Quotes About Cuba

Bush is the Liberace of Cuban politics. He knows how to play us. He says every single thing they want to hear.

My family is very creative. My grandfather played the guitar in Cuba. My sisters, my mom and two aunts would do harmonies, so I would see them and think, 'I want the attention.'

the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery.

I don't think of investing in Cuba after all the hardships of the people there as a profit-making thing for us. I have thought of it as revitalizing the island.

All the Cuban government wants to do - and all it's demonstrated to the world - is that they want a repressive, authoritarian control; a Communist dictatorship to continue in the island. So anything that we do to try to help the island ultimately becomes fuel for them to repress their citizens.

Look what we did with Cuba. You isolate a country, and all you do is impoverish that country.

As a result of their own experience in a country with historical social mobility, American policy makers are often blind to deeply embedded social stratifications that characterize other societies. The only successful political revolution in the western hemisphere that also resulted in a social revolution was that of Fidel Castro's Cuba in 1959, a revolution that the United States spent the next fifty-plus years trying to contain or reverse.

Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.

With the notable exceptions of rum drinks, black beans, fat brown cigars, the smiles of pretty girls, hot yellow sunlight, and fat men with guitars and bongos playing mambos, rumbas, and boleros late into the night, nothing in Cuba comes easily.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

'What comes next?' is the constant question I'm asked by outsiders eager to travel to the island. During the eleven years I traveled to Havana, very few Cubans I met on the island ever bothered to verbalize this question.

I traveled to Cuba with the intention of speaking with boxers who had turned down enormous offers to leave. When explaining my project to people, again and again I was met with amusement and skepticism.

We want to open up more opportunities for U.S. businesses and travelers to engage with Cuba, and we want the Cuban government to open up more opportunities for its people to benefit from that engagement.

A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn't the police or even the secret police; it's their neighbor. Anyone can report you for anything 'outside' the revolution - even if you haven't done it yet.

If Beyonce and Jay-Z had been born and raised in Cuba, they would have merely survived, with no opportunity to realize their aspirations. Only in a land that treasures liberty and the pursuit of happiness can such dreams become a reality.

With President Obama restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, the immigration preferential treatment given to Cubans... no longer makes sense.

If the United States has normalized relations with Cuba, why would we treat illegal immigrants from that nation any different than those from other countries? It is time we level the playing field and end the outdated, preferential treatment for Cubans.

We go in to liberate Cuba, but Cuba still isn't free; we don't really think through what we'll do after the initial treaty is signed, but we're still occupying. There's chaos and torture and finally an outcry.

Jazz and Cuba are inexorably tied together; it's not a branch from a tree. Latin music is part of the root of jazz.

They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?

She is Cuba. If you want to love her, you have to be with her, but you can't be with her in her current state. It's the point of view of all exiles - you have to leave the thing you cherish most.

In Cuba, where Wi-Fi is both slow and terrible, you will be an emissary from the future, a hint of the degeneracy to come. You're a full-on mainlining internet junkie with the world's uproar piped into your head 24/7, your emotional landscape terraformed and buffeted by whatever some narcissist just posted on Instagram or some windbag on Twitter.

Cuban cigars

When I was 14, in Cuba, I met Fidel Castro with my dad, and it was really impressive. And on a totally different level, I met Justin Timberlake!