Top 544 Cuba Quotes & Sayings

Part of me believes that Beyonce and Jay-Z were naive when they chose to celebrate their five-year wedding anniversary in Cuba. However, as the daughter of a former political prisoner in Cuba, I would argue that they should have known better than to travel to the island and support its repressive regime.

My fantasy of Cuba was that everybody was going to be going around looking like Fidel, with green uniforms - and it was very different from my vision of how Cuba was going to be.

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

The real reason Cuba poses a threat has nothing to do with my being here or anyone else being here. It's because Cuba is an example of a country that is actively fighting against imperialist domination and insists on its own right to self-determination and sovereignty.

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.

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.

Despite the situation in Cuba, I had a chance to play on the national team; and compared to other baseball players and other people in Cuba, I had the opportunity to live at a level that was not very high class but in the middle.

For some reason, we can't go to Cuba, businesses in American can't do business in Cuba. I think that that is stupid. So I hope very much and applaud the president for his efforts in that direction and hope that in the not-too-distant future, that if I have anything to say about it as president, we will work aggressively to develop normal relations in every respect with the people of Cuba.

We need to ensure that our foreign policy towards Cuba incentivizes and makes it easier for there to be a democratic transition. That is how I would examine our foreign policy towards Cuba.

The legacy of the embargo will be Cuba's poverty and desperation. When the island comes out of it, they'll be even more desperate than they are now about the things they think they've missed. I think one of the unintended results of the embargo is that Cuba is quite consumerist - and I'm talking about the people, not the government or the official propaganda.

I'm simply asking that people who arrive from Cuba receive the same treatment as any other immigrant who comes from another country. The only difference, obviously, is that the Cuban Adjustment Act will remain in effect, that a Cuban who arrives today from Cuba may remain in the U.S.

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

I'm interested in where I'm going and the people I am there to see. Going to Cuba was a great example of that, and the succession of going into Cuba, which is not a very easy place to get into, and playing music for people who have never seen a live rock concert outdoors like that.

I was born in Cuba. At the age of 14 years of age I was involved in a revolution. We were suffering from a very cruel, oppressive dictatorship, and the revolution started in the high schools and the universities. So when I was 14, I was involved in the revolution. I was in the revolution four years. During that time, a young, charismatic leader rose up in Cuba, talking about hope and change. His name was Fidel Castro.

Both my parents came with their parents during the revolution in Cuba. Both my parents were born in Cuba. They left everything over there. My family got stripped of everything - of their land, of their jobs, everything.

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.

The people in Cuba, they know what I stand for, and there's a lot of people in Cuba that stand for the same. But they can't say it.

You're going to tell me that things aren't right in Cuba, and so we shouldn't engage. It's lunacy. Look outside your door and see the inhumanity of Americans... that we perpetrate on a daily basis in our lives... and then tell me that you're going to isolate Cuba as an example. I'm sorry; that's unacceptable.

We have to remember that literally within months after Castro's taking office the planes from Florida were beginning to bomb Cuba. Within a year, the Eisenhower administration secretly, but formally, decided to overthrow the government. Then came the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Kennedy administration was furious about the failure of the invasion and immediately launched a major terrorist war and economic war that got harsher through the years. Under these conditions it is kind of amazing that Cuba survived.

Being in Cuba has allowed me to live in a society that is not at war with itself. There is a sense of community. It's a given in Cuba that, if you fall down, the person next to you is going to help you get up.

My eyes were bad. I stuttered. I had hepatitis, double pneumonia, even anemia. When I was 7, my family took me on a trip to Cuba, and all my ailments disappeared. Cuba gave me health, so I've been deeply attached to Cubans ever since.

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.

Cuba continues to be a source of instability in the region. For example, historic numbers of people are fleeing the island of Cuba, putting migratory pressure on the United States. Number two, this Cuban government is anti-American. They sponsor - they allow the Chinese and the Russians to conduct espionage, electronic espionage and others from the island of Cuba.

I have been to Cuba many times. I have spoken many times with Fidel Castro and got to know Commander Ernesto Guevara well enough. I know Cuba's leaders and their struggle. It has been difficult to overcome the blockade. But the reality in Cuba is very different from that in Chile. Cuba came from a dictatorship, and I arrived at the presidency after being senator for 25 years.

Esperando (Cuando Cuba Sea Libre) is probably one of the most personal songs from the new [September, 2007] CD, "90 Millas" . . . as it really speaks about the celebration, nostalgia and emotion that will happen the day Cuba is free. If we're to move forward in Cuba, we really have to have a lot of forgiveness for each other and look towards the future.

Cuba does not attack; Cuba defends, Cuba shares.

President Trump reversed the previous administration's disastrous policy of appeasing Cuba and has implemented a vigorous sanctions regime against Nicaragua. Our hope is that the people of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua will one day live in democracies like the rest of their neighbors.

They're willing to accept changes on the part of the U.S. that contribute to more money entering Cuba so they can benefit. But in terms of political changes on the island, an opening, etc., that won't happen, that won't change, and I've always said that, from the beginning. I've even said that it doesn't matter how many tourists who to Cuba, how many times the President visits Cuba; there won't be any changes in the Cuban government's posture. And that is the same as always.

I've always said that I'm open to changes in the relations between Cuba and the U.S., but that Cuba must make changes also.

In Cuba the elections for the powers of the State comes from the people, first it comes from meetings of the citizens at the base. In Cuba we call them blocks, the divisions of a city that is the term we use. Several blocks of neighborhoods that live in the same area gather in assemblies that are stipulated by law. In those assemblies the people choose freely among themselves who will represent them. The criteria takes into account the candidates characteristics, including if they are hardworking, If they are good people, if they have a clean past, and money has no bearing on who is nominated.

Let's be honest: The trade embargo with Cuba hasn't secured our interests or helped the Cuban people. Because the way to promote positive change and better human rights in Cuba is through engagement, not isolation.

If you look at Cuba what's the benefit in being in Cuba? Really? It's almost like being in prison. You can't think. You can't have your own opinions. You have no opportunity. You just gotta live life the way you were born into it.

Comandante Fidel Castro loves Cuba! But his love for humanity, if you'll pardon the expression, trumped his love for Cuba: He was universal; he was an internationalist, and he put that spirit in the hearts and minds of the Cuban people through the Cuban Revolution.

Take Cuba. A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it too. But the government won't allow it.

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.

Cuba is actually one where I am more optimistic because of the unique nature of Cuba - 90 miles off our shore with a massive ex-patriot population, now Cuban-American population that still have deep links to the island. There I am more confident that over time that the winds of commerce and telecommunication and travel start shifting the nature of that regime. But that's a small country which has almost a unique relationship to us.

The Indians on board said that thence to Cuba was a voyage in their canoes of a day and a half; these being small dug-outs without a sail. Such are their canoes. I departed thence for Cuba, for by the signs the Indians made of its greatness, and of its gold and pearls, I thought that it must be Cipango.

Cuba is not like bourgeois democracy the ones that imposes the blockade to make Cuba change. We have direct elections. Here they put people on a list and then tell the people supposedly what they have done so they can be elected. That is the difference and why we say our democracy is truly participatory and popular.

You Americans keep saying that Cuba is ninety miles from the United States. I say that the United States is ninety miles from Cuba and for us, that is worse.

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.

There is a reason why Nelson Mandela went to Cuba to praise Castro and thank the Cuban people almost as soon as he got out of jail. That's a third world reaction and they understand it. Cuba played an enormous role in the liberation of Africa and the overthrow of Apartheid, sending doctors and teachers to the poorest places in the world, to Haiti, to Pakistan after the earthquake, almost everywhere. The internationalism is just astonishing. I don't think there has been anything like it in history.

If you look at US internal documents, they explain very clearly what the threat of Cuba was. So, back in the early 1960s the State Department described the threat of Cuba as Castro's successful defiance of US policy, going back to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine established the US claim to dominate the Western hemisphere and Castro was successfully defying that. That's not tolerable. It is like somebody saying "let's have democracy in Greece," and we just can't tolerate that so we have to destroy the threat at its roots.

That might be the old model: to get a fixed fee. You have to start to think about other models and how they can generate interest - what it can do for a brand in the future - and about the fact that revenue can also be generated in many other ways... Just look at the one and a half million people at the free Rolling Stones concert in Cuba. And Cuba is not Central Park! So just use your imagination as to what kind of revenue can be made.

I won't perform in Cuba until there's no more Castro and there's a free Cuba. To me, Cuba's the biggest prison in the world, and I would be very hypocritical were I to perform there.

Cuba harbor fugitives of American justice. There are people living on the island of Cuba who have violated American law, including those who have stolen millions of dollars from Medicare fraud in South Florida and have fled to Cuba. Those are three reasons right there to care about what is happening on the island of Cuba, which happens to be 90 miles from our shores, basically a neighboring country.

Normal relations, never. We should never forget what has happened to the people in Cuba for forty years. All baseball cares about is getting players out of Cuba. It doesn't care about the suffering, just money. The Orioles shouldn't have gone to Cuba. This is a free county, but that's the way I feel.

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.

I believe that the bigger problem is that we're seeing people who arrive from Cuba and a year and a day later are travelling to Cuba 40 times a year, they're staying, and that's hard to justify. The problem is not that I want to deny anything to anyone; it is the need to justify those laws.

In the era of slavery, you could be a so-called Afro-Cuban one day and a so-called Black American the next day, or vice versa. I mean there was all this back and forth, and there was a lot of opposition in Black America to slavery in Cuba in particular, because slavery in Cuba lasted until the 1880s.

Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.

When we decided to go to Cuba to perform, we did it because we just wanted to build a bridge, you know, between Cuba and the rest of the community. And we just wanted to prove that music and art need to be over all ideology or way to think life, and we just wanted to go in there and play just because of love.

Being an online platform, we ran into challenges with Cuba's lack of Internet accessibility. We were able to work around that by creating a program unique to Cuba where many local hosts are working with hosting partners who have Internet access and can help them manage their Airbnb requests and bookings.

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.

A criminal pipeline from Cuba to Florida threatens U.S. national security interests with Cuban migrants exploiting U.S. law, stealing from the American taxpayer, and paying the Cuban government to live large off the cash in Cuba.

Faith leaders, young people, American companies, human rights advocates, and many others have demonstrated a unique interest in our Cuba policy. But no community cares more deeply about these issues than Cuban Americans - young and old - who have maintained a profound interest in Cuba and an abiding faith in the Cuban people.

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.

It is said that Cuba is not a priority for the United States... That begs the question why then are there laws... with the objective to attack and to try and control the destiny of Cuba.

The Kennedy Administration's public pronouncements on the matter suggested that the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Castro's Cuba would represent an unacceptable strategic threat to the United States. . . . This urgent transformation of Cuba into an important strategic base - by the presence of these large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass-destruction - constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. . . .

When Fidel Castro is gone, there will be hope for Cuba. There will be opportunity for Cuba.

The problem of giving health care to everybody cannot be solved so long as we're spending huge sums of money for war. Already we have a very wasteful healthcare system, the most wasteful healthcare system in the world. I mean, we spend the most money and still have 40 million people without insurance. Compare us to Cuba. Cuba is our enemy, run by a dictator, Fidel Castro. But people in Cuba get health care at least equal to that of the United States - with very scarce resources. So I think this issue is the most important domestic issue.