"In Cuba, Fidel Castro is still the one man
through whom everything has to go. Any
trade that goes through Cuba is going to
strengthen Cuba's regime."

- Condoleezza Rice
Financial Times, July 25, 2000

"Why are dictators of the left not scorned in the same way as those of the right? Was General Pinochet in his 17 years in power, less cruel or less bloody than Fidel Castro has been in his four decades ruling Cuba?

- Mario Vargas Llosa
The New York Times, November 1, 1999

"When the Church demands religious freedom...
she demands the effective recognition of an inalienable
right...the Church should have access to the
communications media, radio, press and television..."

- Pope John Paul II
During his 1998 trip to Cuba

"...my investment in Cuba would directly
 subsidize the oppression of the Cuban People..."

- Donald Trump
"A choice of Human Rights"
The Miami Herald, June 25, 1999

"...we also think of you and we believe that your longing for a free Cuba will also be fulfilled one day. It is really you - and not your jailers - who realize Marti's ideals in practice. It is you - and not them - who represent the best revolutionary traditions of your country..."

- Lech Walesa and Elena Bonner
Open Letter to Cuban Dissidents
The Washington Post, November 14 and le Monde, November 16, 1999

"I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement."
- Fidel Castro, 1959"

I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life."
- Fidel Castro, 1961

"Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main
dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete
readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance
and hidden rage of those who, in order to climb up in the
world, pr to have shoulders on which to stand."

- Jose Marti

Undemocratic conditions in Cuba, we encourage all the
brave Cubans who endure persecution and years of prison
for their loyalty to the ideals of freedom and human dignity."

- Vaclav Havel
Nobel laureate and President of the Czech Republic
Article on the similarities between the Cuba present and Czech past

"The only leader in Latin America who always wears a military uniform, and who steadfastly and on principle refuses elections, is Fidel Casto. Cuba citizens are forbidden by law to use hotels reserved for the rich and may not even enter many stores and pharmacies which trade only in dollars. After 40 years, there are few senior black faces in the supposed 'leadership'.

Many doctors have been trained, but they are paid less than the hotel doormen or policemen in the segregated tourist districts. The regime publishes a daily newspaper which all the literati's can ion of it given by the late Argentinean editor and dissident Jacobo Timerman, who described his morning encounter with that same paper as "
A degradation of the act of reading.

- Christopher Hitchens
Article "Havana Can Wait"
Vanity Fair, March 2000