Top 65 Havana Quotes & Sayings

What's overwhelmingly clear is 'Havana' didn't work for people, but why it didn't work I don't feel I can put my finger on in a way I can learn from.

The U.S. Embassy in Havana may be reopened, but outside its gates, an open society with more freedom for its people is still absent.

In Cuba and specifically in Havana there's a sort of energy that turns every situation into something unexpected.

Today more people lose their seats in the Politburo in Havana than in the Congress of America, ... We need to have competitive races for the Legislature. ... We have to have a clash of ideas.

We're in a global war, facing an enemy alliance that runs from Pyongyang, North Korea, to Havana, Cuba, and Caracas, Venezuela.

A good Havana is one of the best pleasures that I know.

So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana.

As far as cities go, Havana is a festering treasure chest, a primary color.

'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.

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.

I had a whistle-stop tour of Havana in a horse and carriage and couldn't stop taking photographs of the decaying yet enchanting buildings and people.

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

Havana is one of the great cities of the world, sublimely tawdry yet stubbornly graceful, like tarnished chrome - a city, as a young Winston Churchill once wrote, where 'anything might happen.'

On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups.

I picked a name that was a combination of an island name and a very English name. Havana was one choice and Dominico was another, but I liked the combination of Jamaica Kincaid.

The government in Havana is best understood as a cross between violent left-wing radicals and organized crime.

A man like Fidel Castro doesn't die: He is in the hearts and minds of the children who lined the streets when his ashes were driven from Havana, tracing the route of the revolution back to Santiago de Cuba.

Smoking too much makes me nervous. Must lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits. Holding heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip, it has a sort of Havana curl.

A cigar makers organization once said that I was the most famous cigar smoker in the world. I dont know if thats true, but once while visiting Havana, I went to a cigar factory. There were four hundred people there rolling cigars, and when they saw me, they all stood up and applauded.

The poorest guy in Miami lives better than much of the power elite in Havana.

So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana

No, he was no such charlatan-- Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-Pan-- Full of gasconade and bravado, But a regular, rich Don Rataplane, Santa Claus de la Muscavado, Senor Grandissimo Bastinado! His was the rental of half Havana And all Matanzas; and Santa Ana, Rich as he was, could hardly hold A candle to light the mines of gold Our Cuban owned.

The Congressman ascertained that the consulate in Havana had numbers to feed the pigs.

In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man

Camila Cabello did an amazing job with 'Havana.' It's Spanish, but it's English.

One of my favorite places I've visited is Havana, Cuba. On my way home from Costa Rica, I did a week in Havana. The colors, the music, the beautiful men and the cars! I love vintage and antique cars and own a couple myself.

Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.

Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.

Both for Havana's beauty and decay, it's very hard to restrain yourself from staring everywhere you look.

If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.

I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.

And so, whether they came here on the Mayflower, on a slave ship, or on an airplane from Havana, we are all descendants of the men and women who built here the nation that saved the world.

Here in Havana where families make about $20 a month, fewer than 5 percent have Internet in their homes, they are prepared. But it's hard to predict how sweeping this change will be, if the people of Cuba are even ready for it.

I feel like Havana has always been such an amazing, cosmopolitan city that it makes sense that a lot of galleries will want to be present.

The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.

Hundreds of years ago, the most beautiful women of Havana were only glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who arrived and saw this could never get past just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.

Michael still thought of Havana as home, because he was born there. And he had been Miguel Arroya there. Here, he was Michael.

I went to Mexico for three months after college and studied Spanish there. And I went to Cuba and studied at the University of Havana. I loved studying in other countries.

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.

We've been trying to open the gates of communication between Havana and Miami through art, which is apolitical most of the time: It doesn't have anything to do with politics and is only an exchange of ideas.

These musicians, such as these Cubans in Havana, are a part of a scene that did produce great music and great musicians. They came from this tradition, so it's a good place to look. It's like prospecting: You gotta know where to look.

Personally, what I would like the most is to work on a project that would aid the historic rehabilitation of Havana. It's a shame - and it gives me tremendous sadness - to see the precious buildings, to see a city, which could be the most beautiful in Latin America, falling apart and with very little money for renovations.

I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

Havana is a source of great pride to the Cuban people.

If there is a reason to believe in God, it would be the Havana Leaf.

Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.

I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter.

In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado.

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.

I was born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Madrid, Spain. Then I moved to New Jersey.

Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.

I love going to the factories of La Plata, or Little Havana and seeing them roll cigars. I get excited. To me it is more beautiful than a topless club

If the birth of a genius resembles that of an idiot, the end of a Havana Corona resembles that of a 5-cent cigar.

There was a lot of stuff happening in Havana that was being heard and appreciated by New Orleans musicians because of this situation. And vice versa.

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 was told before my first trip that no city in the world offered the dreams you could have sleeping in Havana. But nobody warned me that Havana also always feels like an exhausting nightmare that never quite fulfills the promise of what it's threatening you with.

In 1958, I was shooting a movie in Florida, and I decided to go to Havana, Cuba, to see what it was like.

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.

It didn't get any more glamorous than Havana, Cuba, in the 1950s. I used to go there when I was a waiter on a cruise ship.

There aren't that many galleries in Havana. There are a few state galleries and an ever-increasing but still limited number of independent galleries; there's no comparison with the number in New York.