more than he speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution."

"(What’s your go-to classic? And your favorite book no one else has heard of?)...Subcomandante Marcos’s writings in conjunction with the 1994 Zapatista revolution showed me how lyrical and literary political writing could be, so the anthologies of his manifestoes and essays are up there in my pantheon"

"Compañeros, this old man is my father. He has come to offer me rewards in the name of the Spaniards. I have always respected my father but my homeland comes first."

"Our only crime consisted of decreeing our own laws and applying them to all without exception. Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which effected the interests of the United Fruit Company. Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win economic independence to match our political independence. We are condemned because we have given our peasant population land and rights."

"Unfortunately even the President of the United States of America has made little of his high office, and he too, either through lack of information or other reasons, has lent himself to the campaign of pressure and intimidation against Guatemala."

"For the first time an oil producer country, Ecuador, where a third of the resources of the State depends on the exploitation of the above mentioned resources, resigns this income for the well-being of the whole humanity and invites the world to join efforts through a fair compensation, in order that together we lay the foundations for a more human and fair civilization."

"We are building a conception of development that is different from that of the capitalist system, where we seek not to live better, to have competition, to have more every day, but to live well, to satisfy basic needs, where harmony with nature is sought, where we seek the indescribable life of cultures."

"The global crisis we are experiencing is not a consequence of factors external to economic dynamics; On the contrary, since the 19th century, the cyclical crises that the world has experienced are inherent to the capitalist system, as a product of the construction of a speculative economy, of the divorce between value and price; and overproduction processes due to poor allocation of resources."

"Diagonal : From a more global perspective, the change that is needed is much more radical and has to do with the architecture of global power of giant corporations and megabanks. Do you believe it is possible to democratize this capitalist system in which we now live? Do you believe that such a change is possible?"

"Rafael Correa: Within the system, no. By changing the system, yes, and that is what we are doing. But we cannot be naive. Changes and revolutions in a society depend on the correlation of forces. With this support that we have now received, we can deepen our revolution even further. But remember all the psychological trauma that was done to us. If someone who does not know Ecuador had read the newspapers, we were the most unpopular, most corrupt and most incapable government, despite having more than 70% of the popular support – government action – and popular support – management is not the same as voting intention, of course. We have always had around 56% of voting intentions. And a very interesting phenomenon occurred in the elections. The opposition did not take a single vote from me, they ate each other up. The right, seeing that Alvarito Noboa had no chance, left him alone, let him fall and bet everything on Lúcio Gutiérrez. This also demonstrates the immorality of our sectors of power, of the Ecuadorian right, because they preferred their interests to their principles. You know that no one with any sense can vote for a person with such serious moral and intellectual limitations as Lucio Gutiérrez. But it was on him that the bank, the interest groups of this country, bet, just to boycott the Citizens' Revolution. But they hit the nail on the head, thank God. In any case, changes depend on the balance of power. On April 26, the Ecuadorian people clearly showed their support for the government, giving us more democratic legitimacy, so we can move forward with much more strength, with much more legitimacy in these changes that, little by little, are changing the balance of power in favor of people's power. That means many things. Six girls drowned [edit: during the week of the elections], an absurd tragedy. They were poor girls. Just look how many times it was in the newspapers. If they had been girls from a powerful family, I assure you that it would have been in the newspapers for two months, a commission would have been created, etc. Ecuador needs to change this correlation of forces and we will continue to do so. Little by little, popular strength is gaining ground and this will translate into real changes in the distribution of resources and public policies for the weakest in our country. This must be done outside the capitalist system. Within the socialist system of the 21st century. The global crisis of capitalism that we are currently experiencing is not a cyclical crisis, outside the system, it is a crisis within the system. Of the recurring crises of capitalism, this is one of the most serious, but it is within the system. They will not find solutions within the same system, which is collapsing, but something new and different must be built. I believe that most Latin American governments and leaders are aware of this, and they are taking advantage of the opportunity to build something new and different. For example, our own regional financial architecture, so as not to depend on it. They no longer need bombs, ships or planes to subdue our countries: they need dollars. These were the “weapons” used to subdue us through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It doesn’t have to be this way. With the resources that Latin America has, we could finance ourselves, but we are in the absurd situation of sending these resources, in the form of reserves, to the first world, through autonomous central banks. With a financial architecture, all of this could stay in the region, which would put an end to one of the main forms of dependence in the region that served to subdue us, which is financial dependence. For us, this is clear. We are moving forward. We have just created, at ALBA level, the single regional compensation system, which will minimize the need for dollars, but there is still a long way to go: making the Bank of the South a reality and, hopefully, in the short term, at most in the medium term, making this Southern reserve fund a reality, in order to keep here, in the region, the money that we currently send to the first world to finance developed countries."

"We, the progressive and leftist presidents, are committed to the social movements which are the ones that are providing the leadership throughout all of this Latin America that is indigenous, mestiza [mixed], and of colour. This year, the majority of Latin American nations celebrate the 200th anniversary of our political independence from Spain. But, hopefully, we will also be able to celebrate the beginning of a consolidation process and the irreversible advancement towards our next and most definite independence, as one big nation--a nation of all and everyone."

"What's the difference between a Republican and a Democrat? There is a greater difference between what I think in the morning and what I think in the afternoon than between those two parties."

"Don’t come lecturing us about liberty. You need a reality check. Don’t act like a spoiled rude child. Here you will only find dignity and sovereignty. Here we haven’t invaded anyone. Here we don’t torture like in Guantanamo. Here we don’t have drones killing alleged terrorist without any due trial, killing also the women and children of those supposed terrorists. So don’t come lecturing us about life, law, dignity, or liberty. You don’t have the moral right to do so. (In response to US ambaassador's criticism of Equador, saying that it's very important for the government to protect free press.) I am ready to put up a fight because I believe that better that constructing roads, hospitals, and schools is to construct the truth. Lies had destroyed Latin America. People lie too much, from the press, the politicians, and on the street."

"I think one of the main problems around the world is that there are private networks in the communication business, for-profit business providing public information, which is very important for society. It is a fundamental contradiction.... I think there should be more public and community media, organizations that don’t have that conflict between profits and social communication. What do you think happens when TV shows have to criticize a bank that owns or fund them? Which would prevail, public or private interest?... the owners of the business would end up imposing their will towards profits. That is what happened to us at the beginning of our term. Please let us all understand what goes on in Latin America. Out of the seven TV Networks in Ecuador, five used to belong to the banks. When we wanted to regulate the banks to avoid executive malpractices and an eventual crisis like the one now taking place here in Spain, we used to have all the TV networks against us. There is a conflict of interest."

"The greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history, Lenin Moreno, allowed the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange. Moreno is a corrupt man, but what he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget."

"Regarding his admiration (or not) for the government of Rafael Correa in Ecuador — the country where the interview took place during Iglesias' tour of Latin America — or that of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, among others, Iglesias made it clear. He criticized the corruption that still prevails in some of these countries, but also showed his fascination for the "style" of others. "They started from a dramatic poverty that cannot be compared to ours and they have shown that things can be done differently," he explained. "We call ourselves Podemos because they were constantly telling us that it couldn't be done. In those countries they were also told that it couldn't be done and they were able to do it," he added. And he personified one of his examples in Correa: "He put an end to bank commissions and ATMs. I like that style that doesn't let itself be intimidated by the rich." However, Iglesias acknowledged that it is necessary to adapt to the rules of the capitalist system to get out of the crisis. "What a remedy!" he exclaimed after confessing that he uses an iPhone - even though Apple pays taxes outside of Spain - and defending that "you cannot get out of the crisis by making people poorer." "The key is for people to buy things and, if wages are miserable, people cannot consume," he indicated. "It is terrible, but even if we defend that capitalism can be the destruction of the world, tomorrow we have to feed people and we are too small to destroy capitalism by ourselves," he defended himself. "But, as Correa says, 'there are societies with a market and market societies'. We have to bet on the former," he concluded."

"President Rafael Correa gave the opening lecture at the First International Scientific Congress of Economics and Finance, on, “The global economic crisis, its impact on Ecuador and the policies that the Ecuadorian government is implementing,” with a brief vision of the new urgent development strategy of the country, to a crowd of students, teachers and the general public who filled the Polytechnic Theater on the morning of May 18. When analyzing the crisis, he stated: “It is not a temporary crisis, it is a systemic crisis of the capitalist accumulation regime, which manifests itself in the incompatibility between growth, the means of production and consumption, the dynamic distribution of income, given the concentration of wealth in the world. The world crisis is an internal consequence of the capitalist system and will not find its resolution within the system itself.” “It is a structural crisis of the capitalist system, we are experiencing a multidimensional crisis, worrying in the energy and environmental fields.”"

"The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has attacked the world capitalist system, blaming it for the current global economic crisis. From the Spanish capital, Madrid, where he is on an official visit, Correa on Friday described the capitalist system and the resulting austerity measures as a political problem that serves the groups in power, and announced that it is the cause of the global economic crisis, since it places markets above people. Likewise, he expressed his concern because the same policies that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescribed to Latin America in the 90s are being applied. “It is evident that in the capitalist system, financial capital has supremacy over human beings and they try to convince us that this is how things have to be (…) The problem is not technical, it is political (…) The same things are being committed, in quotes errors that were committed on our continent… And I say in quotes because they are not errors, but rather interests are being protected,” Correa said during a speech given at the Vistalegre Palace, before Ecuadorians residing in Spain."

"When Rafael Correa first ran for Ecuador’s presidency in 2006, supporters at his rallies brandished belts in homage to their candidate, whose surname means “belt” or “strap”. “Dale correa,” or “give them a whipping,” the crowds roared. It was a demand to punish what they regarded as the corrupt elites who had governed Ecuador since the return of democracy in 1979. Mr Correa promised he would. He won that election and then two more. His presidency brought a rare spell of political stability. Living standards rose and public services improved. Mr Correa, who has a respectable approval rating of 42%, is not a candidate. He is counting on Lenin Moreno, a former vice-president, and his running mate, Jorge Glas, the current vice-president, to carry on his “citizens’ revolution”. Mr Moreno, who shares his alarming first name with 18,000 other Ecuadoreans, hopes to win in the first round by capturing the bulk of Mr Correa’s support and adding to it."

"The democratic elections of President Rafael Correa in Ecuador have enraged the oligarchs, particularly the wealthiest bankers who ruled... the nation for so many decades. That... led to a massive banking crisis led by fraudulent elite bankers... Ecuador suffered the highest percentage of emigration in Latin America. Political crises became the norm, with a series of presidents forced to resign within months. Correa and his reform party, Alianza PAIS (AP), changed all this. Correa has served his full elected terms of office largely because he met his campaign promises to more than double expenditures on education, health, and infrastructure that have transformed Ecuador and substantially reduced poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Ecuador’s democracy is real. Ecuador has several major political parties and employs a common democratic means of determining whether the first round of the election results produce such a dominant winner that no run-off election is required. Despite the fact that Mr. Moreno, the AP candidate for the presidency, came within a razor-thin margin of reaching that decisive plurality in the first round, the government required a run-off election in accordance with the law. The AP’s reforms were so successful that immigration to Ecuador exceeded emigration from Ecuador. The AP reformed banking to reduce the frauds by elite bankers that drove Ecuador’s financial crisis. The oligarchs and bankers have been weakening the Ecuadorian economy by moving their wealth to offshore tax havens. The AP has adopted legislation to limit such tax evasion."

"When Rafael Correa, former president of Ecuador, said he would resign sooner than legalize abortion, he was refusing to recognize that when we can't yet have it all, we must choose the path that most expands our capacity to get it all in the future."

"Ecuador, still a relatively poor Third World country, has made achievements we can still only dream of here: free health care, free university education, effective anti-poverty programs, democratizing the media, environmental protection, respect for the rights of oppressed groups such as LBGTs and Original Peoples, repudiation of debt gouging by the banks, increasing taxes on the rich, clean elections. It has taken the initiative, along with President Evo Morales of Bolivia, in demanding action by the West in combating climate change and in shutting down tax havens. The challenges facing Ecuador remain the continued power of the old neoliberal ruling elite in the country, the need to further diversify the economy, to eliminate poverty, and the need to build an organized, politically active mass structure to carry on the Citizens Revolution. The accomplishments of the Citizens Revolution have made President Correa one of the most popular presidents in Latin America. Moreover, in a poll of 18 Latin American countries, Ecuador ranked the highest in citizens’ evaluation of their country’s government, in reduction of corruption, and distribution of wealth. Yet, “The greatest achievement of this revolution is having recovered pride and hope. We recovered our country,” said Correa speaking on the 10th anniversary of the revolution."

"Ecuador’s transformation during the presidency of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) and The Citizens Revolution stands as great step forward for the worldwide struggle against the 1%. President Correa... came to power in a country controlled by a super-rich elite, dependent on oil and commodities exports. Ecuador still suffered from the devastating effects of corrupt banker dealings, which caused the currency and peoples’ savings to lose two-thirds of their value, leading to the US dollar becoming the new national currency. Governments preceding Correa instituted neoliberal austerity and privatization programs, causing inequality, poverty and unemployment to soar. Ecuador became one of the poorest and least developed nations in the region. Poverty rates reached 56% of the population, and from 1998-2003 close to 2 million Ecuadorans out of a population of 12-13 million, over 1 in 10, had left the country for economic reasons. William Blum, in Killing Hope, wrote that the CIA in Ecuador “infiltrated, often at the highest levels, almost all political organizations of significance, from the far left to the far right... In virtually every department of the Ecuadorian government could be found men occupying positions high and low who collaborated with the CIA for money. At one point, the agency could count among this number the men who were second and third in power in the country.” Ecuador was also saddled with the US’s largest air base in the region at Manta, instrumental in Plan Colombia and in enforcing international banking and corporate rule over Ecuador."

"Lenín Moreno actually pledged during his election campaign several months ago was to continue the "Citizens Revolution" of Rafael Correa, whose left-wing government Moreno was part of for 10 years. Moreno called Correa the greatest president Ecuador ever had during the campaign. And here is a video of Moreno leading a crowd in cheers of “Rafael! Rafael!” at a campaign rally. Moreno is now, through a referendum that he never proposed on the campaign trail—it was actually proposed by his right-wing opponent—asking voters to (retroactively) re-impose term limits, handpick a body with “transitional” powers to fire 150 authorities (judges, prosecutors, regulators etc.…) and drastically reduce taxes on wealthy land-speculators. Moreno did not campaign for any of those things. He is now also talking about a “free trade” deal with the United States—another policy he would never have dared to propose while he needed Correa’s support to get elected. Further, Moreno has given Ecuador’s private banks exclusive control over electronic money—which he never would have proposed while he needed Correa. In 1999, the private banks, after years of corruption and deregulation, totally crashed Ecuador’s economy. Reining them in, including their media power, was key to the economic success Ecuador had under Correa."

"How can Moreno get away (so far) with his post-election about face? By quickly turning on Correa, he immediately won over Ecuador’s big private media, and quickly made changes to public media so that it provided negligible opposition to his right turn. For example, Moreno promptly put a former editor of the right-wing newspaper El Comercio in charge of the government-run El Telegrafo. The results were obvious during a January 21 TV interview broadcast across the country, in which journalists from two right-wing networks and a third from public media interviewed Moreno."

"A judge in Ecuador ordered the arrest Tuesday of former President Rafael Correa, a staunch anti-American leftist whose tenure was defined by his friendly ties with Venezuela, China, and Cuba and has reportedly begun proceedings with Interpol to aid in his detention. Correa stands accused of having paid criminals in Colombia to kidnap an opposition legislator visiting that country in 2012, charges Correa, currently residing in Belgium, denies. The government of his successor, the relatively moderate leftist Lenin Moreno, has also launched investigations into Correa-era deals to sell oil to China that Quito now contends are highly unfavorable to the Latin American country. Moreno won the Ecuadorian presidency in 2017 as part of Correa’s National Alliance (AP) party. Correa has since left the party and condemned Moreno, arguing that the current president seeks to undo much of his Marxist legacy. Correa is far from the only Bolivarian socialist leader facing legal troubles."

"Joe Emergsberger: Could you please explain the various legal and constitutional problems with the way Correa is being pursued over the Fernando Balda case? Virgilio Hermandez: The obvious thing... is its political functionality, the determined effort to prosecute the former president... The case is in its early stages but the prosecution has already perpetrated a series of irregularities, a series of violations of the institutional norms and of the rule of law that makes it absolutely clear that justice is not their goal. They are not pursuing a credible investigation of the facts. They are basically pursuing political objectives through the prosecution of Rafael Correa on frivolous grounds. The first irregularity is that, according to our constitution, authorization to prosecute the ex-president should have been received from the National Assembly. In fact, it was requested by Judge Camacho... Second... one must understand why the prosecution of the former president had to be authorized by the National Assembly.... events to which he is being linked happened while he was president. The law says that for prosecution to proceed presidential immunity must first be removed for events that took place while he was in office... A third irregularity... The acting prosecutor has not been sworn in before the National Assembly as mandated by the constitution. Their authority is completely illegitimate.... A fourth irregularity is that the arguments used to link Rafael Correa to the Balda’s case [the attempted kidnapping] are utterly weak and confirm that there is a political vendetta being pursued against the former president."

"Ecuador’s top court ordered former President Rafael Correa on Wednesday to stand trial for his alleged role in the 2012 botched kidnapping of an opposition lawmaker. Correa was charged in September by prosecutors of orchestrating Fernando Balda’s kidnapping in Bogota after he fled to Colombia’s capital to escape what he considered persecution by Correa. A supreme court justice decided that the accusations against Correa, his top intelligence chief and two others merited a trial. Judge Daniel Camacho also formally declared Correa a fugitive after he flouted for months an order to appear before the court every 15 days as part of the ongoing probe. For his defiance, Ecuadorean authorities had previously requested Correa’s arrest and extradition from Belgium, where he has been living since leaving office last year."

"Ecuador has signed a $4.2bn programme with the IMF, signalling a final break by President Lenín Moreno with the policies of his leftist predecessor [Rafael Correa] in a deal that he said saved the country from becoming like Venezuela. The loan to the Opec country forms part of a larger $10bn package with other multilateral lenders to support Ecuador’s struggling economy, which is burdened by external debt that grew under former president Rafael Correa, in part due to oil-backed loans from China. Over the past two years, Mr Moreno has sought to reform the economy, while also distancing himself from the more controversial political positions of Mr Correa, who ruled Ecuador for a decade. The leftist firebrand, who faces multiple corruption charges in Ecuador and now lives in Belgium, was a close ally of socialist regimes such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia. Notoriously, he gave political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The IMF deal comes on the seventh anniversary of Mr Assange’s asylum at the embassy. Ecuador’s extended fund facility with the IMF, which must still be approved by the Washington-based lender’s board...” said... the IMF mission chief to Ecuador."

"All this [in Ecuador] is taking place under a government – elected in 2017 on a platform of continuity – that seeks to reverse a prior decade of political reforms. These reforms were, by measures of economic and social indicators, successful. Poverty was reduced by 38% and extreme poverty by 47%; public investment – including hospitals, schools, roads, and electricity – more than doubled as a percent of the economy. But the prior (Rafael Correa) government was a leftwing government that was more independent of the US (by, for example, closing down the US military base there). One can imagine what this looks like, as the Trump administration now gains enormous power in Ecuador... Lenín Moreno, has aligned himself with Trump’s foreign and economic policy... his government is persecuting his presidential predecessor, Rafael Correa, with false charges filed last year that even Interpol won’t honor with an international warrant. Other opposition leaders have fled the country to avoid illegal pre-trial detention – in the case of former foreign minister Ricardo Patiño, for making a speech that the government did not like... Since Washington controls IMF decision-making for this hemisphere, the Trump administration and the fund are implicated in the political repression as well as the broader attempt to reconvert Ecuador into the kind of economy and politics that Trump and Pompeo would like to see, but most Ecuadorians clearly did not vote for."

"La resistencia del pasivismo se revuelve ahora contra el impulso progresista de la revolución."

"Los pasivos alzan el clamor llamándose apóstoles de la evolución y condenando todo lo que tiene algo de rebeldía; apelan al miedo, hacen llamamientos patéticos al patriotismo; acuden a la ignorancia y llegan a aconsejar al pueblo que se deje matar y ultrajar en los próximos comicios y vuelvan una y otra vez a ejercer pacíficamente el derecho de sufragio, a que una y otra vez lo burlen y lo asesinen los tiranos. Pero nada de salirse del fétido rincón, al cual se pretende evolucionar agregando más y más inmundicias, más y más cobardías."

"La evolución verdadera que mejore la vida de los mexicanos, no la de sus parásitos, vendrá con la revolución: ésta y aquella se completan y la primera no pueda coexistir con los anacronismos y subterfugios que despiertan hoy los redentores del pasivismo. Para evolucionar es preciso ser libre y no podemos tener libertad si no somos rebeldes, porque nunca tirano alguno ha respetado a los pueblos pasivos; jamás un rebaño de carneros se ha impuesto con la majestad de su número inofensivo, al lobo que bonitamente los devora sin cuidarse de otro derecho que el de sus dientes. Hay que armarse, pero no de un voto inútil, que siempre valdrá tanto como el tirano quiere, sino de armas efectivas y menos candorosas cuyo uso nos traiga la evolución ascendente y no la regresiva que preconizan los luchadores pacifistas. ¡Pasividad, nunca! Rebeldía, ahora y siempre."

""Comrades. Our labour has ended, the armed struggle has begun... The invincible flames of the revolution will glow, turning to lead and steel... There will be a great rupture and we will be the makers of the new dawn ... We shall convert the black fire into red and the red into pure light."

"We are the initiators and we should keep this fact deeply in our spirits."

"The People’s War begins to sweep away the old order in order to inevitably destroy it. From the old, the new shall be born. And finally, like the pure and glorious phoenix bird, Communism will arise for all time."

"In one hundred years of struggle, setbacks, and victories, the proletariat has learned how to fight and seize power with arms. The workers took it once in an embryonic form but were crushed with blood and fire. Nevertheless, we remember the Paris Commune, where those who were reviled are today heroes. And their example lives on, while their tormentors are forgotten."

"The innumerable iron legions arise, and more and more will arise, inexhaustibly multiply, encircle and annihilate reaction. Reaction, which unleashes its bloody claws tearing the flesh off the people, continues to sow discord, embroil, and seeks to sate itself with the blood of the people. But the people’s blood ascends like furious wings and the stricken flesh converts itself into a powerful vengeful lash."

"Comrades, in this country we are embarking upon a third epoch. The third epoch is a battle between armed revolution and armed counter-revolution, which are prepared for violence. Counter-revolution with its old and bloody violence, peace at the hands of bayonets, their damned wars that annihilate people in the prisons, schools, factories, in the countryside, and even assassinating children with hunger and misery in their maternal wombs."

"All our struggles have been validated. Comrades, finally it has been realized: Initiate the armed struggle today. Everything that we have accomplished, including errors that have served as experience, are validated here. This is the essence of this School"

"We will become the protagonists of history, conscious, organized and armed. Thus, the great rupture will be open and we will become the makers of a definitive dawn"

"The People's War begins to sweep away the old order in order to inevitably destroy it. From the old, the new shall be born. And finally, like the pure glorious phoenix bird, Communism will arise for all time. We should unfurl optimism an overflow with enthusiasm, furthermore thinking that we serve to carry out a task that will last forevermore. We humans are mere fragments of time and heart beats, but our deeds will remain for centuries stamped on generation after generation. Men march inevitably towards their end, but humanity, the working class and their creations will never end."

"Let us start by saying that the Communist Party of Peru, which has been leading the people's war for more than eight years now, has expressed itself publicly in a number of different documents. We have always considered the pronouncements of the Party itself to be much more important, because that way it is crystal clear that it is the PCP that has dared to initiate the people's war, lead it, and carry it forward."

"Being communists, we fear nothing."

"We think that to be Marxists today, to be Communists, necessarily demands that we be Marxist-Leninist-Maoists and principally Maoists. Otherwise, we couldn't be genuine communists."

"Today, tomorrow, and in these stormy decades in which we live, we can see the enormous and overriding importance that proletarian ideology has."

"Marxism has always taught us that the problem lies in the application of universal truth. Chairman Mao Tsetung was extremely insistent on this point, that if Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is not applied to concrete reality, it is not possible to lead a revolution, not possible to transform the old order, destroy it, or create a new one. It is the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the Peruvian revolution that has produced Gonzalo Thought. Gonzalo Thought has been forged in the class struggle of our people, mainly the proletariat, in the incessant struggles of the peasantry, and in the larger framework of the world revolution, in the midst of these earthshaking battles, applying as faithfully as possible the universal truths to the concrete conditions of our country. Previously we called it the Guiding Thought. And if today the Party, through its Congress, has sanctioned the term Gonzalo Thought, it's because a leap has been made in the Guiding Thought through the development of the people's war. In sum, Gonzalo Thought is none other than the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to our concrete reality. This means that it is principal specifically for our Party, for the people's war and for the revolution in our country, and I want to emphasize that. But for us, looking at our ideology in universal terms, I emphasize once again, it is Maoism that is principal."

"Revisionism arose as a complete negation of Marxism. Modern revisionism, likewise, is always aiming to substitute bourgeois philosophy for Marxist philosophy, going against political economy, particularly denying the growing impoverishment and the inevitability of the downfall of imperialism. Revisionism strives to falsify and twist scientific socialism in order to oppose the class struggle and revolution, peddling parliamentary cretinism and pacifism. All these positions have been expounded by the revisionists, who have aimed for and continue to aim for the restoration of capitalism, the undermining and blocking of the world revolution, and to denigrate the conquering spirit of our class. But here I feel it is necessary to spell out some points to make this concrete: revisionism behaves like any imperialism. For example, the Soviet Union, Soviet social-imperialism, preaches and practices parliamentary cretinism. It mounts and conducts armed actions for the purpose of gaining world hegemony. It carries out aggression, pits one people against another, sets masses against masses, and divides our class and the people. In a thousand and one ways Soviet revisionism fights against everything that is truly Marxist and everything that serves the revolution. We are an example of how they do this. The social-imperialists of the USSR have developed a perverse worldwide plan to become a hegemonic superpower using all the means at their disposal. This includes setting up phony parties, communist in name only, "bourgeois workers parties" to use Engels' words. And this is how Chinese revisionism and all revisionists act, differing only with regard to their particular circumstances, according to who pulls their strings."

"Among the masses, what revisionism does is serve the cause of capitulation to internal reaction, concretely to the big bourgeoisie and the landlords, to the landlord-bureaucrat capitalist dictatorship which is the Peruvian State of today."

"I want to make it absolutely clear that we respect this religiousness as a question of freedom of religious beliefs, as recognized by the programme which was approved by our Congress."

"Marxism has taught us to separate Church and State, this is the first thing we will do. Secondly, I want to repeat, we respect the freedom of religious belief of the people--applying fully the principle of freedom to believe, as well as not to believe. to be an atheist. That is how we will handle it."

"The Party is a system of organizations and obviously has its necessities. The formation of an army that is numerically much larger, more vast, also has its necessities. Marxism, and especially Chairman Mao, has taught us how to resolve this problem, too. The CPC, based on Chairman Mao Tsetung's teachings, concluded that giving economic aid to parties was corrosive, and that it was a revisionist policy, because a Party must be self-reliant. This is what we have followed: self-reliance. Self-reliance has to do with economic necessities, but mainly, as we understand it, it has to do with ideological and political orientation. With that as our starting point we can see how to deal with the economic necessities which are always present--it would be an error to say they don't exist."

"Then, to reiterate, all the struggles waged by the proletariat, the oppressed nations, the peoples of the world, the parties and organizations steadfast and loyal to Marxism--all that struggle is the primary concrete form of proletarian internationalist help. Nevertheless, the greatest assistance we have is undying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the ideology of the international proletariat, which has been generated by the working class through long decades and thousands of struggles all over the world. This is the greatest assistance we receive because it is the light, without which our eyes would see nothing. But with this light our eyes can see and our hands can act. This is how we see this problem, and this is how we advance."

"With regard to violence we start from the principle established by Chairman Mao Tsetung: violence, that is the need for revolutionary violence, is a universal law with no exception. Revolutionary violence is what allows us to resolve fundamental contradictions by means of an army, through people's war."

"I believe that I've got an almost built-in optimism. And I occupy myself more with problems of understanding and conviction than with problems of feelings or depression. On the contrary, I think that I am quite optimistic. It is Marxism, Chairman Mao, who has made us understand that people, especially communists, are optimists. Whenever I find myself in a difficult situation I strive to look for its positive aspect or for what potential for development may stillexist within that situation, because nothing is completely black, nor is anything completely red. Even if there were to be a big defeat, even though we have not had one yet, there would always be a positive aspect. The point is to draw out the lessons, and continue to do our work based on the positive aspect. You will always find someone to support you, to lend their ardent enthusiasm and assistance to the struggle, because communism unites people."

"Fear? I believe that fear and lack of fear form a contradiction. The point is to take up our ideology, and unleash the courage within us. It is our ideology that makes us brave, that gives us courage. In my opinion, no one is born brave. It is society, the class struggle, that makes people and communists courageous--the class struggle, the proletariat, the Party, and our ideology."

"They will send their sinister army armed to the teeth to fight us, assaulting the working class, the peasants and popular masses, spreading their sinister claws. They will try to encircle, isolate, crush and wipe us out. But we are the future, the strength, and history. Comrades, revolution and counterrevolution are also contending forces in our country. They are two parts of a unity of opposites in constant struggle. The reactionaries are armed and concentrated, defending the metropolis and capitals. We are rooted in the countryside, in small villages, with the masses, especially with the poor peasants, with the force of the people, among their disorganized force in order to organize it into a powerful army. But this will not be easy."

"The new is focused in our country, the armed solution, and the Party’s development through arms intensifies through the armed struggle."

"Gonzalo appeared not only as the interpreter of the laws of history but also as the military leader unreachable by the repressive apparatus of the “old State.” He was every where and no where."

"Our chief is Gonzalo he of brilliant thought and action inspired by Marx, Lenin and Mao he develops our powerful ideology and brings to a burning world the invincible people's war."

"When Abimael Guzman referred to the "bloodbath" in 1988, the insurrection's history was already strained by it. The proverbial meat grinder had processed enough people to make the Shining Path uprising one of Latin America's bloodiest since the 1960's, with clear signs of becomeing one of the cruelest wars in the continent's history."

"I give you my greeting and my full and unconditional submission to the greatest living Marxist-Leninist-Maoist on earth: our beloved and respected President Gonzalo, chief and guide of the Peruvian revolution and the world proletarian revolution, teacher of Communists and party unifier. I give you my greeting and full and unconditional submission to the scientific ideology of the proletariat" Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and Gonzalo Thought, especially Gonzalo Thought, all-powerful and infallible ideology that illuminates our path and arms our minds."

"We salute Venezuela that clearly fights for peace, in a commitment that has its foundations in the spirit and conviction of our Latin American and Caribbean peoples, and so we ratify it on the 85th anniversary of Sandino] our ‘general of free men’ ... Beyond their political positions, countries have said that they are not in favor of intervention or war. There are some agreements that have to be worked on and initiatives to be developed to find a solution through peaceful means in Venezuela."

"Imperialism cannot conceive of a free people, a sovereign people, an independent people. Because, simply and plainly, for them the people is nothing more than an empty phrase."

"The Nicaraguan people have won, with their blood, the right to be here today, in this way breaking with a historic past of servility towards imperialist policy. For the first time in their entire history the Nicaraguan people can officially express their sovereign will, joining this movement of the nonaligned barely forty-one days after their triumph."

"Sandino embodied the desire for liberty of a people who were systematically subjected to the attack of Yankee intervention and subjected to imperialist exploitation an domination. The same marines who murdered the Filipino people thousands of miles from our country, arrivied to soak Nicaraguan territory in blood in those days."

"We are Sandinistas; our people have been struggling against oppression and interventions for more than 150 years. That is why we have historically identified with the struggle of the Palestinian people and we recognize the PLO as their legitimate representative. And that is why we condemn Israeli occupation of the Arab territories and demand their unconditional return."

"We are a poor country that wants to take the efforts and resources now being invested in defense of the revolution and invest it in tractors and plows. And we support general and complete disarmament, under strict international control. We are for an end to the arms race and we salute the SALT II accords as an important step in this direction. We demand respect for the territorial integrity of states and renunciation of the use of force in international relations. We condemn the existence of military bases."

"The Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has called for peace in Latin America and warned the United States against a war on Venezuela... during an official act commemorating the 85th anniversary of the death of Augusto C. Sandino, the nation’s national Hero."

""We salute Venezuela that clearly fights for peace, in a commitment that has its foundations in the spirit and conviction of our Latin American and Caribbean peoples, and so we ratify it on the 85th anniversary of [Sandino] our ‘general of free men’," said Ortega during the ceremony."

"According to the Nicaraguan president, Latin America has spoken up against war and against intervention on its territory and called for a peaceful solution in Venezuela. "Beyond their political positions, countries have said that they are not in favor of intervention or war. There are some agreements that have to be worked on and initiatives to be developed to find a solution through peaceful means in Venezuela.""

"Finally, after moderating FSLN ideology and adopting more conservative views on some social issues, Daniel Ortega won the presidency in November 2006. His new administration enacted policies, such as free health care and more aid for low-income people, that significantly improved the lives of many. The FSLN hoped that the success of these policies would result in greater electoral support in coming elections, providing a more secure basis for future change. In 2011, Ortega and the FSLN won the presidency and control of the national legislature, receiving more than 62 percent of the popular vote. The Nicaraguan government in 2013 moved to fulfill the national dream of building an interocean canal that would significantly spur economic development."

"For the past decade, the United States has been quietly assisting opposition groups in Nicaragua, helping them organize resistance to the country’s popular leftist president Daniel Ortega. U.S. officials hope the country’s opposition groups will create a new political movement that can defeat Ortega at the polls or pressure him into stepping down from power. They fear that without their support, Ortega’s opposition will remain weak and divided, making it impossible for anyone to mount a successful political campaign against the Nicaraguan president."

"Currently, Nicaragua is the only country victimized by the US-backed Central American Wars which is not also a source of immigrants to the US. This is in no small part due to the Sandinistas’ effective social programs. As for the Sandinistas’ social programs, even the New York Times acknowledged that “many poor people who receive housing and other government benefits support” Sandinista President, Daniel Ortega."

"During the 1980s, Nicaragua – a tiny country which remains the second poorest in the Hemisphere — inspired many of us, myself included, with its heroic resistance to violent US aggression. Nicaragua has remained a symbol of opposition to US imperialism, and that has galled the powers-that-be in this country – particularly Neo-Cons such as current National Security Adviser John Bolton."

"We must stand with Nicaragua now, as many of us did before, in opposing continued US hostilities in the form of the NICA Act and interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs. Nicaragua deserves such solidarity."

"Only last week, an official of the Soviet Union reiterated Brezhnev's threat to station nuclear missiles in this hemisphere, 5 minutes from the United States. Like an echo, Nicaragua's Commandante Daniel Ortega confirmed that, if asked, his country would consider accepting those missiles. I understand that today they may be having second thoughts."

"(Has the post–Revolutionary leadership tried to re–write the history of the Revolution?)...If by post–Revolutionary leadership you mean the current dictatorship of Ortega and Murillo, they have tried not only to rewrite the history of the Revolution, but to adulterate it, falsify it, and accommodate it to their own interests of consolidating themselves in a family dynasty in power as pernicious or worse than that of the Somozas."

"Either you are in favor of human dignity and respect fir human rights, or you are against human rights. There is no their possibility."

"People learn from experience. We have learned that in order to be revolutionaries and advance a revolutionary process, it is necessary to have one's feet on the ground."

"...When we talk about the FSLN, we are not talking about something that is just a political party. We're not talking simply about an armed organization. We are talking about a historic response. We are talking about the indivisible reality of the FSLN and the Nicaraguan people. As long as this people is militant and proud, as long as this people is made up of heroic workers, as long as the workers and peasants and all revolutionaries are ready to defend the national sovereignty arms in hand, as long as there are Nicaraguans who love the land where they were born, as long as this people exists, the FSLN will continue to exist."

"The sons and daughters of this country are not robots, not mannequins. This is a population every day more conscious, more audacious, and more creative. With this heroic population, we will make it to our goal, we will for all the way. With this heroic population that understands the world around it more clearly every day, it will be easier to come up with the right answers to the questions the revolution poses."

"We hate war, and our National Directorate has repeated this many times. We haven't organized the defense of our revolution for the purpose of conquering neighboring territories - or distant ones for that matter. We have done it in order to win peace. Our friends and neighbors can rest assured that this revolution was made in order to defend the land of our birth."

"Our revolution has always been internationalist, ever since Sandino fought in the Segovias. There were internationalists from all over the world who fought alongside Sandino, men from Venezuela, Mexico, Peru. Another who fought alongside Sandino was the great hero of the Salvadoran people named Farabundo Marti. It is not strange that we are internationalists, because this is something we got from Sandino. All the revolutionaries and all the peoples of Latin America especially know that our people's heart is with them, beats alongside theirs. Our heart goes out to Latin America, and we also know that Latin America's heart goes our to the Nicaraguan revolution."

"We are creating a new society in which an individual is not a piece of merchandise, a society in which there are no wolves and lambs, when men do not live off the exploitation of other men. We are struggling to create a society in which the workers are the fundamental power driving things forward, but in which other social sectors also play a role, always insofar as they identify with the interests of the country, with the interests of the great majority"

"To the Nicaraguans, to the Central Americans, to the Indo-Hispanic Race: The man who doesn't ask his country for even a handful of earth for his grave deserves to be heard, and not only to be heard, but also to be believed."

"I am a Nicaraguan and I am proud because in my veins flows above all the blood of the Indian race, which by some atavism encompasses the mystery of being patriotic, loyal, and sincere. The bond of nationality give me the right to assume responsibility for my acts, without being concerned that pessimists and cowards may brand me with a name that, in their own condition as eunuchs, would be more appropriately applied to them. I am a mechanic, but my idealism is based upon a broad horizon of internationalism, which represents the right to be free and to establish justice, even though to achieve this it may be necessary to establish it upon a foundation of blood. The oligarchs, or rather, the swamp geese, will say the I am a plebeian, but it doesn't matter. My greatest honor is that I come from the lap of the oppressed, the soul and spirit of our race, those who have lived ignored and forgotten, at the mercy of the shameless hired assassins who have committed the crime of high treason, forgetful of the pain and misery of the Liberal cause that they pitilessly persecuted, as if we did not belong to the same nation."

"Fellow citizens: Today, after fifteen months of bitter fighting – marked daily by all of the anguish which darkens the sad situation of a civil war – having arrived at the heart of Brazil and the banks of the portentous Tocantins, we have the happy opportunity to once again remind our homeland that the patriotic crusade initiated on the fifth of July in the glorious city of Sao Paulo and whose ranks were later added to by the brave sons of the South, has not yet died and will not die, or be overwhelmed by the bayonets of tyranny."

"Brazilian People!"

"We know well that the country suffers. So too do the people, with the inevitable procession of violence which accompanies war. It is necessary however, no matter the cost, for Brazil to once again sustain control of its own fate – whether or not new martyrs must add their blood to the blood already sacrificed by those who have given their lives for the liberation of their homeland. To retreat at this moment would forsake an ideal, for so many dear companions have made this great sacrifice. Indeed, after such an abjuration would there most certainly be a loss of life and liberty to absolute despotism. Despotism which has not once brought honor to Christianity or the tradition of generosity in our people. No one wishes to see, however, a desire to wage war on intransigent whims or ambitions. On the contrary: we want peace, and only for peace would we fight for more than fifteen months. Furthermore, we want peace without opprobrium, rooted in justice – that is, in short, able to restore to the country a peace of mind which it so desperately needs. We will surely repel the dark and tragic peace which masks the vilification of the slave’s quarters. Ultimately, if the finality of destiny must represent itself like the last swig of bitter gall to consume, we would prefer, without any hesitancy, the great anguish of being crushed."