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I'll be honest with you I hate war in all its forms Physical, psychological, spiritual Emotional, environmental I hate war And I hate having to struggle, I honestly do Because I wish I had been born into a world where it's unnecessary This context of struggle and being a warrior and being a struggler Has been forced on me by oppression Otherwise I would be a, a sculptor, or a gardener, carpenter You know, I would be free to be so much more I guess part of me or a part of who I am, a part of what I do Is being a warrior, a reluctant warrior, a reluctant struggler But, I do it because I'm committed to life We can't avoid it, we can't run away from it Because to do that is to be cowardice To do that is to be subservient to devils, subservient to evil And so that the only way to live on this planet With any human dignity at the moment is to struggle
But after awhile I began to understand that oppressed people —just by being oppressed — suffer serious wounds. You might go into a store, and somebody might follow you around the store, and you would have a choice of how to react: you could confront them and say "Why are you following me around the store?" or you could say to yourself: "Well, I came here to buy some socks, so let me just concentrate on buying the socks." But you still feel the pain. The obvious racism before had affected me, the prisons, torture... my whole life had created wounds, scars in me that in Cuba I was able to find a space to begin to heal. To begin to think, "Yeah, this happened", and I can look at it and see it for what it was but not be there, not be destroyed by it, not be turned into something bitter and evil by it. And not be like my enemies. Because I think that the greatest betrayal that a revolutionary can participate in is to become like the people you are struggling against. To become like your persecutors. I think that is a betrayal and a sin.
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people that were oppressing them.