Our position is that we do not accept conditions of any kind which may affect the independence and sovereignty of our country just with the view to solve economic problems existing between the United States and Cuba.
I've always been very ambitious, and I always knew that I wanted something else. Cuba was a good start, but I knew I wasn't going to develop a real career, and I wanted to get closer to filmmakers that I wanted to work with.
Cuba wants to get rid of a dictator, and baseball needs a dictator.
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.
The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.
I think I'm going to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida.
There were people in Cuba who truly had substantial things to gain from revolution. There were people who had things to lose in the revolution. I think they're all allowed to have their memories of what happened.
I traveled to Cuba with the intention of speaking with boxers who had turned down enormous offers to leave. When explaining my project to people, again and again I was met with amusement and skepticism.
Our Cuba policy didn't make much sense during the Cold War and makes even less sense now.
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.
With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.
Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.
Of course, the kind of support that Cuba could give us was very limited when it came to building up our army, since they didn't manufacture armaments in the quantities that we required. So we turned to Algeria and the Soviet Union for support.
Communism in Cuba will collapse sooner or later because you can't control the free flow of information. Communism prevents organizations from developing by stopping the flow of information. The system is based on police and listening devices and triggers the worst characteristics in humans.
Where the 'Bay of Pigs' invasion failed, undoubtedly the tourist invasion will succeed in forever changing the landscape of island. What comes next in Cuba? The answer is that many Cubans aren't waiting around to find out.
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.
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.
To me, the New Jersey law enforcement community, and many other Americans, one of the biggest impediments to improved relations between the United States and Cuba is the continued safe haven provided to the fugitive, Joanne Chesimard.
I didn't come here without a visa, like everyone from China and Vietnam and Cuba. I came here by special plane... received by the ambassador, by the president of the United States. I should be the most honored man in your country.
As the son of a Cuban refugee and cousin and nephew to many Cubans on the island, I cringe when Americans visit Cuba for a fun island vacation.
A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn't the police or even the secret police; it's their neighbor. Anyone can report you for anything 'outside' the revolution - even if you haven't done it yet.
The world's longest-serving dictator has just stepped down and handed over power. The national project of Cuba, which was Fidel's vision, is now finished. It's something - a small something, but still something.
I moved to Madrid with 200 bucks in my pocket to see what was going to happen. Of course, I didn't know that 200 euros was nothing, because in Cuba, 200 was a lot, and the money I had been saving from my movies.
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.
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 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.
Sending $300 to your grandma in Cuba doesn't change the dynamic with Castro.
The U.S. trade embargo on Cuba is almost completely ineffective, as many other countries, including the European Union, do not honor it.
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.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but I remember watching 'Boyz n the Hood,' and there is a scene where Cuba Gooding, Jr. gets pressed against a car by a police officer, and he starts crying because it's so humiliating. I remember thinking in that moment that I could totally identify with him, and I'm a little white kid from Canada.
Performing, not rehearsing, is a dancer's raison d'etre, and I've been lucky to 'etre' in some extraordinary places - Cuba, Paris, Mongolia. In particular, a two-week stint in Greece leaps to mind. We danced in the Acropolis's Herodes Atticus amphitheater, once a venue for gladiator spectacles.
The embargo doesn't affect the United States, not even minimally; all of Cuba's economy is smaller than that of Miami-Dade County, and the ones who suffer the most are Cubans. If you talk to them in the street, they're the ones most interested in the opening of a free market in their country.
When I was 14, in Cuba, I met Fidel Castro with my dad, and it was really impressive. And on a totally different level, I met Justin Timberlake!
Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage.
Hostility toward Iran may not be the silliest of all American foreign policies - that would probably be the continuing trade embargo of Cuba - but it is undoubtedly the most self-defeating.