Top 449 Cuban Cigars Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

Why should Congresspeople have to visit D.C.? Thanks to Skype, meetings are possible across the country. Thanks to email, communications are simple. And we've had the technology to vote from afar for decades. Why should we have backroom deals made over cigars thousands of miles distant from those who are affected by those deals?

The US government's most acute fear is that other countries are going to follow the Cuban example. They want everybody to know that if you follow this example we will attack you in every way that we can.

I'm actually Cuban-born, born in 1956, the year Fidel Castro came into power, and my father moved my family to Miami a few years later when things were starting to look bad.

Because there's such a long tradition of the arts being very prominent and very varied in Cuban culture and society, people do use the art world as a space for critical reflection and people look to it for that.

My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.

The unyielding resistance of the Cuban patriots is symbolized by our 5 Heroes. They shall never back down! They shall never surrender!

One October day in 1976, a Cuban airliner exploded over the Caribbean and crashed, killing all 73 people aboard. There should have been 74. I had a ticket on that flight, but changed my reservation at the last moment and flew to Havana on an earlier plane.

Growing up in Miami, I had all these great, strong influences. You know, being Cuban and the Latin influence, but also the strong hip-hop influence.

By the way, if socialism is so damn hot, why doesn't the pope ask all Mexicans to return home? If capitalism is such a bad thing, why doesn't the pope say to every Cuban living in America, "Get the hell back to Cuba"?

America has had an influence on me, as has going out with a Cuban-American guy and having lots of American friends. But I am still fundamentally British and speak with a British accent and feel very English.

Here is the thing people do not understand. And I have said this repeatedly. I am not against changes in U.S. policy towards Cuba. I just want to make sure that those changes are reciprocal, that they're reciprocated by the Cuban government. That was not part of what President Obama did.

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble.

Funny enough, the person who is most bummed out to hear I won't be back is Mark Cuban. Despite what you might surmise from on screen, he and I are actually good friends - just really competitive good friends.

Just to be able to say that I'm from Miami, Florida, in the Winter Olympics was an honor, and I'm proud to be able to say that I'm playing on the U.S. national team for baseball from Miami as a Cuban-American.

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.

I gladly accepted the commission but was uncertain about what the end result would be. On the one hand, Cuban music was conquering the world; being heard everywhere, and our small island was already producing one of the popular musical genres of the 20th century.

Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

I have been obsessed with seamed stockings my whole life, and I would collect vintage ones that were made in the '40s and '50s with the authentic styling of the keyhole, the welt, the reinforced toe and heels, French or Cuban heels, and hand-stitched seams.

Freedom-loving people around the world must say . . . I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.

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.

Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America. That's why we restored diplomatic relations, opened the door to travel and commerce, and positioned ourselves to improve the lives of the Cuban people.

My grandmother is a little Cuban woman who cooks all day and speaks Spanish. Your grandmother watches pay-per-view porn." "She used to watch the Weather Channel, but she said there wasn't enough action." -Ranger and Stephanie

I don't think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail.

I'm Cuban, so I know a lot of people who act like vampires. But wait, vampires have to be invited to your house, so maybe they are nothing like Latinos!

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.

There was a time when emigration from Cuba was a definitive separation. There were no visits. In the '80s, '90s, it was incredibly difficult. I'm not the only one interested in this as a filmmaker - other Cuban filmmakers have dealt with it, too, because it's such a part of our reality.

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.

I really admire Ana Mendieta. She was a Cuban American artist who died the year I was born and whose work examines violence, feminism, and belonging. Her art is always brave and visually arresting and vibrates with meaning.

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.

In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

Nineteen-seventy-nine had been a year of American setbacks around the globe. Before the year began, Cuban troops were already roaming Angola, and a pro-Communist regime ruled Ethiopia.

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.

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.

Everyone has a black guy inside them. Mine is a Cuban sonero who is 80-something years old and sings better than I do. His name is Medoro Madera. Medoro has been recording since 1997.

There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by, and the problem will remain the same.

I am not the representative of guerrilla in this hemisphere. I would say that the representative would be Fidel Castro which was the leader of our revolution and who had the most outstanding role in the direction of the revolutionary struggle and directs the strategy of the Cuban government.

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.

I grew up in Florida, and I have a lot of friends, close friends, who are Cuban-Americans, and I have heard the stories of their families escaping, and some of them didn't even make it to come to the United States for a better life to get away from the Castros.

There is no one more talkative than Cubans, Cubans express their feelings, there's nobody more rebellious and revolutionary than a Cuban and I say that without chauvinism.

My grandmother would shanghai pilots at the Havana airport so they'd bring me cartons of mango baby food - the only kind I'd eat. I learned to eat peach later. And in every carton, she'd slip a Cuban record.

I can't eat beans - all beans. I think because I'm half Cuban. So growing up, we were always eating black beans and rice, and I think I just said, 'Enough with it,' and I can't even stand to taste it anymore.

Year after year, an ideological and economic barrier hardened between our two countries, meanwhile, the Cuban exile community in the United States made enormous contributions to our country, in politics, in business, culture and sports.

A white lady came running up to me after a show. She goes, What gives you the right to do jokes about black people like that. And I'm like, Listen lady, my best friend is Cuban. And that's close enough.

Looking for a job, I was working with the Salvadoran American Foundation, a humanitarian aid group, and from there, I got an offer from the Cuban-American National Foundation.

I can tell you I also smoked cigars 10 years before, and the watch, which is a Patek Philippe - it was my former wife who bought it for me as a gift when I completed my military service. What is all of this about anyway? I'm no wealthier than Bibi Netanyahu or Arik Sharon. I don't feel that I'm more hedonistic than Ehud Olmert, or Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres.

Cuban agents are assigned to a Catholic Church where their instructions are to beat, jail and intimidate the Ladies In White that attend Mass and who afterwards peacefully take to the streets calling for the release of their husbands, sons and fathers who are political prisoners.

The music is one of the beautiful things that has survived the Castro regime. I have played for audiences all over the world but I've never played for a Cuban audience. For [husband] Emilio and me, the music is the one tie to our homeland.

I pledged myself to smoke but one cigar a day. I kept the cigar waiting until bedtime, then I had a luxurious time with it. But desire persecuted me every day and all day long. I found myself hunting for larger cigars...within the month my cigar had grown to such proportions I could have used it as a crutch.

I see the sharp inequality between how Haitian and Cuban refugees are treated in Florida. Both groups come here because their lives are equally desperate. But on arrival, the Haitians are incarcerated, and some are immediately repatriated, whereas Cubans get to stay and are eligible for citizenship.

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.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc ended the massive subsidies that had kept the Cuban economy afloat. The once-vaunted education and health care systems fell into disrepair. Fidel Castro's stubbornness, meanwhile, made political and economic change difficult in Cuba.

My parents fled from a Cuban dictatorship in search of freedom. Growing up, I saw my parents struggle... I am here today because of them. My success is their success. Their sacrifice and perseverance made my education possible.

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 feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.

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.

Back in 2010, it didn't matter when it was only Cuban democrats, Zimbabwean dissidents, Afghan reformists and Russian bloggers whose lives and liberty were put at risk by Wikileaks' wilfully negligent data dumps.

'La Lupe' is my passion project. I've done it as a one-woman show, but I'm raising money to turn it into a film. It's a story of a Cuban singer who became the Queen of Latin Soul, the first woman on the N.Y. salsa scene.

What I do see is Cuban people that are just - want to see change. They are vibrant. They are trying to fix up old cars, so they can start their tourism businesses. There's hundreds of thousands of small companies that have already started under some exceptions that Raul Castro has put into place.

With the Cuban presence in Namibia it was possible to achieve the security and real freedom of that country and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, with the modest contribution of the international military presence in Africa.

We know next to nothing about the relationship between Chavez and Raul Castro. One thing, though, is certain. The Cuban military and political elite do not regard Chavez as a logical successor to Fidel Castro in Latin America.