“'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.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler“Both for Havana's beauty and decay, it's very hard to restrain yourself from staring everywhere you look.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler“'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.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler“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.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler“In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler“Las Vegas, the most expensive toilet in the world that still can’t flush.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler“Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler, The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba