Top 101 Cuban Quotes

From time to time, the irresponsible acts of the Cuban government remind us that this is far more than about the freedom of one country, but it really is about the stability and security of the region and the national security interests of the United States.

Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface.

Socially, the Cuban revolution created an education system and health service that remain the envy of much of the neo-liberal world.

I’m a Hemingway fan, so in a manner of speaking, I’ve been fishing with him already. But man, would I love to board Pilar in Key West and head south until we have a day-long battle with a tarpon, haul that bad boy up, then celebrate by telling lies over rum on a Cuban terrace.

A political event was that I met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary. He is a young, intelligent guy, very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious; I think we hit it off well.

Dominicans, Nicaraguans, and even the already highly skilled Cubans greatly improved their baseball skills when occupied by U.S. troops. The only acceptable resistance to a hated American presence was to try to beat them in baseball games.

I remember very vividly, as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they’re still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.

The actions taken by the Cuban government with its new trade zone open up the potential of strategic investments from Mexico. Mexican companies are very excited.

I already had three strikes against me. One, I have light skin. Two, I’m from Miami, which wasn’t getting looked at at the time. Three, I’m Cuban. But now, I’ve made everything that stacked against me into a virtue.

It’s ridiculous how the United States practically every week sanctions Cuba and then uses manipulative language to say this is ‘helping’ the Cuban people.

I remember my parents taking me to see ‘The Exorcist’ in theaters when I was really young. They’re Cuban and didn’t really speak English, so I don’t think they got that it was a movie about a girl possessed by the devil.

I believe in the promise of America. Being a Cuban refugee, having come here when I was eight, I know that this is a shining city on the hill.

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it’s a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.

What I’ll say is that Cuban-Americans don’t have to deal with the same immigration issues as other nationalities because of the ‘wet feet, dry feet’ policy. For Cubans, one year after you touch United States territory, you can become a legal resident.

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.

I have the Cuban gene of speaking very loudly.

The Obama administration benefited the Castro regime. The Trump administration plans to benefit the Cuban people by taking away power from the government and directly emboldening citizens.

I’m Cuban. My parents are immigrants.

In 1995, the Clinton Administration reached an agreement with Cuban government that any refugee caught at sea would be sent back to Cuba while any refugee who reaches the United States shores would be allowed to begin the process to citizenship after one year.

Jose Marti, known as ‘the Apostle of Cuban Independence,’ was an influential poet, journalist, and political theorist who became a symbol for the Cuban people’s bid for independence. The concepts of freedom, liberty, and self-determination feature prominently in his work.

Since Castro took power, the Cuban people have been denied basic human freedoms. No freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no political freedom. And the regime uses brutality and violence to suppress these freedoms and impose its will.

I definitely see myself as an international musician. When I play, I respect the source of the music, whether it’s Cuban, Brazilian or Israeli. I try to bring that to all of the music I play. Music has no borders and no flags.

The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.

I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.

To our brothers in Latin America and the world, we must convey that the Cuban people will overcome.

You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it.

Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.

Cuba is a nation stuck in time, and the regime’s complete control of businesses, the press and the Internet has kept the Cuban people from advancing and achieving their dreams.

Whether you hear me come out with another album or whether you hear any one of the Clan members, we’re always going to involve everybody. When I look at ‘Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Part II,’ I look at that as a Wu album. You feel me? Even though it was my brand and my thing that I done, I had my dudes on it.

Ry Cooder for me is a master, a great master that has a wonderful feel for Cuban music. He’s also paid tribute my talent a bit, even though I don’t know half of what he knows.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It’s very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Growing up in Miami, being Cuban is integrated into our culture. When we greet anyone, we give them a kiss on the cheek.

When I first asked my boxing coach, two-time Olympic champion Hector Vinent, what made the Cuban style of fighting distinct from the rest of the world, he smiled and told me to sit on a bench in Prado and watch the Cuban women walk.

I hunt and fish, and I don’t fly on Lear jets, and I don’t smoke Cuban cigars.

Cuban athletes represent the most expensive human cargo on earth. They are sitting on over a billion dollars of human capital if these boxers and baseball players would come over to any other field or ring in the world and begin to ply their trade.

Castro branded Rigondeaux a ‘traitor’ and ‘Judas’ to the Cuban people.

The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.

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

Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.

My dad would call me his Cuban princess because I had really dark olive skin because I was always in the sun; but I don’t really go in the sun anymore, so that is why I am so white.

For more than fifty years, Americans and Cubans have been isolated from one another even though Cuba is only 90 miles away from Florida.

I’m not Cuban and therefore don’t have any family members who were oppressed by Castro’s regime. But I do have a number of friends whose families were.

Don’t blame America for the thousands of Cubans who have been arrested, detained, and imprisoned by Castro for peacefully protesting the regime.

While Fidel Castro used to deliver his marathon seven-hour speeches in Havana, Cubans used to joke that if Spanish lacked a future tense, their leader would be speechless. He was only fluent in broken promises, they lamented.

I grow up in the States, in Miami, but I was born in Guatemala, and my father’s Cuban, and in ‘Body of Lies,’ I played an Iraqi.

Politically speaking, Miami-Dade was once a Republican stronghold, thanks in large part to older Cuban voters who became more politically influential following the Bay of Pigs invasion. In contrast, Democrats used to rely on votes in North Florida and the Space Coast in an era of much softer partisanship.

My family is Jamaican and Cuban, but we would go to see our Jamaican side every summer for three months and every Christmas. One of the things I used to love was climbing trees and picking ackee fruit for breakfast.