About

This database includes speeches, interviews, etc., by Fidel Castro from 1959 to 1996. All texts are in English. If you would like more recent speeches or texts in Spanish, please consult Discursos e Intervenciones de Fidel Castro, which has texts in a variety of languages starting with 1998, Discursos: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores at the Cuban Foreign Ministry, or Discursos y otras intervenciones de Fidel Castro.

You can search the Castro Speech Data Base by using the box above, or you can browse the collection by date using the links to the right.

"Castro Speech" is a database containing the full-text translations of speeches, interviews, and press conferences by Fidel Castro, based upon the records of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), a U.S. government agency responsible for monitoring broadcast and print media in countries throughout the world. These records are in the public domain.

The Department of Research of the Radio Martí Program, part of the U.S. Information Agency, undertook the task of digitizing FBIS reports from 1959 through the end of the 1980s. FBIS records are now produced online and updates to the Castro Speech database have been made electronically.

The files are organized by year and with files named according to the date of the speech, interview, or event (e.g., 13 July 1987 = 19870713). If there are two or more events on the same date, files are named sequentially by adding extensions (e.g., 19870713.1, 19870713.2, etc.). The convention has been to name files in accordance with the date of the event; however, file names may vary in that the date of the event, date of the broadcast, and date of the report are often different and inconsistencies will occur.

There are several caveats that users should keep in mind:

  1. It is not to be construed that this database contains all statements, speeches, and interviews made by Fidel Castro.
  2. There is no guarantee that all FBIS records have been acquired and entered into the database. Further, FBIS corrections of original transcriptions have not been incorporated into the database.
  3. For critical research needs, it is suggested that users compare the text of FBIS translations with an original source such as the newspaper Granma, the Granma Archives Index, or other collections of speeches by Fidel Castro, such as the Discursos e Intervenciones de Fidel Castro collection.