“Too many people in the u.s support death and destruction without being aware of it. They indirectly support the killing of people without ever having to look at the corpses. But in Cuba i could see the results of u.s foreign policy: torture victims on crutches who came from other countries to Cuba for treatment, including Namibian children who had survived massacres, and evidence of the vicious aggression the u.s government had committed against Cuba, including sabotage and numerous assassination attempts against Fidel.
I wondered how all those people in the states who tried to sound tough, saying that the u.s should go in here, bomb there, take over this, attack that, would feel if they knew that they were indirectly responsible for babies being burned to death. i wondered how they would feel if they were forced to take moral responsibility for that. It sometimes seems that people in the states are so accustomed to watching death on “Eyewitness News”, watching people starve to death in Africa, being tortured to death in Latin America or shot down on Asian streets, that, somehow, for them, people across the ocean — people “up there” or “down there” or “over there” — are not real.”
- Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (1987)