“The economic crisis also means the aggravation of major problems that are far from being solved: poverty, hunger and disease, which kill tens of millions of people in the world every year; illiteracy, lack of education, unemployment, and the exploitation of millions of children through child labor and prostitution; the trafficking and consumption of drugs, which mobilizes and absorbs hundreds of billions of dollars; money laundering; the lack of drinking water; the scarcity of housing, hospitals, communications, schools and educational facilities.”

“It is the primary duty of the overburdened leaders of our complex world --among many other obligations and without forgetting hunger, poverty, underdevelopment, the diseases that decimate entire regions, the climate changes and other calamities-- to meditate and reflect on the causes and the sources of the dangerous pandemic of terrorism and to apply really effective methods to fight it.”

“In Cuba, the social and human nightmare denounced in 1953, which gave rise to our struggle, had been left behind just a few years after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. Soon, there were no longer (…) undernourished, barefoot, parasite-ridden children, without schools or teachers, even if their schooling took place beneath the shade of a tree. They no longer died in massive numbers from hunger, disease, from lack of resources or medical care. No longer were the rural areas filled with unemployed men and women.”