Anti Fascists

"We brought ten thousand head of cattle to the Sierra one day and said to the peasants, simply, "Eat". And the peasants, for the first time in years and years, some for the first time in their lives, ate beef."

"In order to change a way of thinking, it is necessary to undergo profound internal changes and to witness profound external changes, especially in the performance of our duties and obligations to society."

"In the future individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collectivity."

"The task of educating and feeding youngsters, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the former absentee landlords to those who laboured every day upon that same land without receiving its benefits, are accomplishments of social medicine."

"Everything we thought and felt in that past period ought to be deposited in an archive, and a new type of human being created."

"Our youth must always be free, discussing and exchanging ideas concerned with what is happening throughout the entire world."

"The desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone."

"After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people."

"I began the ups and downs of my career as a university student, a member of the middle class, a doctor who shared the same horizons, the same youthful aspirations you have. In the course of the struggle, however, I changed and became convinced of the imperative need for revolution, and of the great justice of the people's cause."

"The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study. Education should be the daily bread of the people of Cuba."

"This professor standing before you was once a doctor, and by force of circumstance was obliged to take up arms, and after two years graduated as a guerrilla commander."

"I would say that in order to reach the people you must feel as if you are part of the people. You must know what the people want, what they need, and what they feel. You must do a little self-analysis, study the university's statistics, and ask how many workers, how many peasants, how many men who make their living by their sweat eight hours a day are here in this university."

"Today the people stand at the door of the university, and it is the university that must be flexible. It must color itself black, mulatto, worker, peasant, or else be left without doors. And then the people will tear it apart and paint it with the colors they see fit."

"The university should color itself black and color itself mulatto—not just as regards students but also professors."

"How could I as an individual, Ernesto Guevara, accept the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa conferred by the School of Education, since the only education I have imparted has been that of guerrilla camps, harsh words, and fierce example? And I believe such things certainly cannot be transformed into a cap and gown. That is why I continue to wear my Rebel Army uniform."

"The university, vanguard of our struggling people, cannot become a backward element, but it would become so if the university did not incorporate itself into the great plans of the Revolution."

"Great strategic links are being developed abroad to destroy our Revolution. Those forces are trying to attract all those who have been hurt by the Revolution. We do not refer to the embezzlers, criminals, or the members of the old government; we are thinking of those who have remained on the margin of this revolutionary process, those who have lost economically but support the Revolution in a limited way."

"A number of students denounce state intervention and the loss of university autonomy. This student sector reflects its class background while forgetting its revolutionary obligation. This sector has not realized that it has an obligation to workers and peasants. Our workers and peasants died beside the students in order to attain power."

"The university cannot be an ivory tower, far away from the society, removed from the practical accomplishments of the Revolution. If such an attitude is maintained, the university will continue giving our society lawyers that we do not need."

"We believe that the state is capable of understanding the needs of the nation; as such, then, the state must participate in the administration and direction of the university."

"Our universities produced lawyers and doctors for the old social system, but did not create enough agricultural extension teachers, agronomists, chemists, or physicists. In fact, we do not even have mathematicians."

"If they attack, we shall fight to the end. If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression. But we haven't got them, so we shall fight with what we've got."

"More and more violently, with the impotent rage of the wild beast, who wishes to maintain in the backyards of all her colonial possession, each and every sinecure upon which the American way of life was erected. Let them take heed, those sons of the Pentagon and of North American monopolies who until now have paraded their arrogance up down the lands of America... Cuba is no longer a solitary island... defended only by the vulnerable breasts of her sons... Cuba is now, in addition, a proud Caribbean island defended by the missiles of the greatest military power in history."

"The example of a revolution and the lessons it applies for Latin America have destroyed all coffee house theories; we have demonstrated that a small group of men supported by the people without fear of dying can overcome a disciplined regular army and defeat it."

"The victory of the Cuban Revolution will be a tangible demonstration before all the Americas that peoples are capable of rising up, that they can rise up by themselves under the very fangs of the monster."

"I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people's psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn't interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life."

"What is our ideology? If l were asked whether our revolution is Communist, I would define it as Marxist. Our revolution has discovered by its methods the paths that Marx pointed out."

"The government of the United States represents, as its army also does, the finances of the United States. But these finances do not represent the North American people; they represent a small group of financiers, the owners of all the big enterprises... who also exploit the North American people. Clearly they do not exploit them in the same manner that they exploit us, the human beings of inferior races... for we have not had the good fortune of being born from blond, Anglo-Saxon parents. But they do exploit and divide them, they too are divided into blacks and whites, and they too are divided into men and women, union and non-union, employed and unemployed."

"The interests of the IMF represent the big international interests that today seem to be established and concentrated in Wall Street."

"If it is an element of liberation for Latin America, I believe that it should have demonstrated that. Until now, I have not been aware of any such demonstration. The IMF performs an entirely different function: precisely that of ensuring that capital based outside of Latin America controls all of Latin America."

"Is it not true that our brotherhood transcends distances, different languages, and the absence of close cultural links, and unites us in the struggle? Ought not a Japanese worker be closer to an Argentine laborer, a Bolivian miner, a man working for United Fruit Company or a Cuban cane cutter, than to a Japanese samurai?"

"What are our primary goals? Our greatest goals? The great lines we must follow? From the political point of view, the first thing we want is to be masters of our own destiny, a country free from foreign interference, a country that seeks out its own system of development."

"The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn't get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: "Yank it off, boy, what does it matter." I did so and his possessions were now mine."

"I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ.... I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place."

"The truth is that after the experiences of my wanderings across all of Latin America, and to top it off, in Guatemala, it didn't take much to incite me to join any revolution against a tyrant, but Castro impressed me as an extraordinary man. He faced and overcame the most impossible things. He had an exceptional faith that once he left for Cuba, he would arrive. And that once he arrives, he would fight. And that fighting, he would win. I shared his optimism."

"Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated."

"Calica keeps cursing the filth and, whenever he treads on one of the innumerable turds lining the streets, he looks at his dirty shoes instead of at the sky or a cathedral outlined in space. He does not smell the intangible and evocative matter of which Cuzco is made, but only the odor of stew and excrement. It's a question of temperament."

"One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness."

"Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel!"

"Words that do not match deeds are unimportant."

"Silence is argument carried out by other means."

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. It exists when people liberate themselves."

"We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it."

"Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the surface."

"In order to know about the illnesses of society, you have to know what men are suffering from, how they suffer."

"No less a considerable writer, Camus is a wonderful stylist, certainly an exemplary novelist in many respects. He certainly talks about resistance. But what bothers me is that he is read out of his own context, his own history. Camus's history is that of a colon, a pied noir. He was born and grew up in a place very close to a city in Algeria on the coast, Annaba in Arabic, Bone by the French. It was made over into a French town in the 1880s and 1890s. His family came variously from Corsica and various parts of southern Europe and France. His novels, in my opinion, are really expressions of the colonial predicament. Meursault, in L'Etranger (The Stranger), kills the Arab, to whom Camus gives no name and no history. The whole idea at the end of the novel where Meursault is put on trial is an ideological fiction. No Frenchman was ever put on trial for killing an Arab in colonial Algeria. That's a lie. So he constructs something. Second of all, in his later novel La Peste (The Plague), the people who die in the city are Arabs, but they're not mentioned. The only people who mattered to Camus and to the European reader of the time, and even now, are Europeans. Arabs are there to die. The story, interestingly enough, is always interpreted as a parable or an allegory of the German occupation of France. My reading of Camus, and certainly of his later stories, starts with the fact that he, in the late 1950s, was very much opposed to independence for Algeria. He in fact compared the FLN to Abdel Nasser in Egypt, after Suez, after 1956."

"I could see clearly that this problem could only be solved on the individual and personal level; political revolt is irrelevant. Both Camus and Sartre had been neatly hog-tied by their earlier radicalism. Camus came to see that rebellion is a political roundabout that revolves back to the same old tyranny; too ashamed to admit that he had outgrown his leftism, he found himself in an intellectual cul-de-sac. Sartre accused Camus of being a reactionary; but he paid for his own refusal to reexamine his political convictions by congealing into a grotesque attitude of permanent indignation, shaking his fist at some abstract Authority. Where politics is concerned, he seemed determined to be guided by his emotions."

"I love Camus so much. I read and reread The Plague. I enjoy the Notebooks, though sometimes he seems so wary of women and love I feel he is too wise about life. He perhaps needed to know the blue coast was there, was possible, in order to go so deeply into that windy chill winter of the Algerian plague city— somehow I understood that “place”"

"Although a few commentators have noted the influence of Simone Weil on the thought of Albert Camus, their relationship has never been fully explored ... I shall examine several aspects of that influence in ... Weil's critique of Marxism which Camus adopted in L'Homme Révolté... the conception of the rebel as an artisan which Camus also used in L'Homme Révolté, and ... Weil's mysticism, to which Camus was reluctantly though definitely drawn. ... I shall consider more fully the different conceptions of freedom and justice which appear in their writings and argue that their contributions to political thought here lay with their appreciation of the impulse in modern man to seek and impose absolute values. In this context, we shall see that Camus and Simone Weil provide different routes to individual authenticity and integrity in an absurd world."