Wealth & Money Quote by Fidel Castro

Castro turns economic debate into a punchline with a blade behind it. “Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away” reads like self-critique, but it’s also a preemptive strike: he names the accusation before his opponents can, then repurposes it as a moral distinction. “Using” money suggests cold efficiency, money as a tool to reproduce more money. “Throw it away” sounds reckless until you hear the implied object: not cash into a bonfire, but resources diverted from profit toward social aims that don’t “pay” in capitalist terms - literacy campaigns, universal health care, subsidized basics, geopolitical solidarity.

The line works because it dramatizes the state’s wager. Revolutionary legitimacy in Cuba depended on demonstrating that a planned economy could deliver dignity faster than a market economy could deliver consumer choice. Castro’s quip concedes scarcity and misallocation - the chronic headache of the Cuban system - while reframing them as evidence of different priorities. If capitalism “uses” money, it uses people too; if socialism “throws” money, it’s allegedly refusing to let efficiency become the only ethic.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Cuba lived under embargo, dependent on Soviet backing, forced into improvisation. Waste wasn’t theoretical; it was daily. Castro’s rhetorical move is to convert administrative failure into principled sacrifice, turning austerity into a badge. It’s gallows humor as governance: an admission that the revolution can’t match capitalism’s sleek productivity, paired with the insistence that matching it was never the point.