Préfète Duffaut (Haiti), Le Générale Canson, 1950. In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’. […]
Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn’t know where north or south is. If you don’t eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you’re lost in a forest, not knowing anything.
— Fidel Castro
Che! You are one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th Century. You inspired tens of millions of people throughout the world to fight for justice, for their freedom and civil rights. You have left a vision of hope, of never giving up – a legacy of solidarity and of Venceremos! – we shall overcome.
From April 28 – May 5, 2015 representatives of the July 26 Coalition of New York-New Jersey organized a people-to-people program to Cuba with a dozen travelers.
Our delegation included doctors and other health care providers, teachers, trade unionists, and activists against the decades-long U.S. government policy aimed at destroying the Cuban Revolution which triumphed in 1959.
No later than the Wilsonian propaganda campaign to bring ordinary US citizens and the world to support US intervention in World War I, did the inhabitants—at least the “white” ones—become convinced that not only was their nation the new Eden but that merely by virtue of being an American one was loved and/or envied throughout the world. It is crucial to mention this ideological transformation because until 1917, when the US entered the war on the side of the British elite, most inhabitants of the US could be seen as despised.
We have found, then, that we wish for the end, and deliberate and decide about what promotes it; hence the actions concerned with what promotes the end will express a decision and will be voluntary.
– Aristotle
The United States seems destined to plague us with miseries in the name of liberty.
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Latin America
Once the United States is in Cuba, who will get it out?
— José Martí, Cuban national hero
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.
— Che Guevara1 To my children (1965)
