Quotes About Cuba

Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.

When America liked it? When Cuba was racially segregated? When education was only available to a privileged few? When the poor died of easily curable ailments? When vice was rampant? Had they preferred Batista's mafia-infested Cuba? Or the Cuba between the state that Teddy Roosevelt preened to subjugate and Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked to keep?

The Revolution did not assume a socialist nature because of support from the U.S.S.R.; it was the other way around: support from the U.S.S.R. was produced by the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution. To such a degree, that when the U.S.S.R. disappears, Cuba keeps on being socialist.

We've supported the development of Cuba's private sector. This is a human rights issue - people should have the right to live with dignity and to control their livelihoods.

The loss of the greater part of the American empire in the twenties had left no psychological scar, for it was lost in a civil war, of metropolitan against colonial Spaniards. Cuba was wrenched from Spain by defeat at the hands of a foreign power her press had taught her to despise as a nation of vulgar meat-vendors or to fear as a Colossus. It was the public destruction of the image of Spain as a great power which turned defeat into moral disaster.

If Cuba is Hell, Miami is Purgatory.

Due to a big bust in Cuba, my father's business suffered badly, so I was free to choose my own career. I became a professional dancer, and I went on the road and started making real money.

I wanted to leave high school in 1958 and join the Cuban revolution. So the only reason I did not come to join [Fidel] Castro was because my mother would not let me. I was only 16.

I acted when I was a real little kid. My mother was an actress in a Miami theater company comprised of actors from Cuba like her and I was the default kid.

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.

The roots of Cuban music are in my head.

Cuba is such a beautiful country, and everywhere you go, there's music and people dancing - especially in Havana.

What really swings is the music of the United States, Cuba, the Caribbean and vicinity, and, of course, Brazil. The rest is all waltzes.

In Cuba, taking into account the long fight for our independence and sovereignty, we will defend the one-party system in the face of the games, demagogy and the marketing of politics.

The only way to Cuba is with the CIA.

I have real fears for Cuba based on the South American experience. Where you have had such a stern regime, as Fidel's [Castro], there is no culture of politics.

Is it of any significance I wonder that the two countries of the Western Hemisphere whose governments the United States would most like to overthrow - Venezuela and Cuba -have the greatest National obsession with baseball outside of the United States?

If there is a reason to believe in God, it would be the Havana Leaf.

Then I received support from the Government to compete for my country, and to represent Cuba in competition.

I worked, studied, mothered and continued to be an activist. I found that Cuba was much different from the US; its government was genuinely trying to erase racism.

Try telling a Cuban: 'You should pay higher rent, or pay for your own healthcare' ... There is no serious opposition to the current government.

Here, too, were dozens of troopers whom Roosevelt knew only by their contradictory nicknames: "Metropolitan Bill" the frontiersman, "Nigger" the near-albino, "Pork Chop" the Jew, jocular "Weeping Dutchman," foul-mouthed "Prayerful James," and "Rubber Shoe Andy," the noisiest scout in Cuba.59

The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.

I was vaguely aware that people used to hijack planes to Cuba. But I didn't know much about how often it happened and what the motives were. I started looking into what was going on back then, and I was blown away by how common hijacking once was.