Havana Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. Then, at last, I could sing for my people.

I have already transmitted to Congress the report of the naval court of inquiry on the destruction of the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana during the night of the fifteenth of February. The destruction of that noble vessel has filled the national heart with inexpressible horror. Two hundred and fifty-eight brave sailors and marines and two officers of our Navy, reposing in the fancied security of a friendly harbor, have been hurled to death, grief and want brought to their homes and sorrow to the nation.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.

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.