Quotes by Cuban Authors

There is nothing like the whites of someone’s eyes to convince you how very true what you believe is, how very much you must act on it.
Jennine Capo Crucet
We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.
Maria Irene Fornes
The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice. You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come. Where will you be a few years down the line? Will it be everything you dreamed of? We seal our fate with the choices we take but don't give a second thought to the chances we take.
Gloria Estefan
The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice. You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come. Where will you be a few years down the line? Will it be everything you dreamed of? We seal our fate with the choices we take but don't give a second thought to the chances we take.
Gloria Estefan
Unbelievably, while many non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and America’s Watch have denounced the human rights situation in Cuba, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro.
Armando Valladares
People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
Assata Shakur
Some people suffer from the green-eyed monster called envy.
Ana Monnar
If I had to do it all again, I would still want my same daughter and two sons; through laughter, tears, prayers, and blessings.
Ana Monnar
She was almost too beautiful. Maybe that sounded stupid, but there wasn't another way to describe it.
Chanel Cleeton
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.
Assata Shakur
Play to win because almost doesn't cut it.
Ana Monnar
Weather out the storm in the island of tranquility to find inner peace.
Ana Monnar
The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.
Raul Ramos y Sanchez
In common with librarians the world over, the two women were used to dealing with a disproportionate quota of odd people acting strangely.
José Latour
If you take risks, you may fail. But if you do not take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to do nothing.
Roberto Goizueta
In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation of because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noted that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I confided the details and feelings I hadn't even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents' attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don't adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn't the same as knowing - and having others know - that the one who went the other way was my own brother.pp. 175-176
Leonardo Padura
Sometimes I tend to worry too much and at the end of all the preoccupation nothing goes wrong.
Ana Monnar
Man can never be more perfect than the sun. The sun burns us with the same light that warms us. The sun has spots (stains). The ungrateful only talk about the spots (stains). The grateful talk about the light.
José Martí
Marriage without love is just one more twisted form of slavery.
Margarita Engle
It seemed to him that life's true tragedy was to lift up one's voice among the living and be met with indifference.
Cristina García
Columbus gave Europe a New World; [Alexander von] Humboldt made it known in its physical, material, intellectual, and moral aspects.
José Cipriano de la Luz y Caballero
I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards.
Alberto Salazar
The anxious wait lasted four years, and the alert ears never despaired of hearing, at any moment, the voice of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Macandal had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses, and stood poised once more, sinewy and hard, with testicles like rocks, on his own human legs" (36-37).
Alejo Carpentier
For instance, when people press their lips together in a manner that seems to make them disappear, it is a clear and common sign that they are troubled and something is wrong.
Joe Navarro
The problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing, or, as Sherlock Holmes, the meticulous English detective, declared to his partner, Dr. Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.
Joe Navarro
Man is Nature's most wonderful creature. Torturing him, crushing him, murdering him for his beliefs and ideas is more than a violation of human rights-it is a crime against all humanity.
Armando Valladares
He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.--Havana Red
Leonardo Padura
I was almost twelve years old when I decided to kill my parents.
Armando Lucas Correa
I can't understand why dark northern soldiers and light ones are seperated into different brigades. The dead are all buried together in hasty mass graves, bones touching.
Margarita Engle
Think of your mother and smile for all of the good precious moments.
Ana Monnar
The most important thing in my life is to be the best mother that I can be to my daughter and two sons; full of blessings and love. I can guide them, pray for their goals to be achieved, and follow a good path; but ultimately it will be up to them to live their own lives and make their own choices knowing there are rewards and consequences.
Ana Monnar
Surprisingly, I came closer to really knowing myself, not because I feared death, because we were always aware of it, but rather because I was always challenging myself about what had led me there and about how strong my commitment really was.
Aleida March
It seemed that there was no time to catch up with all the things that were happening. I would be at the construction workers' demonstration one day and then marching with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with everything - the rent strikes, the sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give active support in some way. The more active i became, the more i liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole ...My energy just couldn't stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of the struggle and i wanted to dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me.
Assata Shakur
Most of us felt that taking control of our neighborhoods was the first step toward liberation...First, we would take control of the schools; then we would take control of the hospitals; then we would take control of the colleges, the housing, etc., etc. We would have community controlled employment, welfare centers, and city, state, and federal agencies.'Hold on for a minute,' somebody said. 'Where are y'all gonna get the money to run all that stuff?''We'll take community control of the banks,' someone answered.'You'd better take community control of the army, too, because those banks aren't gonna just let you take their money lying down."'We'll take control of the political institutions in our community. Then we'll take control of the congressional seats, the senate seats, the city council seats, the mayor's office, and every other office you can take control of. We'll take control of the political offices so we can allocate money to the people who need it.''Y'all just wishing and hoping,' someone said. 'You can control the social institutions and the political institutions, but unless you control the economic and military institutions, you can only go so far.
Assata Shakur
Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.
Cristina García
The creation of conditions by which an entire people who have lived in exploitation and illiteracy gains access to the highest levels of knowledge and creativity is one of the most beautiful achievements of a revolution.
Roberto Fernández Retamar
As women in today's society, we are encouraged to compare ourselves to other women when what we need to do is focus on our own strengths, our own capabilities, our own beauty.
Cameron Díaz
Even wondered about the difference?Autobiography: The usually self-serving accounts of personal accomplishments by a public figure.Memoir: The usually self-serving accounts of someone whose only accomplishments are often self-pity and vindictiveness.
Raul Ramos y Sanchez
Discipline transforms the gifted to the great.
Raul Ramos y Sanchez
There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.
Cristina García
For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.
Cristina García
In America everything is fantastical.
Alejo Carpentier
If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
If you currently travel abroad or plan to in the future, make sure you understand the cultural convention of the country that you are visiting. Particularly with regard to greetings. If someone gives you a weak hand-shake, don't grimace. If anyone takes your arm, don't wince. If you are in the Middle East and a person wants to hold your hand, hold it. If you are a man visiting Russia, don't be surprised when your male host kisses your cheek, rather than hand. All of these greetings are as natural as way to express genuine sentiments as an American handshake. I am honored when an Arab or Asian man offers to take my hand because I know that it is a sign of high respect and trust. Accepting these cultural differences is the first step to better understanding and embracing diversity.
Joe Navarro
He said that he was sorry but Robert Bey had called and told him i was no longer in the party. I was burnt. I got the Bronx Ministry to put him on the phone and proceeded to call him the unprincipled, arrogant idiot he was... i hate arrogance whether it's white or purple or Black. Some people let power get to their heads... the only great people i have met have been modest and humble. You can't claim that you love people when you don't respect them, and you can't call for political unity unless you practice it in your relationships.
Assata Shakur
I can't think of anything that anyone has ever accomplished without having some sort of self-discipline. Without knowing how to work for it. Without learning how to earn it. I talk to my friends who are writers. I say, "Well, how do you do it?" Most all of them will say, "I sit down. I force myself every day to sit down and write for at least two hours. Whether something comes out of it or doesn't come out of it, whether I finish my fifty pages or two, I sit down and I do that because I have to make myself do it."That's what a work ethic is. Any person I know who is successful in my business or any other business is so because they work their asses off for it, because nothing is for free. If you want something, if you want to achieve success in any area of life, you must apply your discipline and your work ethic. Because discipline is what helps you consciously do things in order to reach a desired goal. Discipline is a rejection of entitlement and expectation. Discipline is having a strong awareness that your choices have impact and that your actions make a difference.
Cameron Díaz
Can it be true that freedom only exists when it is a treasure, shared by all?
Margarita Engle
Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty.
José Martí
A journey indeed, in an emotional roller-coaster.
Ana Monnar
In just a few weeks, Soldier 13 became aware of a mutation in the colors of his consciousness. As the theoretical classes were filling his brain with philosophical, historical, and political arguments to make his faith unbreakable, the sessions with the psychologists were draining his mind of the deadweight of experiences, memories, fears, and illusions forged of the course of a life of a past that he detached himself from as if they were skinning him. He was overwhelmed to see how his personal history was becoming a foggy haze and how even recent events, like Kotov's last recommendations before he returned to Spain, seemed to diffuse that he sometimes asked himself if he hadn't lived them in another remote and murky existence.During those months was when Ramon really began to stop being Ramon and only became him against when the man they were turning him into was suffocating and, to save him, the former Ramon Mercader had to come to the surface. Or whenever they ordered him to go out and get some sun. But he was never again the same Ramon Mercader del Rio.p. 208
Leonardo Padura
Papi, I don't know what to do anymore." Lourdes begins to cry. "No matter what I do, Pilar hates me.""Pilar doesn't hate you, hija. She just hasn't learned to love you yet.
Cristina García
I raised my three teens with love, perseverance, tenacity, sweat, tears, prayers, lighting candles, and the list could go on.
Ana Monnar
Suddenly, no one, including me, was in Guescheste anymore; they weren't in Miami or Cuba; they weren't in the present, or the future, but floating somewhre in the formless, timeless space of memory.
Richard Blanco
Hatred must be a hard thing to learn.
Margarita Engle
Do I have to admit that I'm half Cuban and half American,or should I go even further, and explainthat Dad's parents were born in the Ukraine,part of Soviet Russia?Or am I just entirely American,all the fractions left behindby immigration from faraway nations?
Margarita Engle
...quality of life lies in knowledge, in culture. Values are what constitute true quality of life, the supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter and clothing.
Fidel Castro
The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to you that Idon't belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else
Gustavo Perez Firmat
Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance.
Cristina García
I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
There is often talk of human rights, but it is also necessary to talk of the rights of humanity. Why should some people walk barefoot, so that others can travel in luxurious cars? Why should some live for thirty-five years, so that others can live for seventy years? Why should some be miserably poor, so that others can be hugely rich? I speak on behalf of the children in the world who do not have a piece of bread. I speak on the behalf of the sick who have no medicine, of those whose rights to life and human dignity have been denied.
Fidel Castro