Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
Alan Furst
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
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.
Alvaro Enrigue
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.
Andrea Navedo
The government in Havana is best understood as a cross between violent left-wing radicals and organized crime.
Ben Domenech
Havana is a source of great pride to the Cuban people.
Ben Rhodes
As far as cities go, Havana is a festering treasure chest, a primary color.
Brin-Jonathan Butler
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.
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.
Both for Havana's beauty and decay, it's very hard to restrain yourself from staring everywhere you look.
'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.
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.
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.
I would really like to be reborn as my wife, Bhavana, because people keep telling her that she has got a beautiful husband.
Chunky Pandey
I was born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Madrid, Spain. Then I moved to New Jersey.
Daisy Fuentes
The Congressman ascertained that the consulate in Havana had numbers to feed the pigs.
Erich Leinsdorf
I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana.
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
The poorest guy in Miami lives better than much of the power elite in Havana.
Joe Garcia
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.'
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.
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.
If they opened things up and I could build a luxury condominium in Vedado, I would sell them in two hours here in Miami. Cubans in Miami would be the first to buy. In Miami, 80 percent of the people we sell to are foreigners. Havana is a city very similar to Miami... There's good music, good theater, good ballet.
Cuba is such a beautiful country, and everywhere you go, there's music and people dancing - especially in Havana.
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.
My father was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. His family is from Spain. My father never taught me how to speak Spanish when I was little. That's very disappointing to me. I'm still planning on learning it on my own. I really want to travel to Spain and immerse myself in the culture and learn it on my own.
Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.
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.
Camila Cabello did an amazing job with 'Havana.' It's Spanish, but it's English.
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.
Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
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.
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.
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.
We're in a global war, facing an enemy alliance that runs from Pyongyang, North Korea, to Havana, Cuba, and Caracas, Venezuela.
In 1958, I was shooting a movie in Florida, and I decided to go to Havana, Cuba, to see what it was like.
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.
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.
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.
