Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something beautiful.
For me personally Cuba has been a healing state. When I first got here I had no sense that I had to heal or anything. When you’re struggling for your life and you’re in the midst of things, you don’t feel all the blows.
My experience in the United States was living in a society that was very much at war with itself, that was very alienated. People felt not part of a community, but like isolated units that were afraid of interaction, of contact, that were lonely.
When you go through all your life processing and abusing your hair so it will look like the hair of another race of people then you are making a statement and the statement is clear.
People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television before they ever see a courtroom.
I’ve always been a student of different ways of looking at the world, different religions. That’s been part of my survival mechanism, and also part of my curiosity as a person.
What most impressed me about Cuba was the optimism.
And if I know anything at all, it’s that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down.
I really prefer to be kind of anonymous. Because when people know your whole history, they have a tendency to relate to you differently and maybe put you up on a pedestal. I want people to just be normal with me. I just want to live my life.
I’ve tried as much as possible to avoid the standard nine-to-five thing. I’ve tried to organize my life so that I can move around, change the rhythm and the tempo.
A revolutionary woman can’t have no reactionary man.
I was sentenced to life plus 30 years by an all-White jury. What I saw in prison was wall-to-wall Black flesh in chains. Women caged in cells. But we’re the terrorists. It just doesn’t make sense.
How lovely it is to live with a sense of community. To live where you can drop in the street and a million people will come and help you.
In my case, spirituality has been important to me because at periods in my life there’s been very little else that I’ve had going. I’ve actually needed to call on, to feel the forces of good in this universe to be able to survive.
When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.
Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika’s schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.
Hip Hop can be a very effective way to reach young people and teach them about current political and social issues.
I stay connected in my head. I’m spiritually and psychologically connected to African-Americans. They are my people, and that will never change.
We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.
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.