Fidel Castro BIO »Fidel Alejandro Castro Rúz (born 13 August 1926) has been Cuban head of state since 1959, when, leading the 26th of July Movement, he helped overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista turning Cuba into the first socialist state in the Western Hemisphere. He held the title of premier until 1976, when he became president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers. He has been the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba since its inception in 1965.
hide 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, illness, poverty or hunger.
Condemn me, it does not matter: history will absolve me.
A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.
Ideas do not need weapons, if they can convince the great masses. Speech on August 3, 1985
I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.
If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.
I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.
If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, then I would win the gold medal.
The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.
The Cuban people refuse to be forced into consumerism, and for that we are the most democratic nation on the planet!
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 revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.
This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell. Speech made by Castro on February 2, 2005
I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.
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! Speech made by Castro at Ernesto "Che" Guevara's memorial service on October 18, 1967
