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I'm certainly proud to be Cuban American, and it's a fantastic opportunity for anybody - regardless of their ethnicity or nationality. It does carry a measure or pride to know where you're from and to know what your roots are.

In Cuba we use our champions to promote the sport.

Then I received support from the Government to compete for my country, and to represent Cuba in competition.

Despite the situation in Cuba, I had a chance to play on the national team; and compared to other baseball players and other people in Cuba, I had the opportunity to live at a level that was not very high class but in the middle.

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.

To our brothers in Latin America and the world, we must convey that the Cuban people will overcome.

I am convinced that in the upcoming chapter of the struggle, I can be more useful to the inevitable change that will soon come to Cuba, to Cuba's freedom, as a private citizen dedicated to helping the heroes within Cuba.

The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.

When we decided to go to Cuba to perform, we did it because we just wanted to build a bridge, you know, between Cuba and the rest of the community. And we just wanted to prove that music and art need to be over all ideology or way to think life, and we just wanted to go in there and play just because of love.

It shows courage, and it shows commitment to move beyond the status-quo politics of rhetoric, which is all the Cuban-American community has received from any party for the last half century.