Every single one of us is the descendant of a go-getter. Of dreamers and of believers.

We have also seen an economic crisis that is very serious within Venezuela, we are seeing cutbacks, I believe even more are coming in terms of electricity. Government employees no longer work on Fridays, and that has not been enough.

Our status as a land of equal opportunity has made us a rich and powerful nation, but it has also transformed lives. It has given people like me the chance to grow up knowing that no dream was too big and no goal out of reach.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

For over two centuries, each generation of Americans before us confronted and solved problems. They embraced opportunities and Americans have never had it easy. This was a nation founded by declaring independence for the most powerful empire in the world. This was a nation that faced a divisive and bloody civil war, two great world wars, a long cold war.

Their rhetoric is the same as always. The only difference is that the United States has granted them a whole series of concessions, and that the Cuban government has not changed at all. And that is part of the same thing I've always said, this isn't different, nothing has changed on the part of the Cuban government, absolutely nothing has changed on its part.

Both of my parents were born into poor families on the island of Cuba. They came to America because it was the only place where people like them could have a chance.My father was a bartender. And the journey from the back of that bar to the [election 2016], to me, that is the essence of the American dream.