My main point in this regard was to compete for my country and my people and to receive the support of the entire Cuban society, to carry my flag in whatever competition I was in, the Olympic Games, Pan-American Games.
Alberto Juantorena
Those who have always had faith in its final success can do no less than rejoice as if it was our own triumph after five years of daily struggle to impose Cuban music on the European continent.
Alejo Carpentier
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.
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.
Alexander Acosta
Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust - the blackest day of a horrendous week.
Alistair Horne
Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.
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.
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.
Alma Guillermoprieto
Fidel Castro's most scandalous show trial was not mounted against a political figure but against a writer: Heberto Padilla. In 1971, after 38 days of detention, Mr. Padilla was forced to 'confess' at the Cuban writers' union to the charges of 'subversive activities.'
Alvaro Enrigue
Rebuilding our relationship with Cuba would be a win for American business and a win for the Cuban people.
Amy Klobuchar
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.
I normally speak by moving my hands, and I'm very expressive with my face - something Cuban, I guess.
Ana de Armas
Miami is one of these places where diversity is in our blood, where, you know, if you want to go have a Nicaraguan breakfast, a Cuban lunch, and an American diner dinner, you do.
Ana Navarro
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.
Anat Cohen
I listen to and I play all kinds of music, and I'm interested in jazz and in bluegrass - I like it all - but Cuban music speaks to me in a certain way.
Andy Garcia
Cubans can be as conversant as any Netflix-and-chill American about popular shows like 'House of Cards' or 'Black Mirror', and they drop allusions to the 'Lannisters' and 'Omar Little' constantly.
Antonio Garcia Martinez
The lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that - and who won't leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn't.
Arthur L. Herman
Culture is a fluid, ongoing process. People tend to look at culture in a fixed time but it's constantly moving and evolving, as is the conversation between Americans and Cubans.
Arturo O'Farrill
I grew up in an environment with virtually no Hispanics where you see only people in your culture in custodial jobs. I had a messed up image of what we bring to this nation. My father was known as a pioneering figure in Cuban music, but I still associated him with everything that was negative in my neighborhood. I could not have been more mistaken.
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.
Barack Obama
My father is Cuban. Spanish was my first language, but I don't speak it that much anymore because I had dyslexia, and in school they work with you only in English. But I'm proud to be Latina, and most people don't know I am.
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, our policy towards Cuba was not making life better for Cubans. In many ways, it was making it worse.
The Catholic Church played an integral role in supporting the opening between the U.S. and Cuban governments.
While President Obama raised the hopes of Americans and Cubans alike with a forward-looking opening in diplomatic, commercial and people-to-people ties, President Trump is turning back the clock to a tragically failed Cold War mindset by reimposing restrictions on those activities.
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.
Havana is a source of great pride to the Cuban people.
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.
For more than fifty years, Americans and Cubans have been isolated from one another even though Cuba is only 90 miles away from Florida.
Increased remittances to Cuba from the United States has helped Cuban families.
We want to open up more opportunities for U.S. businesses and travelers to engage with Cuba, and we want the Cuban government to open up more opportunities for its people to benefit from that engagement.
Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?
I want all Hispanics in the Republican Party, in the Democratic Party, whether Latin Americans, Central Americans, Cubans, Mexicans, I want us to unite.
With President Obama restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, the immigration preferential treatment given to Cubans... no longer makes sense.
Since he took power over half a century ago, Fidel Castro proved to be a brutal dictator who must always be remembered by his gross abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cubans, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship upon his own people.
Fidel's oppressive legacy will haunt the Cuban regime and our hemisphere forever.
I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.
I will not ascribe to the 'Blame America' club for vicious abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cuban labor, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship.
Don't blame America for the thousands of Cubans who have been arrested, detained, and imprisoned by Castro for peacefully protesting the regime.
He's the best practitioner I've ever seen of the Cuban style. But I think that what Rigondeaux sees as an immaculate performance has no corollary to what fans see as a perfect performance. In his mind, to make an opponent look terrible who has been lauded as exciting or favored against him gives him satisfaction.
My documentary 'Split Decision' examines Cuban-American relations, and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro's revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.
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.
Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.
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.
'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.
Many of the greatest Cuban boxing champions since the revolution triumphed on the island resisted the temptation to leave Cuba and, in some cases, defied any suggestion they were tempted in the first place. Most famously, Teofilo Stevenson rejected multi-million dollar offers to leave his island to fight Muhammad Ali.
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.
In the summer of 2007, two-time Olympic champion Guillermo Rigondeaux and his teammate, Erislandy Lara, had been arrested in Brazil after going AWOL from the Cuban team during the Pan Am Games. The defection attempt made international news and quickly became a national soap opera, regularly appearing on Cuban news and round table discussions.
Castro branded Rigondeaux a 'traitor' and 'Judas' to the Cuban people.
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.
