When U.S President Donald Trump openly threatens Cuba and Latin America—reviving the language of siege, punishment, and imperial entitlement—he is not improvising. He is speaking the native tongue of U.S. imperialism. What appears today as vulgar bravado is, in fact, the unfiltered expression of a system that has always treated the region as a backyard, its peoples as expendable, and sovereignty as a privilege granted only to obedient regimes.
The quotations that follow are not retrospective commentary or theoretical speculation. They are political interventions delivered at moments of open conflict, when U.S. imperialism asserted itself through war, economic coercion, and ideological aggression. Read together, they expose a continuity that Trump merely makes more explicit: the dictatorship of capital on a world scale, enforced by the United States and resisted, openly and relentlessly, by Fidel Castro.
1. “The United States believes it has the right to decide the destiny of all peoples. That is the essence of imperialism.”
Castro pronounced this sentence at the UN General Assembly in September 1960, standing inside the political headquarters of the very power he was accusing. Cuba had already faced economic retaliation, diplomatic isolation, and covert operations. This was not defiance for effect: it was a direct challenge to the core imperial doctrine that global power confers political authority. Castro stripped U.S. policy of its rhetoric and reduced it to its material foundation—domination justified by strength.
2. “Imperialism cannot forgive a people that frees itself.”
Delivered in February 1962 during the Second Declaration of Havana, this line was spoken to the Cuban masses and, through them, to Latin America. The context was one of escalating U.S. aggression following the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Castro identified independence itself as the unforgivable act, making clear that no level of compromise could reconcile a sovereign socialist project with imperial interests.
3. “The Platt Amendment was the legal consecration of Cuba’s submission to U.S. imperialism.”
Still in 1962, Castro revisited the juridical mechanisms of domination. The Platt Amendment, imposed in the early 20th century, was exposed not as a historical anomaly but as proof that imperialism rules not only through armies, but through constitutions drafted under coercion. Law, in this reading, becomes an extension of force.
4. “The United States has lived by exploiting the labor, the resources, and the blood of other peoples.”
Spoken in the mid-1960s, while U.S. interventions expanded across Latin America and Southeast Asia, this statement rejected the mythology of American prosperity. Castro tied wealth accumulation directly to imperial extraction, identifying capitalism’s global center as parasitic rather than productive.
5. “The same imperialism that bombs Vietnam blockades Cuba and murders revolutionaries in Latin America.”
During the Vietnam War, Castro insisted on a unified understanding of U.S. violence. This was a strategic intervention against attempts to compartmentalize imperial crimes. Whether through napalm in Asia, coups in Latin America, or economic siege in the Caribbean, the same system was operating under different tactical forms.
6. “Imperialism is not a mistake or an excess; it is a system built on domination.”
In the early 1970s, Castro moved decisively away from event-based criticism. This formulation rejected the liberal notion that imperial violence results from bad leadership or miscalculation. Instead, it framed U.S. aggression as structurally necessary to monopoly capitalism and its global expansion.
7. “The United States cannot exist without wars, interventions, and threats.”
This declaration was made in 1979 at the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Havana, in front of dozens of governments formally outside the U.S.–Soviet bloc system. Castro was not appealing for neutrality; he was warning that U.S. imperialism required permanent conflict to sustain its dominance, of Cold War alignments.
8. “Human rights are used by the United States as a pretext to destroy governments it does not control.”
During the 1980s, as Washington justified interventions in Central America through moral discourse, Castro dismantled the ideological weaponization of “human rights.” He pointed out the systematic hypocrisy: crimes by client regimes were ignored, while any defiant government was demonized and targeted.
9. “The blockade is an act of war against an entire people.”
In the early 1990s, amid Cuba’s Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Castro described the U.S. embargo in explicitly military terms. This was not metaphorical language. The blockade aimed to produce hunger, social breakdown, and political collapse—outcomes indistinguishable from warfare.
10. “Economic blockades kill like bombs, but silently.”
Speaking again at the UN in 1995, Castro expanded the argument: sanctions function as weapons of mass destruction without spectacle. Their victims die slowly, invisibly, and without headlines. The absence of explosions, he argued, does not make the violence any less real.
11. “Never has arrogance reached such extremes as under U.S. domination.”
This statement captured the unipolar moment of the 1990s, when U.S. power faced no counterweight. International law, multilateral institutions, and sovereignty were increasingly subordinated to unilateral decisions enforced by economic and military pressure.
12. “The United States believes it has the right to govern the world by force.”
After September 11, 2001, Castro responded to the so-called “War on Terror” by rejecting its premise. What was presented as self-defense, he argued, was in reality a doctrine of global military rule, granting Washington the authority to invade, occupy, or destroy entire countries.
13. “Not even the worst Roman emperors dared to claim the power the United States claims today.”
Delivered at the May Day rally in Havana in 2006, during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, this comparison framed U.S. imperialism as an empire in decline—expansive, violent, and increasingly lawless. The reference to Rome was not rhetorical excess, but historical warning.
14. “The United States has built an empire sustained by lies, manipulation, and fear.”
In his Reflections columns of the 2010s, Castro focused on ideological domination. Military power alone was no longer sufficient; empire required permanent propaganda, distortion of reality, and psychological warfare to legitimize endless aggression.
15. “The greatest danger to humanity is U.S. imperialism.”
One of Castro’s final formulations condensed a lifetime of confrontation into a single conclusion. After decades of wars, coups, blockades, and environmental destruction, he identified U.S. imperialism not merely as an oppressor of nations, but as a systemic threat to human survival itself.
Fidel Castro’s revolutionary thought is timely not because history repeats itself, but because imperialism has not exhausted itself. The same mechanisms he identified—economic strangulation disguised as sanctions, military force masked as “security,” propaganda replacing truth—now operate on a wider scale and with fewer restraints. What has changed is not the nature of power, but its arrogance. In an era of open threats, permanent wars, and legalized economic violence, Castro’s insistence on naming imperialism as a system, not a series of mistakes, cuts directly against the dominant narratives of our time. His words endure because they offer no comfort, no illusions, and no false neutrality—only a clear line of confrontation between domination and resistance, one that today’s world has once again been forced to cross.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
