Let us go on with our work and talk a little to the comrades about some principles of our Party and of our struggle.

Those comrades who were aware of a document published in 1965 under the title General Watchwords of our Party should remember that the final part is a chapter entitled ‘Apply Party Principles in Practice’. Obviously those watchwords dealt with fairly general principles and today we can talk about some additional principles. Everyone knows them well, but sometimes overlook that they are the foundation, the bases, the principle of our struggle. In other words, our struggle is seen in its fundamental political aspect, in its principal aspect which is the political aspect. Obviously for us to define, for example, the strategy and even the tactics we adopt in our armed struggle for liberation, other principles were stated, but these are no more than the application of our general principles to the field of armed struggle.

A first principle of our Party and our struggle, that we all know well, is: ‘Unity and Struggle’; which is even the motto, if you like, the theme of our Party. Unity and struggle. Obviously to study the basic meaning of this fairly simple principle we must know well what unity is and what struggle is. And we must put or treat the question of unity and the question of struggle in a particular context, that is from the geographical viewpoint and bearing in mind the society – social and economic life, etc. – of the environment in which we want to apply this principle of unity and struggle.

What is unity? We can clearly take unity in a sense which one might call static, at a standstill, as no more than a question of number. For example, if we consider the entirety of bottles in the world, one bottle is a unity. If we consider the entirety of men meeting in this hall, comrade Daniel Barreto is a unity. And so on. Is this the unity that we are interested in considering in our work when we speak of our Party principles? It is and it is not. It is to the extent that we want to transform a varied entirety of persons into a well defined entirety seeking one path.