Portal:Communism/Selected quote/34

“ It would, therefore, be false to say that they had a revolution there without a struggle. That will always be a lie. And I believe that it is not correct for any revolutionary to wait with arms crossed until all the other peoples struggle and create the conditions for victory for him without struggle. That will never be an attribute of revolutionaries. There are those who believe that a peaceful transition is possible in some countries of this continent; we cannot understand what kind of peaceful transition they refer to, unless it is to a peaceful transition in agreement with imperialism. Because in order to achieve victory by peaceful means—if in practice such a thing were possible, considering that the mechanisms of the bourgeoisie, the oligarchies and imperialism control all the means for peaceful struggle ... And then you hear a revolutionary say: They crushed us; they organized 200 radio programs, so and so many newspapers, so and so many magazines, so and so many TV shows, so and so many of this and so and so many of that. And one wants to ask him: What did you expect? That they would put TV, radio, the magazines, the newspapers, the printing shops, all this at your disposal? Or are you unaware that those are the instruments of the ruling class designed explicitly for crushing the revolution? (APPLAUSE)

They complain that the bourgeoisie and the oligarchies crush them with their campaigns, as if that were a surprise to anyone. The first thing that a revolutionary has to understand is that the ruling classes have organized the State so as to dedicate every possible means to maintaining themselves in power. And they use not only arms, not only physical instruments, not only guns, but all possible instruments to influence, to deceive, to confuse.

And those who believe that they are going to win against the imperialists in elections are just plain naive, and those who believe that the day will come when they will take over through elections are even more naive. It is necessary to have lived in a revolutionary process and to know just what the repressive apparatus is by which the ruling classes maintain the status quo, just how much one has to struggle, how difficult it is.

This does not imply the negation of forms of struggle. When someone writes a manifesto in a newspaper, attends a demonstration, holds a rally or propagates an idea, he may be using the so-called famous legal means. We must do away with the differentiation between legal and illegal means; methods should be classified as revolutionary or non-revolutionary.

The revolutionary employs various methods to achieve his ideal and his revolutionary aim. The essence of the question is whether the masses will be led to believe that the revolutionary movement, that socialism, can come to power without a struggle, that it can come to power peacefully. And that is a lie! And any persons in Latin America who assert that they will come to power peacefully are deceiving the masses. (APPLAUSE)

” — Fidel Castro (1926)
Speech to the OLAS Conference , 1967