You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.

Just before I left [Cuba], I was about to transfer to the university. I had decided I had had enough experience in work in the manual areas. But then I got word from the United States that I could return...that my party had gathered enough information about the false charges that were against me for me to return to the United States.

I don't want people to think he [Eldridge Cleaver] is so important - our party is important because our party works for the people and no individual is important in our party, including myself.

Institutions work this way. A son is murdered by the police, and nothing is done. The institutions send the victim's family on a merry-go-round, going from one agency to another, until they wear out and give up. this is a very effective way to beat down poor and oppressed people, who do not have the time to prosecute their cases. Time is money to poor people. To go to Sacramento means loss of a day's pay - often a loss of job. If this is a democracy, obviously it is a bourgeois democracy limited to the middle and upper classes. Only they can afford to participate in it.

I worked in the mechanical factories repairing cement trucks. The Cuban government wanted me to work in the university as a teacher in literature, but I declined because I wanted a more sense of the countryside.

The neighbors were more than neighbors [on Cuba]. They were like part of the family.