I have experience and I am employing it in the service of a Chilean road for Chile's problems. We always take advantage of experience wherever it comes from, but adapting it to our reality. I am putting it to use in a Chilean way, for the problems of Chile. We are not anyone's mental colonists.

People can progress only by working and producing more.

Fidel Castro is a man with a great sense of self-criticism and respect for his political friends. He is not going to give me instructions, and I am not the type of man who would take them. That's not to say that I don't approve of what is happening in Cuba, but he would never send me a letter telling me what to do or not to do.

I have been to Cuba many times. I have spoken many times with Fidel Castro and got to know Commander Ernesto Guevara well enough. I know Cuba's leaders and their struggle. It has been difficult to overcome the blockade. But the reality in Cuba is very different from that in Chile. Cuba came from a dictatorship, and I arrived at the presidency after being senator for 25 years.

If the U.S. is going to defend itself, why shouldn't we do the same? We only want to be treated equally, nothing more.

People can come and see me, and I have the pleasure of being able to talk to them.

The Popular Unity government represented the first attempt anywhere to build a genuinely democratic transition to socialism - a socialism that, owing to its origins, might be guided not by authoritarian bureaucracy, but by democratic self-rule.