Quotes About Cuba

#1. As long as Fidel Castro is alive we [the American Government] will not normalize relations with Cuba. We don't want it, and he certainly doesn't.

Mark Falcoff

#2. I miss friends and family. If it weren't for visits from old friends and other African Americans I meet who come to Cuba, I'd probably be in some kind of time warp.

Assata Shakur

#3. My dad left when I was a little boy and I grew up with my mother's family. There were foundations in the U.S. where Jewish people got together and sent money to Cuba, so we got some of that. We were a poor family, but I was always a happy kid.

William Levy

#4. I played for Almendares in Cuba. Guess who was trying out for the team? Castro. Fidel Castro, as a pitcher. He could throw pretty hard, but he was wild. He didn't have any control.

Monte Irvin

#5. Our focus needs to be on freeing dissidents and continuing to support the opposition movement within Cuba - not rewarding Castro and subsidizing and strengthening his totalitarian regime.

Mel Martinez

#6. The Cuban people still live in constant fear of a brutal totalitarian regime that has demonstrated time and again its utter disregard for basic human dignity. The fight for a free Cuba has gone on for far too long.

Mitt Romney

#7. Patria o muerte! Motherland or death! Cuba si, yanqui no!

Ken Follett

#8. Tourism has affected Cuba, because tourists come and they bring racist, sexist ideas. They bring a whole vision that there are rich people all over the world and that's the way it should be.

Assata Shakur

#9. I think the art world will continue to be a place where people have a certain freedom and creativity to think about what's happening in Cuba.

Rachael Price

#10. 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.

Herman Melville

#11. I wouldn't like to see Cuba change in other ways. And the trouble is when Fidel [Castro] does go - I am sure he will at some stage. He will probably be replaced by some sort of Western capitalism, ultimately.

John Gimlette

#12. The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind! Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City!

Che Guevara

#13. No one played devil's advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy's "disastrous" decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11

Philip G. Zimbardo

#14. It turns out Cuba has this incredible healthcare system for a very poor country.

Michael Moore

#15. In 1958, a year before the revolution, Magnum wanted to send me to Cuba because they had contacts with the rebels. I'd just spent six months in South America and said 'No', so I missed everything.

Rene Burri

#16. I was sent down to Cuba. Everything had been prepared with the help of Congressman Johnson and his staff.

Erich Leinsdorf

#17. I was in Cuba in the winter of 1937. I was playing in Cuba, and I'm in the shower, and I slipped and caught myself with my right arm. I felt something pull right then. Then, in '38, when I came back, my arm was messed up.

Leon Day

#18. My life has changed in many ways, both on an economic and personal level. All major league players are accorded the respect they deserve. In Cuba, it was not that way. National team players were not respected. The treatment was not adequate.

Yoenis Cespedes

#19. Cuba has the cleanest and most-educated prostitutes in the world.

Fidel Castro

#20. I will keep my word. My father fled Cuba, and I will fight to defend liberty because my family knows what it's like to lose it.

Ted Cruz

#21. I lived in Cuba - I was there for one year in the 1950s. We built the famous nightclub, which is still there, Tropicana, and a restaurant, Montecatini, that I opened is still there. I was there when the U.S. ambassador said everyone must leave because Castro was arriving the next morning.

Sirio Maccioni

#22. I'm not a drinker, my body won't tolerate ... eh ... spirits, really. I had two martinis New Years Eve and I tried to hi-jack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.

Woody Allen

#23. I am Fidel Castro and we have come to liberate Cuba.

Fidel Castro

#24. President Obama has decided to have the United Nations review the law of Arizona. You have got to be kidding! We're now going to have countries like Cuba, Libya and Uganda sitting in judgment on Arizona's laws? Enough is enough!

Russell Pearce

#25. I loved sitting on my veranda sipping quality scotch, puffing a Cuban cigar and watching Cuba on the horizon, or the oceanic vista. Did this late in the evenings many times.

Dirk Benedict

#26. I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue?

Edwidge Danticat

#27. To give [the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba] even covert support is on a par with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world, nor on our own consciences.

J. William Fulbright

#28. Sudan replaced the U.S. on the U.N. Human Rights Commission joining Syria, and Cuba. So now, the commission members have no interest in upholding the stated mission of the panel. It's just like the Senate Ethics Committee.

Argus Hamilton

#29. People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know.

Hanif Kureishi

#30. Cuba is a wonderful country. What Castro's done is superb.

Helen Caldicott

#31. Suddenly, no one, including me, was in Guescheste anymore; they weren't in Miami or Cuba; they weren't in the present, or the future, but floating somewhre in the formless, timeless space of memory.

Richard Blanco

#32. I don't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years, and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida, and I will swim from Cuba to Florida.

Diana Nyad

#33. I was born in Cuba but was made in the USA.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#34. Except for food and medical supplies, the United States imposed a total embargo on Cuba on October 19, 1960.

Hank Bracker

#35. 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.

Elliott Abrams

#36. What is interesting in this is the exchange of music that occurred between New Orleans and Cuba, I mean, they had ferries that would go from one port to another.

Ruben Blades

#37. I did 'Lonely Hearts' with John Travolta and James Gandolfini. Talk about getting over your fears. These guys were amazing! Also, Cuba Gooding, Jr. is one of my favorites. We've made 3 films together. He is such a generous, giving actor.

Christa Campbell

#38. I had an amazing experience in Cuba. People there are fantastic. But I do have to say it's very nice to be back home in front of all of you capitalist pigs.

Conan O'Brien

#39. If you are a married man resident in Cuba, you cannot get a passport to go to the next town without your wife's permission in writing.

Edward Burnett Tylor

#40. I'm thirty-six years old and I've been married once and he left and I don't want to feel this way anymore. Like I can't be vulnerable. Can't relax. It's exhausting, always being on the defensive, keeping my guard up. I feel like Cuba.

Noah Hawley

#41. 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.

Henry Louis Gates

#42. I've been to Cuba many times.

Euzhan Palcy

#43. Fidel Castro's justice, while seeking refuge with his rebel troops in the Sierra Maestra mountains, was harsh and the penalty for violating some of his rules was death." See page 286, "The Exciting Story of Cuba

Hank Bracker

#44. The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

Federico Garcia Lorca

#45. You probably heard about the big prisoner swap with Cuba. A man who has been incarcerated in Havana for five years is back home in the United States. And we sent them some prisoners. The deal still has to be approved by President Obama and Bud Selig.

David Letterman

#46. Forty-two years ago, I came to America from communist Cuba so I might have a better way of life, a freer way of life - a more democratic way of life. I wanted to live the American Dream where if you worked hard and put your mind to the task, anything was possible.

Mel Martinez

#47. I think it's wrong for North America in particular, the West in general to make a comparison between the economic situation in Cuba and the extraordinarily developed industrial complex of North America.

Huey Newton

#48. For me personally Cuba has been a healing state. When I first got here I had no sense that I had to heal or anything. When you're struggling for your life and you're in the midst of things, you don't feel all the blows.

Assata Shakur

#49. Because he'll take me to Cuba and I don't want to go to Cuba.

Elian Gonzalez

#50. I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things.

Wim Wenders

#51. I trust Cuba as a principled country. Cuba's strength is that it has been steadfast in its commitment to the principles of liberation, freedom, of resistance to the kind of institutionalized terrorism that the United States government does every day.

Assata Shakur

#52. Being born in Cuba, a country where freedom of speech is non-existent, it's startling to observe how Venezuela, where I was happily raised, is fast becoming Cuba's mirror image: Dismantling of fundamental democratic rights deserved by its people and citizens of the world.

Maria Conchita Alonso

#53. Our Cuba policy didn't make much sense during the Cold War and makes even less sense now.

Stephen M. Walt

#54. In Cuba, His Holiness [Pope Francis] won't find a government that protects its people and their God-given rights. Instead, he will find a regime that oppresses people and hinders progress, both socially and politically.

Marco Rubio

#55. Cuba may be the only place in the world where you can be yourself and more than yourself at the same time

Pedro Juan Gutierrez

#56. In consigning Elian back to slavery without a hearing, this administration is setting back the cause of freedom
in this country and in Cuba.

David Limbaugh

#57. The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.

Stephane Hessel

#58. Left-leaning policies - I'm 52 years old, I've been to Cuba, I've been to dysfunctional state oriented places - left-leaning policies fail the lower and middle classes.

Anthony Scaramucci

#59. First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life.

Milan Kundera

#60. My hope is that the Pope Francis visit to Cuba will remind all the Cuban citizens that they possess dignity and fundamental rights that come from God and that the Castro regime has no claim on changing what is 100% God-given.

Marco Rubio

#61. I wish that they had the freedoms like the Japanese and the Koreans and the Mexicans and everybody else that has that freedom to come over here and play the game, because I know Cuba has a very strong baseball history.

Rafael Palmeiro

#62. If I want to fuck Cuba, then I'll enjoy every dirty moment. I'm not afraid of getting my heart broken Leo. There's not one there to break.

Ilsa Madden-Mills

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

Antonio Carlos Jobim

#64. The neighbors were more than neighbors [on Cuba]. They were like part of the family.

Huey Newton

#65. It's amazing how everything here seems like it's in abundance. In Cuba, there is a shortage of everything.

Jose Contreras

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

Rachel Kushner

#67. My parents made it a point that, although I was born and raised in New York City, I needed to speak Spanish because they wanted me to be able to communicate with my elders when I went to Santo Domingo or when my family came to visit from Cuba.

Selenis Leyva

#68. In Latin America in general, and Cuba in particular, poets have been the inspiration behind struggles for independence, struggles for freedom of all sorts.

Margarita Engle

#69. History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone's heritage." Captain Hank Bracker. This quote is from the flyleaf of the award winning book "The Exciting Story of Cuba.

Hank Bracker

#70. But Cuba doesn't have a dictatorship it's a revolutionary democracy.

Hugo Chavez

#71. My grandfather left Cuba when Castro came into power and literally left everything. He had two suitcases and two kids and showed up in New Jersey and waited for my uncle to meet up with him. Imagine - there were no cell phones back then!

Chrissie Fit

#72. Since [violence against women] is rooted in discrimination, impunity and complacency, we need to change attitudes and behavior - and we need to change laws and make sure they are enforced just like you are doing in Cuba.

Ban Ki-moon

#73. A missile is a missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile fired from the Soviet Union or from Cuba.

Elie Abel

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

Julia Sawalha

#75. Naked, you are blue as the night in Cuba;
You have vines and stars in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.

Pablo Neruda

#76. Standing, as I believe the United States stands for humanity and civilization, we should exercise every influence of our great country to put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence.

Henry Cabot Lodge

#77. On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.

Joan Didion

#78. My first film was with Cuba Gooding Jr, 'The Fighting Temptations,' and I had a little part here and there on little shows as guest stars. And I've taken acting classes.

NeNe Leakes

#79. It's absurd. We would all like to see Cuba move toward civil society and free markets and greater respect for human rights. But the U.S. policy is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

Wayne Smith

#80. American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

Noam Chomsky

#81. There's some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the '60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba.

Aaron McGruder

#82. Well, you know, I left Cuba as a kid when I was 6 years old back in 1971.

Rafael Palmeiro

#83. I am convinced that in the upcoming chapter of the struggle, I can be more useful to the inevitable change that will soon come to Cuba, to Cuba's freedom, as a private citizen dedicated to helping the heroes within Cuba.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart

#84. There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination, we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalisation of relations with Cuba.

William Attwood

#85. We should never suffer Cuba to pass from the hands of Spain to any other European power.

Henry Cabot Lodge

#86. Cuba," he said in his resounding defense plea, "continues to be a producer of raw materials. We exhort sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows.

Eduardo Galeano

#87. Can you imagine that Cuba and Europe's youth, who had forgotten about traditional music, who only thought of rock music, are now looking back towards their grandparents? That is a phenomenon.

Compay Segundo

#88. If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.

Antonio Carrillo Flores

#89. For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.

Barbara Walters

#90. Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

Carlos Fuentes

#91. I pray the Pope Francis can use his moral authority to inspire true religious freedom, and bring us closer to the day when freedom can finally take root on the island country; because only then will the people of Cuba prosper and have the opportunity to live out God's plan.

Marco Rubio

#92. For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people.

Pico Iyer

#93. 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.

Yul Vazquez

#94. Cuba will find its own way, regardless of what the U.S. wants. This has always been the case, not just since 1959.

Mark Falcoff

#95. The administration's attempt to keep us from selling agricultural products to Cuba is an outrage. Cuba is not a threat. That is why we must do more to open Cuba - not less.

Max Baucus

#96. Particularly during the late 1960s, a large number of American skyjackers earnestly believed that Fidel Castro's Cuba was an egalitarian, post-racial utopia.

Brendan I. Koerner

#97. Tourist trips to Cuba are being abused. They are tourist trips that are providing hard currency for a dictatorial, tyrannical regime to get hard currency that it uses to oppress its people. And that's why these trips need to be carefully scrutinized.

Marco Rubio

#98. The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba
yes Cuba too.

Malcolm X

#99. I grew up in Cuba under a strong, military, oppressive dictatorship. So as a teenager, I found myself involved in a revolution. I remember during that time, a young, charismatic leader rose up, talking about hope and change. His name was Fidel Castro.

Rafael Cruz

#100. I was not chosen to be president to restore capitalism to Cuba. I was elected to defend, maintain and continue to perfect socialism, not destroy it.

Raul Castro