Essayists From Cuba

"What we need is a collective practice in which investigating and shedding privilege is seen as reclaiming connection, mending relationships broken by the system, and is framed as gain, not loss. Amílcar Cabral, leader of Guinea-Bissau's war of independence from Portuguese colonial rule, called it "class suicide," meaning to die to one's class position by irrevocably aligning oneself with the interests of the oppressed. Cuban revolutionary José Martí put it more positively and poetically in the poem that became the popular song "Guantanamera": "I want to throw in my lot with the poor of the earth. The little mountain stream pleases me more than the sea.""

"One just principle from the depths of a cave is more powerful than an army."

"Love is... born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation!"

"Oh, what company good poets are!"

"A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them."

"To beautify life is to give it an object."

"Man needs to suffer. When he does not have real griefs he creates them. Griefs purify and prepare him."

"Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests."

"A nation is not a complex of wheels, nor a wild horse race, but a stride upward concerted by real men."

"Men are products, expressions, reflections; they live to the extent that they coincide with their epoch, or to the extent that they differ markedly from it."

"A grain of poetry suffices to season a century."

"Hatred, slavery's inevitable aftermath."

"Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas."

"Man needs to go outside himself in order to find repose and reveal himself."

"Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him."

"The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country."

"The whole afternoon was spent rejoicing as the demonstration spread across the city; no one walked alone for all San Juan was a single family."

"Many houses were still full of light when, at the close of March 22, the people of the Círculo returned to their homes, which were gladdened with a fleeting gladness by an hour of justice — for there are still many slaves, black and white, in Puerto Rico!"