“Here," an old sugar worker told me, "the people have a great love for martyrs--but only after they're dead. Before, there's nothing but complaints.”

“The Revolution, after discovering that it had confused the knife with the assassin, turned sugar, which had been responsible for underdevelopment, into an instrument of development. There was no alternative, born of Cuba's incorporation into the world market, to break the spine of that monoculture and dependence.”

“Grown on a grand scale, sugar spreads its blight on a grand scale and today unemployment and poverty are these islands' permanent guests.”

“Helena dreamed about the keepers of the fire. The poorest old women had stored it away in suburban kitchens and had only to blow very gently on their palms to rekindle the flame”

“Cuba,” he said in his resounding defense plea, “continues to be a producer of raw materials. We exhort sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows.”

“I would recognise myself in each of his translations and he would feel betrayed and annoyed whenever I didn't write something the way he would have. A part of me died with him, a part of him lives with me.”

“The world,' he revealed, 'is a heap of people, a sea of tiny flames.'Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every colour. Some peoples flames are so still they don't even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can't look at them without blinking and if you approach, you shine in fire.”