That first play I did in New York, Rogelio Martinez's 'When It's Cocktail Time in Cuba,' I played a young Fidel Castro.
Communism wasn't a word that I thought of when I went to Cuba. The original Fidelistas were not Communists. They were graduate students at the university and law students. After the Fidelistas took over, they went to Washington and tried to get support from the U.S. government, which turned them down. They were in a desperate political and economic situation, so they took the offer from the Soviet Union. Communism was a matter of necessity.
Havana.- If 1959 was the Year of Liberation, 1960 was the Year of the Agrarian Reform. The nation lived days of intense transformations, not only political but, also, in every aspect of social and individual activity of its citizens.
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.
The U.S.S.R. had absolutely nothing to do with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
I like Fidel Castro and his beard.
A road trip in Cuba is probably top of my list.
To the developing world, Cuba has been a symbol of sovereignty and resistance and a supporter of revolution - for good or bad. From the Missile Crisis to the anti-apartheid movement, from the Kennedys to Obama era, this small island has put itself at the center of world events.
I lived in Cuba - I was there for one year in the 1950s. We built the famous nightclub, which is still there, Tropicana, and a restaurant, Montecatini, that I opened is still there. I was there when the U.S. ambassador said everyone must leave because Castro was arriving the next morning.
The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere.
Violet speaks Spanish and understands it. She loves Cuban food! My mom is very good at teaching her about our culture, whether it be the food or Spanish or explaining to her that she's Cuban.
We should look to (Castro) as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult.
Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage.
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.
I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.
Fidel's oppressive legacy will haunt the Cuban regime and our hemisphere forever.
The last time the Diaz-Balarts were removed from power, it took a revolution, and we ended up with Fidel Castro.
I wanted to leave high school in 1958 and join the Cuban revolution. So the only reason I did not come to join [Fidel] Castro was because my mother would not let me. I was only 16.
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 have not been to Cuba, though if you count the stories my grandma told me growing up, I've been there in my head many times. I think someday I will see it, when things are different there, but I've come to feel like I really am a Miami girl.
It wasn't until Castro marched triumphantly into Cuba that you might say the whole thing grew into a Marxist revolution.
Thanks to pathetic reporting by The New York Times and other media sycophants more than 50 years ago, Fidel Castro, following the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, was also seen by many as a liberator of Cuba. 'I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.' Castro said at the time. Only after he consolidated power, did he tell the truth: 'I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.'
Havana is a source of great pride to the Cuban people.
So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana.
I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.
