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Richard A. Kahn (1891-1958), a lawyer and economist, taught economics and business law courses, published numerous articles and held a variety of positions in the United States government. Born in Germany, Kahn studied in Heidelberg and served as counsel for the city government of Ludwigshafen-Rhine. During the 1920s, Kahn became executive director of the Tobacco Association of Mannheim. He later worked as a financial consultant and then as Vice President of the Electric Works Company in Berlin during the 1930s.

A research fellowship from Johns Hopkins University brought Kahn to the United States, where he conducted research and taught at American University and later at the Catholic University of America. Kahn also served as economic advisor to the Railroad Retirement Board, before joining the Office of Price Administration (OPA) during World War II. Kahn represented the fisheries industries, and participated in efforts to settle labor disputes and establish price ceilings for the OPA. He handled appeals cases and corresponded with other government agencies including the War Department and the Federal Trade Commission.

In 1944, Kahn became Chief of the Economic and Cooperative Marketing Section of the Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. Working in the Branch of Commercial Fisheries, Kahn planned and directed economic research, wrote economic reports for the U.S. Congress and government agencies and produced bulletins and pamphlets for the public. Kahn recorded and analyzed investments, cost and consumption statistics and frequently appeared before congressional committees to give reports and represent the interest of commercial fisheries.

Kahn wrote several articles on economics and law published in America and Germany. A member of the Investment Bankers Association and the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute, he also participated in the activities of these organizations.

Mirta Ojito was born in Havana, Cuba on February 10, 1964 and was raised in the Santos Suárez neighborhood of Havana. Her parents, Orestes, a truck driver, and Mirta, both hailing from Las Villas, met and were married in the 1950’s as the Revolution began to gain ground. They had not been fans of either Batista or Castro and disliked the subsequent state imposition on their daily lives post-1959. Ojito’s father had several siblings in the U.S. and had long since planned to join them but did not get the chance during the first wave of the Cuban exiles. When Ojito’s parents married in October of 1962, they applied for a visa to the U.S. but it never came through due to the event of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ojito notes in her memoir that during her childhood, many friends and neighbors would leave and no one would hear from them again. She also recalls having teachers and administrators at her school keeping a detailed file on her and her family’s views of the Revolution and participation in revolutionary activities. She recalls also as a teenager working in la escuela al campo, which involved manual labor outdoors in lieu of a classroom education, and her boyfriend being conscripted for the war in Angola.

Ojito came to the United States during the Mariel boatlift on May 10th, 1980, leaving her life in Cuba behind. On April 19th, 1980 the Mariel exodus began. Ojito’s uncle, Oswald, traveled to Cuba in his boat “Major Rafael” to take Ojito’s family to Miami, but the boat ended up breaking down. At that time, he had been in Cuba for 17 days. Luckily, he got another captain, Mike Howell, a Vietnam veteran, to take them on his boat, called the “Mañana.” During the trip, Ojito, her sister and mother became separated from her father and uncle, who ended up on the boat the “Valley Chief.” They finally arrived at her uncle’s house in Hialeah on May 12th. Years later, Ojito sought out Howell for her memoirs to thank him for saving her life and to discover his perspective on the Mariel boatlift. They reunited in New Orleans, 22 years after the life-changing trip from Cuba to Key West.

Ojito finished high school in Miami and then attended Miami Dade College. She went on to earn a degree in 1986 from Florida Atlantic University and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, where she taught as a journalism professor. In 1987, she began working as a reporter for the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald for 9 years. In 1991, Ojito had a chance to interview Fidel Casto outside his hotel room in Guadalajara, Mexico while she was a reporter for the Miami Herald. In January of 1998, Ojito returned to her childhood home, an apartment in Havana, and found many of her family's old belongings still there. She was in Cuba reporting on Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to the island. A story from that trip was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She covered issues of immigration for 15 years as a journalist in Miami and New York, and became known for her coverage of Cuban detainees in federal penitentiaries and stories about human rights in Cuba. In 1987, she interviewed Gustavo Pique, one of the detainees involved in the takeover of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. In 1996, she started working in the Metro desk of The New York Times, where she covered immigration and other issues.

She has won several major awards for her work, including a 1999 award for best foreign report from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and she shared a 2001 Pulitzer prize for her reporting on race in America. In 2014, she joined NBC News, as the director of Standards for Telemundo. She was also a member of the Telemundo team that won an Emmy for the coverage of Pope Francis's visit to the Americas. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2005, Ojito published her memoir of exile from Cuba, Finding Mañana. She worked on it from 2002 to 2005. She cites that in her memoir she “wanted to tell the story of the first 20 years of the Cuban Revolution and why a people turn around to leave their country and why the United States receives them.” (2005)

In addition to her memoir, in 2013, she published the critically-acclaimed book Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town, about the 2008 murder of an immigrant man. It was a 2014 International Latino Awards Finalist. She also appeared in the 2013 documentary Cubamerican, and produced three documentary films about immigration: Batalla en la Frontera (2015), Cosecha de Miseria (2016), and The Source (2017).

Rolando Moreno is a Cuban director, playwright and theater designer who has adapted and authors numerous plays. His most recent productions include "Si vas a comer espera por Virgilio" and "La retirada de Moscú," performed in Miami in 2011.

Silvio Acosta was a Cuban architect educated at the University of Havana in the early 20th century. He dedicated his life to education, working actively as the President of El Colegio de Arquitectos de la Habana, where he was a distinguished speaker. He was a professor at Havana's La Escuela de Artes y Oficiosfor more than 30 years, and principal of the same for 11. Acosta was also professor of physics and chemistry at the Edison School and the English School, where he had future doctor José "Pepe" Lastra as a student. A man of many interests, Acosta was a member of the Junta de Amillaramiento and President of the National Commision of Archaeology. He had the pleasure of winning architectural competitions and other honors, as well as authoring important articles on architecture and industrial technical education from 1920 until his death in 1961.

Jorge Castellanos was an author and professor born in 1915 in Guantánamo, Cuba.

After graduating from the University of Havana in 1940 with a doctorate in philosophy and letters, Castellanos worked as a professor of history and literature at the Institute of Secondary Education in Santiago de Cuba and the University of Oriente.

Castellanos had been associated with the Popular Socialist Party, Cuba’s communist party, during his early career, but eventually shifted his political leanings toward that of the Christian Democrats by the 1950s. He also came to oppose the dictatorial rule of Fulgencio Batista during this period.

Exiled to the United States by way of Jamaica in 1961, Castellanos was working as a history professor at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan, by 1962. He retired in Miami in 1987, but continued to publish books on Cuban culture, most notably his series Cultura Afrocubana, co-authored with his daughter Isabel Castellanos, from 1988 to 1994.

The Patronato del Teatro was a theater company in Havana, Cuba.

In May 1957, the University of Miami and the American Society of Magazine Photographers held the first Wilson Hicks International Conference on Visual Journalism, nicknamed "The Miami Conference." Co-founded by LIFE executive editor and UM faculty member Wilson Hicks, this photojournalism conference dealt with "problems confronting the photographer, the writer and the editor in taking and making use of the photograph which, next to the word, is the most important instrument of communication in today's world." For three days, editors, writers, and photographers exchanged ideas about creative techniques and processes during panel discussions.

From 1957 to the mid-1970s and again from 1995 to 1997, "The Miami Conference" became a major rendezvous for visual communicators. Countless renowned speakers participated over the years, including Magnum Photos' Ernst Haas, author-photographer David Douglas Duncan, LIFE's Margaret Bourke-White, New York Times' Kathy Ryan, and National Geographic Magazine's Thomas Kennedy

Otto G. Richter (1892-1959) was a successful accountant in Pittsburgh, Pa. For health reasons, he retired and moved to Miami in 1938, where he became involved in various organizations throughout the community as a volunteer and philanthropist.

Richter became an ardent supporter of the University of Miami. In 1951, he gave the University his first gift to establish the Richter Loan and Scholarship Fund. After his death, his estate made available two million dollars for the construction of the Richter Library, which was completed in 1962.

Cuban-born playwright Eduardo Machado is the author of over 27 plays and has served as Artistic Director of INTAR Theatre in New York since 2004. Machado is also the former head of Columbia University's Graduate Playwriting Department.

Born in Havana in 1953 to Othon and Hilda, Eduardo Oscar Machado arrived in the United States with his brother Jesus in 1961 as part of Operation Pedro Pan, an effort that brought 14,000 unaccompanied children out of Cuba. Machado and his brother lived with relatives in Hialeah, Florida until they were reunited with their parents and the family moved to California.

Machado began acting in Los Angeles at age 17, and a year later married Harriet Bradlin. The marriage ended over decade later, and today Machado is openly gay.

After attending writing workshops led by Cuban-American dramatist María Irene Fornés, he moved to New York in the early 1980s and began writing plays full time. Machado's works most often explore themes of Cuba, exile, cultural identity, and homosexuality. Among his most widely produced plays are Havana is Waiting and the plays that make up The Floating Island Plays: The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, In the Eye of the Hurricane, and Broken Eggs. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. With Michael Domitrovitch, Machado authored a memoir and cookbook in 2007, Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home (Gotham).

The University of Miami School of Medicine (now known as the Miller School of Medicine), is an academic medical center located in downtown Miami. It serves South Florida, South America and the Caribbean through education, research, patient care and community service. Founded in 1952 as Florida’s first accredited medical school, the Miller School of Medicine provides medical staff for the nationally renowned University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center and the University of Miami Hospital.

Randy Femmer was Chairman of the Undergraduate Student Government of the University of Miami in 1967.

The University of Miami opened in the fall of 1926 with two academic units: the Conservatory of Music (later called the School of Music), and the College of Arts and Sciences. The School was founded by Bertha M. Foster, who became the University’s first music dean. It was renamed the Frost School of Music in 2003 in honor of a landmark naming gift by Dr. Phillip and Patricia Frost, ardent supporters of the arts in Miami.

The School of Music has survived many decades of change and growth to become a national music leader in higher education. It offers degrees in instrumental performance, vocal performance, music engineering, music education, music composition, and musical theatre. It also offers Studio Music and Jazz degrees for instrumentalists and vocalists. Its Studio, Music, and Jazz Program is consistently known as among the best in the nation. It was also the first music school in the nation to offer the innovative degree in Music Business and Entertainment Industries, as well as boasting a hands-on music therapy program.

For over 30 years, Joseph Handleman was the president of the Handleman Company,  which specialized in sales, merchandising, and distribution of consumer goods including phonograph records.  He advised the School of Music on the development of new degree programs in Music Merchandising and Recorded Music.

David A. Lieberman was Senior Vice President for Business and Finance at the University of Miami.  He retired from his position in 2006 after serving the university for 28 years as the chief business and finance officer.