Mostrando 7591 resultados

Dr. Martha Lizabeth Phelps is a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Miami in 2012.

Una Austin was a professional concert mezzo-soprano singer in London in the early 1900s. During World War I she gave concerts to entertain the British soldiers in India, where she met her husband, Lewis Weeks in 1921. She was the mother of the late L. Austin Weeks, who was a benefactor of the Frost School of Music’s Marta and Austin Weeks Music Library and Technology Center.

Una Austin was a professional concert mezzo-soprano singer in London in the 1910s.  During World War I she gave concerts to entertain the British soldiers in India, where she met her husband, Lewis Weeks in 1921.  She was the mother of the late L. Austin Weeks, who was a benefactor of the Frost School of Music’s Marta and Austin Weeks Music Library and Technology Center.

Lydia Cabrera was born in Havana, Cuba on May 20, 1899. Her father, Raimundo Cabrera, was a lawyer. He was a member of the pro-independence intellectuals known as the “generation of 1868” and founder of the literary and political magazine Cuba y America. Lydia, an avid reader, was taught at home. She was strongly influenced by her father’s nationalist feelings and cultural background, her sister Emma’s love of art, and her nannies’ African and Afro Cuban stories, language and traditions.

Lydia completed her secondary school without ever attending classes and started auditing college courses. Although she published her first articles in the Diario de la Marina at age eighteen, her first love was painting, and she attended the San Alejandro Academy of Arts for a brief period.

In 1927, Cabrera moved to Paris to study painting and remained in France for eleven years. Graduating from L'Ecole du Louvre in 1930, she subsequently studied with Russian exile artist Alexandra Exter. During this time, Lydia began to study Asian cultures and religions, and her research in this area lead to a renewed interest in Afro Cuban culture. Later in her life, Cabrera stated that she “discovered Cuba in the banks of the Seine”.

During short trips to her native country while living in Paris, Cabrera began to make preliminary contacts with the future informants of her ethnology research. Back in Paris, she wrote her first Cuentos Negros. The stories were read at literary gatherings and later published in several reviews such as Cahiers du Sud, Revue de Paris, and Les Nouvelles Littéraires. A French translation by literary critic Francis de Miomandre was published by Gallimard in 1936 as a collection entitled Contes Nègres de Cuba.

Cabrera returned to Cuba in 1938 with the purpose of doing research on the subject of folklore, conscious of the need to preserve this vital element of Cuban culture for posterity. The first Spanish edition of Cuentos negros de Cubawas published in1940 in Havana; a second work of fiction, ¿Por Qué? Cuentos Negros de Cuba, Colección del Chicherekú, was published in 1948.

Cabrera distinguished her work by writing with a new voice and style and positioned herself at the forefront by conducting field research, which required her to spend years gaining the trust of her informants. She traveled within the island conducting interviews, collecting oral histories, recording stories and music, documenting rituals and practices, and cataloging “Africanisms” of Cuban Spanish. The result was El Monte (The Forest or The Wilderness), published in 1954, a formative work on Afro Cuban religions and liturgy.

Cabrera left Cuba as an exile in 1960 and she did not produce any writing for ten years. In 1970, Cabrera published Otán Iyebiyé, Las Piedras Preciosasand in 1971 the third volume of “cuentos negros” Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea, followed by other publications. She published one of her most well known works, Anaforuana, about the secret Abakuá society, in 1975. Her writings in exile are considered by some critics to be among her best because of the intellectual and emotional maturity she had achieved. She had become internationally recognized and honored for her contributions to literature, ethnology and anthropology.

She died in Miami on September 19th, 1991. During her long and prolific career Cabrera produced what is considered the most complete and important body of research on Afro Caribbean religions and folklore. She was one of the first to recognize the richness of African culture and its vital contributions to Cuban identity. Her work remains a leading authority of Afro Cuban culture.

Tony Varona was a major figure, both in Cuba, and later in the Cuban exile community in the United States. He was a loyal supporter of President Carlos Prio and served as Prime Minister of Cuba from 1948-1950. When the Cuban Revolution began, he worked with Prio and the Central Intelligence Agency to instigate a counter-revolution, ultimately having to flee to Miami. He co-founded Movimiento de Recuperacion Revolucionario(MRR) and later headed Consejo Revolucionario Cuba, the Cuban government-in-exile. He was a notable anti-Castro leader in the United States.

Luis Conte Agüero was born in Santiago de Cuba on July 6, 1924. He was a journalist and politician belonging to the Partido Ortodoxo. He was exiled to Venezuela in the 1950s and returned to Cuba on January 6, 1959, working in radio and television and initially supporting the Cuban Revolution. Within a few months of Castro's rule, Conte Agüero broke with the revolutionary movement's communist turn and was sentenced to death by firing squad. He escaped the island and settled in Miami, where he has been a critic of the regime.

He is the author of more than 40 books, including "Cuba: historia de su historia," "América contra el comunismo," and "Mis memorias: Cuba y América."

Eugenio Batista (1900-1992) was a Cuban architect and author who worked in Cuba in the 20th century.

Batista completed high school courses in the United States and Cuba and received an architecture degree from the University of Havana in 1924. He moved on to work as a draftsman at the architecture firm of Walker and Gillette while taking summer and evening classes at Columbia University in New York, eventually graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in Architecture from Princeton University and working as a professor there before returning to Cuba to practice his profession in 1939.

Batista was involved in such projects as the building of the Bay of Havana amphitheater; the placement of the José Martí statue in the Parque Central; the design of the church and park at Yumurí; and the renovation of Havana's Payret Theater. He was professor and acting dean of the School of Architecture at Havana’s St. Thomas of Villanova Catholic University in the 1950s, and worked as a professor in design at various schools after his exile in 1961 including the University of Oregon and the University of Puerto Rico. In 1974 he was given a Fulbright scholarship to teach architecture at the Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá, Colombia.

In his retirement he wrote a book on church architecture and the history of the Catholic liturgy titled El culto cristiano: ¿ceremonia o dedicación? (1981). He was a founding member of the Hermandad Nazaret, an exile religious organization.

Batista died in Miami at the age of 91.

Eva Canel (January 30th, 1857; Coaña, Asturias, Spain - May 2nd, 1932; Havana, Cuba) was a Spanish playwright, novelist, and one of the first female Hispanic journalists. She was a prolific writer and speaker and largely addressed political and feminist topics - she was specifically vocal on matters concerning marriage, the breakdown of customs, divorce, adultery, and incestuous relationships. Canel published many notable works including the novels: Trapitos al sol (1891); Manolín (1891); La pola (1893); Oremus (1893); and El agua turbia (1899), as well as several works of theater, including La mulata (1893) and El indiano (1894), which both concerned matters of race, and Fuera de la ley (1902) and La Abuelita (1905). She also often wrote in mixed literary forms, blending travel narratives, journalistic writing, and the autobiographical. Canel has contemporarily been described as “very daring for a woman of the era” in terms of the way she lived her life and the subjects she wrote about (Vallejo 107).

Agar Eva Infanzón Canel, whose pen name would become Eva Canel, was born to a fairly privileged family. At age three, her father, who was a doctor, was killed and she moved to Madrid with her mother. In Madrid, while trying to forge a career as an actress, she met and married actor and author Eloy Perillán Bux at age fourteen, and later had her only son: Eloy. In 1874, Canel’s husband was forced to leave Spain because he was attracting attention for his subversive writings and she leaped in to assume his editorial responsibilities for the satirical magazine, La Broma. Shortly thereafter, Canel joined her husband and traveled the theater circuit with him, living in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru – all the while writing, publishing, and even founding newspapers. In 1881, due to political upheaval in multiple South American counties, the couple decided to return to Spain and settled in Barcelona. Canel’s husband, however, soon became unsettled in Barcelona and their perpetually rocky marriage finally led him to settle in Cuba, where he died in 1889. She, too, left for Cuba shortly after the death of her husband.

Once in Cuba, Canel tried to find journalistic work but was refused job opportunities because of her gender; therefore, she founded her own weekly magazine – political satire in genre – called La Cotorra. After a period of eight years, during which time the Cuban War of Independence ended, she left Cuba for Spain and then on to Buenos Aires, where her literary peak began. Canel’s strong beliefs were reflected in her literary works; she was a Catholic traditionalist, monarchist, and all-around conservative, who ardently defended Spanish colonial power in Cuba and the Americas more broadly. One of the many paradoxical things about her is that she did not believe in divorce and felt that women should be subservient and occupy domestic roles, yet her life as an independent, outspoken woman who traveled widely while writing freely and supporting herself is in complete contention with the views she expressed in print. Vallejo explains that her relative obscurity in comparison to her sheer volume of literary production is in part due the unconventional way she lived for a woman of her era: “Eva Canel’s omission from serious critical study is compounded by the fact that she lived in many different places and wrote under several different pseudonyms; thus, she has not been recognized as any “national” writer—a circumstance that is hugely ironic, as she was a lifelong, proud Spanish nationalist and conservative monarchist” (107-108).

By the last few years of her life, Canel had established herself as a defender of Spanish interests and was called upon to hold conferences and give speeches on such themes. In 1914, while travelling around Central America to deliver speeches, her health began to suffer greatly. Invited by a former friend, she decided to return once again to Cuba where she lived until her death on May 2, 1932. Canel recorded the details of her extraordinary life in two memoirs: Por la justicia y por España (1909) and Lo que vi en Cuba (1916).

Berta Barreto de los Heros was born in Camaguey, Cuba, in 1914. She was most prominently known for her role as the Coordinator of the Cuban Families Committee for the Liberation of the Bay of Pigs Prisoners of War, Inc. She was married to Dr. Guy Pérez Cisneros Bonnel, Cuban diplomat, professor, and art critic, from 1937 until their divorce in 1943. She and Pérez Cisneros had three children: Guy, Francisco, and Pablo. Barreto de los Heros’ son, Pablo Pérez-Cisneros, finished and published Barreto de los Heros’ book, After the Bay of Pigs: Lives and Liberty on the Line, in 2007, which was sold exclusively by the popular Miami pharmacy, Navarro.

In a 2012 article her son, Pablo, writes: “My mother, who lived in Havana at the time, became involved because my late brother was among the captured fighters. She was instrumental in initiating negotiations with Castro and inviting the Miami committee members to meet with the new Cuban leader at her home on the island — with the promise that millions would be paid for the men.”

Working from her home in Havana, Cuba, Barreto de los Heros was instrumental in negotiating, along with American attorney James B. Donovan, Milan C. Miskovsky of the CIA, and others, the release of 1,113 political prisoners in exchange for food and medicine given to the Cuban government. Her son from her first marriage, Alberto Oms Barreto, was one of the 1,400 men who participated in the failed Bays of Pigs invasion and also one of the 1,200 captured. It was reported that the Cuban Families Committee knew Barreto de los Heros well and asked her to take charge of the committee and to meet with Castro through his secretary, Conchita Fernández. On April 10, 1962, Barreto de los Heros met with Castro in her home, and shortly after, the first group of prisoners consisting of 60 wounded and sick men were released and flown back to Miami. It is said that Attorney Donovan set up a secret code for her to use since her phone was being tapped. After days of tense negotiations involving many lawyers, private American companies, and the Red Cross, two days before Christmas of 1962, 484 prisoners were released back to Miami and the remaining 719 prisoners returned the next day, on Christmas Eve. Barreto de los Heros left Cuba for Miami on one of the last planes out. It is reported that she refused to shake Castro’s extended hand, and he remarked: "Pride has the face of a woman."

After her arrival in Miami, she continued to devote herself to service to others, including serving on the Hispanic Committee of Dade County Mental Health Association and helping to achieve community construction projects. One of the fellow committee members recalls that Barreto de los Heros arranged a productive interview with then mayor of Miami, Xavier Suarez. Her daughter-in-law also mentions Barreto de los Heros’ efforts to help the elderly vote by absentee ballot to make sure they could exercise their right to vote.

Barreto de los Heros died in 1993. "She cared and made an effort to get us out of the quagmire. She gave us our great freedom," said Modesto Castaner, former president of Brigade 2506. "It is a pain for the brigade members that will be in our hearts."