I checked with a friend of mine and he said the following.

By default, COBOL uses double quotes (“) for string delimiters instead of single quotes (‘).  This is different than other languages and often causes confusion.

The default for CRTSQLCBLI is OPTION(*QUOTESQL).

The user can either change their string delimiter character to “ or use CRTSQLCBLI OPTION(*APOSTSQL) to allow the use of single quotes.  Most users use OPTION(*APOSTSQL) so their embedded SQL looks the same in all languages.