Quotes About Cuba

There is my life in Cuba and my life in America, the old life and the new life, and almost nothing about them is the same.

I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.

Keith Bolender, Voices From the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba (London: Pluto Press, 2010).

Sandecker picked out a cigar from a humidor on the bedside table and lit it. Even though the trade embargo with Cuba had been lifted in 1985, he still preferred the milder flavor and looser wrap of a Honduras over the Havana. He always felt that a good cigar kept the world at bay.

Russell Bufalino had secret interests in Las Vegas casinos and not-so secret connections to the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, whom Fidel Castro toppled in 1959. With Batista's blessings Bufalino had owned a racetrack and a major casino near Havana. Bufalino lost a great deal of money and property, including the racetrack and the casino, when Castro booted the mob off the island. Time

The Morro Castle was regularly engaged in a traffic in armaments. The shipments were used by the Cuban dictatorship of Gerardo Morales Machado to suppress a growing Communist influence on the island. There are strong indications that the shipments were organized by powerful U.S. business interests concerned about the threat Communist activities would pose to the handsome profits coming from Cuban tobacco and sugar.

Unilateral sanctions on Cuba have been oppressive and largely ineffective, and that's why the public largely supports lifting them.

The U.S. trade embargo on Cuba is almost completely ineffective, as many other countries, including the European Union, do not honor it.

Of course, the kind of support that Cuba could give us was very limited when it came to building up our army, since they didn't manufacture armaments in the quantities that we required. So we turned to Algeria and the Soviet Union for support.

Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba.

Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.

Many things shall change in Cuba, but they shall change because of our efforts and despite the United States. Perhaps that empire shall crumble first.

Visionless status quo policy towards Latin-America, particularly towards Cuba, has turned off a lot of people, and I think it's created an opening.

The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn't an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth.

The world's longest-serving dictator has just stepped down and handed over power. The national project of Cuba, which was Fidel's vision, is now finished. It's something - a small something, but still something.

Fidel Castro disclosed that he was reading Churchill's World War II memoirs. "If Churchill hadn't done what he did to defeat the Nazis, you wouldn't be here, none of us would be here," he told a crowd that had gathered to see the new Cuban leader when he visited a Havana bookstore. "What is more, we have to take a special interest in him because he, too, led a little island against a great enemy." Another surprising fan

The notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where you can live without working must be erased forever.

Even today, when the Obama administration has liberalized travel to Cuba - and failed to reverse that liberalization when Alan Gross was imprisoned - there are limits.

Inés de Bobadilla, Cuba's first woman governor

In Cuba, everything seemed temporal, distorted by the sun.

Cubans all had free universal health care, which was the best in the Latin American world, and free education all the way through college. They are the most educated people in the Latin American world. The literacy rate is almost 100 percent. In addition, they are the most sophisticated moviegoers. The average Cuban sees more than six movies a year, while the average American goes to the theater just under two times a year.

A lot of groups spend their whole cultural and aesthetic identity trying to move away from Africa, which I think is a mistake. One of the reasons I love Cuba and cultures like that is because they're not trying to move away from their African roots, they're trying to embrace them. That's part of the culture.

One crisis, in Cuba, mounted quickly after Fidel Castro staged a successful revolution against a corrupt pro-American dictatorship and triumphantly took power in January 1959. Castro at first seemed heroic to many Americans. When he came to the United States in April, he was warmly received and spent three hours talking with Vice-President Nixon. But relations soon cooled. Castro executed opponents and confiscated foreign investments, including $1 billion held by Americans.

The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the U.S. from entering into a full conflict with Cuba.