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Jesús M. Casagrán was a Cuban sculptor. He was also the director of culture within the Ministry of Education during the years of Ramón Grau San Martín of the Auténtico Party where the production of art and culture flourished with support from the state.

Dr. Rosa Leonor Whitmarsh Dueñas was born in Vedado, Havana, Cuba in 1930 to Enrique Whitmarsh and Rosario Dueñas, pianist and singer. Whitmarsh’s paternal great-grandfather was a Major General and Lieutenant of the Liberation Army Calixto García Iñiguez during the war for Cuban Independence from Spanish colonial rule. Her grandfather on her mother’s side was Dr. Joaquín L. Dueñas, who is considered by the National Medical College of Cuba to be the first Cuban pediatrician. Dr. Dueñas and his family, the maternal side of Whitmarsh’s genealogy, went into exile, residing in Philadelphia during the War of 1895 for aligning with the struggle for Cuban independence. The paternal side of her family was also exiled during the war, and they resided in New York and Paris until 1905 when they returned to the island. Dr. Dueñas’ eldest daughter, Leonor, married Dr. David Whitmarsh, their children included Rosa Whitmarsh’s father, Enrique, who later married Rosario Dueñas. Rosa Whitmarsh Dueñas has two siblings, Mercedes and Sergio.

As a young girl, Whitmarsh attended the Colegio de las Ursulinas, a Catholic institute for girls in Miramar, Havana run by the Order of the Ursulinas. She then earned a diploma at the Instituto del Vedado. From a young age, she studied piano under María Emma Botet at the Hubert de Blanck Conservatory. She went on to earn a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters, specializing in Letters and graduated as Professor of English at the University of Havana. She also completed post-graduate English studies at Columbia University in N.Y. For two years, 1956 and 1957, Whitmarsh taught at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. as an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Language and Civilization after being recruited by Dr. Camila Enriquez-Ureña. She then returned to Cuba where she was very active in promoting music and culture, acting as a Member of the Board of the Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club of Havana, a women’s cultural and social organization that included many of the city’s most prominent female figures, in the Vocalía de Música from 1952 to 1959, promoting Cuban music by organizing concerts, competitions, conferences, and showcases. She also worked on both editions of the publication of the Contradanzas de Manuel Saumell, the composer considered to be the father of the Cuban contradanza.

In 1960, she earned the competitive position of Chair of Spanish at the Guanabacoa Institute, which she did not take due to ideological differences. When it became clear she would need to leave Cuba, she earned a scholarship to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Ecuador. She experienced a delay in being able to leave Cuba, and her documents and scholarship offer expired so she stayed in Mexico where she lived for 22 years. There she took postgraduate courses in Hispanic American Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico with poet Ernesto Mejía Sánchez and academic María del Carmen Millas.

While living in Mexico, Whitmarsh worked as a teacher of Spanish, English, and Greco-Latin Etymologies at the High School of the Colegio Hebreo Tarbut, as well as at the Universidad Anáhuac where she worked as a Teacher of Oral and Written Expression in Spanish and English. She was also a private English teacher in the Hebrew colony of Mexico. She traveled throughout Mexico and gave lectures on Cuban history while studying Mesoamerican cultures. Whitmarsh also helped collect provisions and even tried unsuccessfully to obtain visas for the Cubans involved in the Mariel exodus while she was living in Mexico, which she wrote about in “A veinticinco años del Mariel, en México” for Diario Las Américas.

When she moved to Miami in 1984, she taught Spanish in the Miami-Dade County Public School system for 11 years and English at Miami Dade Community College for 13 years. In the U.S. Whitmarsh also wrote extensively and was a commentator and panelist on Radio and TV Martí and a columnist for the Diario Las Américas. She wrote essays on topics such as José Vasconcelos, Prominent Cuban Women, José Martí, Spanish in Cuba, Education in the United States, The Taking of Havana by the English, the life of Calixto García Íñiguez, and she had poetry published in two exile anthologies. She served as a panelist in national and international literary and civic congresses in Peru, Spain, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. She wrote prologues for literary works by Cuban authors such as Darío Espina, Esteban Beruvides, Nicasio Silverio, and Emelina Núñez. She has won prizes for her work including the Mariana Grajales Award from the Raíces organization in Miami, Florida and the Second Prize for Poetry at the Sesquicentennial of the Birth of José Martí organized by Casa Cuba in Houston, Texas. She also sits on the board of directors at the San Carlos Institute in Key West and is a member of Círculo de Cultura Panamericano, the Colegio Nacional de Periodistas de Cuba en el Exilio, and a member of the Board de la Revista Herencia Cultural Cubana. She passed away in Miami in 2023.

Anita Arroyo de Hernandez was a journalist, professor, and historian born in Italy in 1914 to Cuban and Puerto Rican parents. She graduated from the University of Havana and worked as a journalist and was also a prominent writer for Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura. She left Cuba for Puerto Rico after criticizing the post-1959 Castro government in her column in the newspaper Diario de La Marina. She was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan.

She wrote a number of publications, including: Un deber ineludible (1942), Las artes industriales en Cuba: su historia y evolución desde las culturas precolombinas hasta nuestros días (1943), Razón y pasión de Sor Juana (1952), about the Mexican nun, Superación y aporte de la mujer norteamericana (1959). América en su literatura (1967), El pajaro de lata: Cuba para Sus niños (1973), Raíces al viento (1974), Narrativa hispanoamericana actual: América y sus problemas (1980), the children’s book El grillo gruñón (1984), El hombre palabra (1985), José Antonio Saco: Su Influencia En La Cultura y en Las Ideas Political De Cuba (Colección Cuba y sus jueces) (1989), Las pequeñas muertes (1992), a novel about living in exile, and Cuentos del caribe (1992.)

She died in Puerto Rico in 1994.

Andrés Castro was the owner Teatro Las Máscaras in Havana. Castro, born July 27, 1917, in Havana, Cuba, was from an affluent family that was in the furniture business. He and Antonia Rey married in 1958. Reportedly they tied the knot during the intermission of a show they were rehearsing at the time. He and his wife moved to New York in 1961, where Castro also stayed in the theater world. He earned his B.F.A from the Senior Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. He founded the Westside Repertory Theater 81st Street in Manhattan, where he was the director and an educator for 25 years. He was also the director of the Senior Dramatic Workshop at Carnegie Hall. He passed away on September 2, 2000.

Caridad “Pitucha” Vega was a Cuban rumba dancer from Havana who was one of the first to bring Afro-Cuban music and dance to the popular stage in the United States. The “Tropicana Nightclub” in Havana was a famous tourist spot that showcased Rumba, becoming an icon of the post-1959 Cuban cultural scene. Vega was part of Tampa billionaire Leon Claxon’s “Harlem in Havana” revue, where she and her dancing partner Mario Valdes were recruited from the Tropicana and became showrunners in the 1957 and 1959 seasons of “Harlem in Havana.” She and dozens of other cast members of the revue are said to have performed more than a dozen shows per day, depending on the size of the audience. Vega reportedly said of her performances in the U.S. that “I love the evening shows because then you get the feel.” After the Cuban Revolution of 1959 when Cuban artists were no longer free to travel between the U.S. and Cuba and visas were restricted, the revue never recovered to its heyday when Vega, “The Cuban Dancing Dolls,” Mercedes Valdes, the Rodríguez Brothers, and others were top performers. Many of the artists, like Vega, decided to remain in the United States after Castro took power.

Eliana S. Rivero is Professor Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. She was born in Artemisa, Cuba in 1941, in Pinar del Rio province, forty kilometers between Mariel on the north and Majana on the south. In 1958, at the age of seventeen, she traveled to the U.S. to study and settled there permanently in 1961. She did not return to Cuba until 18 years later in 1979, and again 31 years later, in 2016, while participating in an educational tour led by American author Tom Miller.

Rivero received her B.A. magna cum laude in Spanish Language and Literature in 1964 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literatures in 1968 from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Her research focus is in the area of Latin American and U.S. Latinx literatures, (colonial, modern, and contemporary,) especially poetry and women's writings. She has taught numerous courses on these topics during her 40 years at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she began her career as an assistant professor in 1967.

Since the 1980’s, Rivero has produced a plethora of publications, writing about the experience of Chicano/as, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and other U.S. Latino/as, and has published over one hundred articles, chapters in books, review essays, notes, bibliographies, and collection entries, on topics ranging from Caribbean authors to Mexican colonial nuns, as well as autobiographical essays on the Latinx experience, diaspora, Latinidad, “Otherness”, feminism, borders, and other topics. For example, in 1994 her widely-read autobiographical essay "Fronterislena," (Border Islander) was published in the journal Michigan Quarterly Review and reprinted in 2019. Her work has been influenced by feminist authors such as Donna Haraway and cultural theorists like Rubén Rumbaut and Salman Rushdie. Rivero has delivered keynote addresses and lectures at more than fifty university campuses in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Cuba, and Chile, and she has presented papers at over 75 national and international conferences.

In the 1970’s Rivero organized other female academics on the U of A campus to form the Committee on Status of University Women, which resulted in the approval of the first Women’s Studies program by the Arizona Board of Regents in 1975. In the 1990s, Rivero served as chair of the national committee for the Advanced Placement Examinations in Spanish (The College Board and Educational Testing Service) as well as served on numerous professional association boards both in the US and abroad, and was chair of the Fulbright Grants for Latin America committee. She has been the recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Rockefeller Foundation, and others.

In 2000, she was named Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and was a pioneer for future scholars, being one of only two Latinas, and the first Latina scholar in the humanities, in the program’s 44-year history up to that time. During her year as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, Rivero visited several institutions around the country, sharing her work in Latin American and U.S. Latino literatures, particularly theoretical and autobiographical approaches to Latina identity and consciousness, and Latin American representation of women's images in literature and popular culture. Her research topics included "Nun on the Web: Latin American Popular Culture and Their Icons" - a hands-on lecture on the construction of two cultural icons in Mexico and Latin America: the Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and the 17th century nun poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, "Dreaming, Hollering, and Dancing: U.S. Latina Writers," and "Border Islander: American(o) Living/Writing at the Margins."

Rivero has published four books of poetry, including De cal y arena (Of Limestone and Sand) (1975), Cuerpos breves (Brief Bodies) (1975), and Collected poems of Eliana Rivero (2005). A recording of Rivero reading her poetry in 1978 can be accessed through the Library of Congress. Cuban-American poet Eliana Rivero reading from her work | Library of Congress (loc.gov) Her collection of essays Discursos desde la diáspora was published in Spain in 2005 and her poems and autobiographical narratives are included in several anthologies in the US, Cuba, Argentina, and Spain. In 2012, she edited a special winter issue on the Cuban diaspora for Revista Caribe.

She co-edited with the Chicana writer Margarita Cota Cárdenas, Siete Poetas, a pioneer text of Latina women poets which was published in 1978 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her other co-edited works include the award-winning Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke University Press, 2001), with the Latina Feminist Group collective and the best-seller Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (University of Arizona Press, 1995, now on its third printing), which is widely used in college and high school curricula, with Tey Diana Rebolledo, a Distinguished Professor at the University of New Mexico and showcases the talents of more than fifty authors, including Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Cherríe Moraga, and María Helena Viramontes. Her most recent co-edited publication is an anthology with Iraida H. Lopez, Let’s Hear Their Voices: Cuban American Writers of the Second Generation, which was published by State University of New York Press in 2019. This latest anthology brings together works by ten distinguished and emerging Cuban American writers of the "second generation"-writers who were born between 1960 and the mid-1980s in the United States to Cuban parents or have a mixed ethnic background. Called "ABCs" (American-Born Cubans) or "AmeriCubans," these writers experiment with different formal approaches and lace their work with Cuban Spanish to give voice to hybrid identities and cultural legacies within the contemporary multicultural United States.

A research scholarship set up by Rivero in her name was established in 2015 at the Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University, Miami to promote the development of young scholars working in the field of Cuban and Cuban-American studies. For example, the 2017 winner was Alberto Sosa Cabanas, who used the funding to work on his doctoral dissertation "Racism, Celebration, and Otherness: Depictions of Blackness in Cuban Cultural Discourse (1790–1959.)”

Her video Melodías y memorias de Eliana Rivero, with her interpretations of traditional Cuban music and autobiographical commentary, was finished in January 2015. In 2016-2017, she participated in the documentary “The Cubans at Harvard”, a film recounting the experience of over 1,700 Cuban teachers, including Rivero’s maternal grandmother, who were invited to visit Cambridge and Washington DC in 1900. The film was screened at the Cuban research institutes at Harvard University and Florida International University (FIU).

Her recent publications include an essay on Cuban studies, "Leyendo a Cubamérica: Visiones y revisiones," in Reading Cuba: Discurso literario y geografía transcultural, edited by Alberto Sosa Cabanas in 2018 and her poetry was published in Catedral sumergida: Poesía cubana contemporánea escrita por mujeres, edited by Ileana Álvarez and Maylén Domínguez in 2013. Rivero formerly served on the Advisory Board of Latinx Talk (latinxtalk.org) in 2019. Rivero lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she enjoys the daily activity of playing her grand piano.

Gordon Gilbert was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Montreal, San Salvador, Mexico City, and Miami. Gilbert received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami in 1968 and his Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Miami in 1975. He is a registered architect in New York, Florida, New Jersey, Virginia. and Pennsylvania. He founded his architectural office, Gordon Gilbert Architect, in New York City in 1984. He was a founding member of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, and has developed conceptual and experimental work, including such projects as "Architecture of the Night," which was published and exhibited internationally. His most recent book, "Transparent Architecture," demonstrates the relationship of Gilbert's experimental, conceptual, and constructed work.

"Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1953 and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He has lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his wife, Colleen. He has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies.

Michael Hettich’s awards include several Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize, and the 2020 Lena M. Shull Book Award. He often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and fellow writers.

He is married to Colleen and has two adult children, Matthew and Caitlin, and a grandson, Owen Sharpe." -- Biographical description from https://michaelhettich.com/