Brin-Jonathan Butler Quotes

I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.

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.

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 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 come from Cuba. Taxes for me are no big thing.

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

The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore.

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.

Fidel Castro takes up so much space in the Cuban mind. It's hard for us to imagine as Americans - isn't it? - how much of everyday conversation he's dominated for 50 years.

Fidel Castro for me is like a father.

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.

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'm a staunch anti-Castro individual.

There are only two groups I recognize in Cuba: those who wholly support the revolution and those who are joining the reactionaries.

We cannot let the present government go on there [Cuba].

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

Sending $300 to your grandma in Cuba doesn't change the dynamic with Castro.

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 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.

People in America think of it as a sad and downtrodden place, and I guess it could be, but it's not because that's not who Cubans are. In Cuba, you get a good story every day you go out walking. People are so funny.

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

Where the 'Bay of Pigs' invasion failed, undoubtedly the tourist invasion will succeed in forever changing the landscape of island. What comes next in Cuba? The answer is that many Cubans aren't waiting around to find out.