"Today, self-defense as a system and as a reality has been liquidated by the march of events."

“In order to destroy one army, another army is necessary, and this ipmlies training, discipline, and arms. Freternity and bravery do not make an army. Witness Spain, and the Paris Commune.”

“In each country that has experienced a revolution a confrontation has taken place between revolutionaries on one side and reformists and future renegades on the other.”

“One may well consider it a stroke of good luck that Fidel Castro had not read the military writings of Mao Tse-Tung before disembarking on the coast of Oriente: he could thus invent, on the spot and to of his own experience, principles of a military doctrine in conformity with the terrain. It was only at the end of the war, when their tactics were already defined, that the rebels discovered the writings of Mao.”

“We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing the mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play. Each time the curtain rises, continuity has to be re-established. The blame, of course is not history's but lies in our vision, encumbered with memory and images learned in the past.”

“All decisive revolutionary processes must begin and have begun with certain missteps for the reason that we have mentioned: because the existing points of departure are those left by the preceding historical period, and they are used, even if unconsciously.”

“In Vietnam above all, and also in China, armed self defense of the peasants, organized in militias, has played an important role as the foundation stone of the structure of the armed forces of liberation-but self-defense extended to zones already militarily liberated or semi-liberated; in no way did it bring autonomous zones into being. These territories of self defense were viable only because total war was being carried out on other fronts, with the regular and mobile forces of the Vietminh. They permitted the integration of the entire population into the war without resting the principal weight of the struggle upon it. By dispersing the French expeditionary force, these zones lightened the task of the regular and semi-regular forces and permitted them to concentrate a maximum of troops on battle fronts chosen in accordance with the strategic plans of the General Staff. Even less than in Vietnam can self-defense be self-sufficing in Latin America-at least not if one aims to avoid the elimination of the civilian population.”