Walter Salles Quotes

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'd like to go to Cuba.

I've been to Cuba many times.

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.

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.

In 1958, I was shooting a movie in Florida, and I decided to go to Havana, Cuba, to see what it was like.

Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.

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.

In Cuba, I didn't even have a bicycle.

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.'

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.

I always wanted to go to Cuba growing up. It was this fascinating, forbidden country that seemed to have a lot of politics and folklore and history behind it.

A road trip in Cuba is probably top of my list.

Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.

Cuba has long played an outsized role in the world's imagination.

'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.

Fidel Castro for me is like a father.

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

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

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.

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 don't think of investing in Cuba after all the hardships of the people there as a profit-making thing for us. I have thought of it as revitalizing the island.

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

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.