Scott Simon Quotes

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.

That first play I did in New York, Rogelio Martinez's 'When It's Cocktail Time in Cuba,' I played a young Fidel Castro.

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 first thing out of Fidel Castro's mouth to me, he looked me right in the eye and said, 'You're a man of great courage.'

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.

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.

I like Fidel Castro and his beard.

Fidel Castro for me is like a father.

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

I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.

I'm a staunch anti-Castro individual.

Fidel's oppressive legacy will haunt the Cuban regime and our hemisphere forever.

Havana is a source of great pride to the Cuban people.

The last time the Diaz-Balarts were removed from power, it took a revolution, and we ended up with Fidel Castro.

The Elian events were shocking to Cubans because we were the fair-haired boys of the Cold War. The problem is, the Cold War ended.

'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.

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.

I doubt that Fidel will ever come back to power. I think he is slowly going to the great beyond. Too slowly . . . he could have gone a long time ago.

Fidel Castro gave it all to make his nation serviceable to all who desire real change. That's why I love Fidel Castro, and that's why he will never die.

Fidel Castro just talked a long time, and he talked and he talked and he talked and he talked... and he talked during the meeting. I think it was about four hours. But I guess that's part of the Castro spirit.

Meeting Fidel Castro was really cool. It's cool because it's Fidel, and it's a world leader, and there's so much history behind the man and who he is in this hemisphere. And then at the end of the day, he's, I think, just like a big mayor. There's only, like, 11 million people in Cuba. He's a big mayor.

I first interviewed Fidel Castro 39 years ago. He was charming and fiercely guarded about his private life. He called our interviews 'fiery debates.' During our times together, he made clear to me that he was an absolute dictator and that he was a staunch opponent of democracy.

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.

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.