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Julio Angel Mestre is an exiled Cuban economist who was born in Havana, Cuba in 1935. He is the son of Aida Margarita Cordovés Bolaños and Juan José Mestre Miyares and grandson of Julio Cordovés y de la Paz and Isabel Bolaños Fundora. The Cordovés and Bolaños families were involved in Cuba's Wars of Independence against Spain. Rosario (Charo) and Encarnita Lastra, great-aunts of Mestre, were members of the Cuban Liberation Army (Mambises) within the brigade headed by José María Aguirre, Chief of the Division of Havana, and served under Generalísimo Máximo Gómez.

Mestre studied at the Colegio de la Salle in Havana and graduated with a degree in economics from the Universidad Católica de Santo Tomás de Villanueva in 1957. He served as number 3195 in the Brigade 2506 during the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961. Later, he worked for Union Panamericana in Washington, DC (1963-1965), for CBS/Time Life (1965-1968), and for Kodak Corp. in Venezuela (1968-1972). Mestre established private businesses in Venezuela, Santo Domingo, and Madrid. He and his wife, Sandra Teresita Caballero, have two sons. After residing for many years in Venezuela, Mestre now makes his home in the United States.

Mildred Merrick, who was head of the Otto G. Richter Library's Reference Department for many years, retired in 1991 after 32 years of service to the University of Miami.

Mildred Merrick, 1921-2014, was head of the Otto G. Richter Library's Reference Department for many years.  She retired in 1991 after 32 years of service to the University of Miami.  She was married to art professor Richard Merrick, who was the youngest brother of George Merrick, the founder of Coral Gables.

Merici Academy was a private, Catholic elementary and secondary school for girls established in Havana by American Ursuline nuns in 1941. The Order of Saint Ursula, founded in Italy by Saint Angela Merici in 1535 as the first order in the Church dedicated to the education of girls, had a presence in Havana since 1804, when nuns originating from the New Orleans chapter of the order opened the first school for girls on the island. Initially under the protection of the Spanish Crown and Cuban colonial authorities, the school, known as the Colegio de las Ursulinas, flourished and expanded well into the twentieth century. In 1937, the school added an English department, which led to the creation of the English Academy under the direction of American nuns. The English Academy became the nucleus for the foundation of Merici Academy, a bilingual Catholic girls' school that would offer English as the main teaching language.

In February 1940, the Prioress General of the Ursulines, Reverend Mother St. Jean Martin, traveled to Cuba to assess the possibilities of establishing another Ursuline school in Havana - Merici Academy. The school opened in September 1941 with Mother Thomas Voorhies of New Orleans as founder and directress, and was immediately successful. Mother Thomas was assisted by Mother Rita Connell of Galveston, Texas, Mother Cecelia Prudhomme of Dallas, Texas, and Mother Bernadette Daly of Frontenac, Minnesota, who was already teaching at the Miramar Academy. Elementary courses, Pre-Primary to 7th Grade, were taught in English; additionally, in compliance with Cuban law, the requisite elementary curriculum was offered in Spanish. There were two types of courses at the secondary level. The Academic course was much like an American high school; and the Commercial and Secretarial courses offered bilingual business training. The curriculum was designed in accordance with the traditional Ursuline model of education, which is “based on the general principles of classical and Christian philosophy and permeated with sound religious spirit.”

After its initial success, Merici Academy continued to exceed all expectations. In its twenty years of existence, the school operated at three locations. Two were private residential properties under lease in the neighborhood of Vedado: L and 19th Streets (1941-1943) and Línea and 6th Streets (1943-1949). The third was Merici's own property, custom designed and built in the Reparto Biltmore, a residential suburb west of Havana (1949-1961). Before it was closed by the revolutionary government in 1961, Merici Academy had brought forth nineteen graduating classes with close to seven hundred Academic, Commercial and Secretarial graduates.

Ofelia Garcia-Menocal y Brito (1920-2012) was a Cuban exile and ex-political prisoner born in Havana who lived in Madrid, Spain after fleeing from political persecution in Cuba. She was the daughter of Fausto García-Menocal y Deop, a general in the Cuban War of Independence, and Ofelia Brito y Mederos, and the sister of Fausto García Menocal y Brito who was a member of the anti-Castro Brigade 2506 that participated in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. She was also the niece of Aurelio Mario Gabriel Francisco García Menocal y Deop who was the 3rd president of Cuba, serving from 1913 to 1921. She was said to be interested in political affairs from a young age, influenced by the careers of her father and uncle.

Menocal received a degree in Law from the University of Havana, one of very few women to do so at the time. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Menocal was critical of the Castro regime and was persecuted for her clandestine counterrevolutionary activities and was taken as a political prisoner in 1973. Eventually, she married the French diplomat Luis de Montgrelet and left Cuba for Europe, eventually settling in Madrid, Spain.

She was Secretary of International Relations of the Federación Mundial de Ex-presos Políticos Cubanos en Europa. Even in exile from Cuba, Menocal was politically active and worked tirelessly against the post-1959 regime.

In 2007, la Federación Española de Asociaciones Cubanas (FECU) honored her, Héctor Palacios, and Gisela Delgado for their efforts for the freedom of Cuba.

Guillermo Meneses (15 December 1911 - 29 December 1978) was a Venezuelan writer, playwright, and journalist. He graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, majoring in Political Sciences, and worked as a state attorney and judge. However, he became nationally renowned primarily for his fictional writing and its screen versions. His short story “La Balandra Isabel Llegó Esta Tarde,” was adapted for the cinema and for TV under the direction of Carlos Hugo Christensen. He was the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Premio de Teatro de Caracas (1943) for the play El Marido de Nieves Márquez, the Premio Arístides Rojas (1952) for the novel El Falso Cuaderno de Narciso Espejo, and the Venezuelan National Prize for Literature (1967) for his whole body of work.

In addition to literature, politics played a significant role in Meneses’ trajectory. At the age of 17, he joined a student-led movement later known as the “Generación del 28,” in opposition to the military government of Juan Vicente Gomez (1931-1935). As a consequence, he was arrested along with other members of the group. His activist vein also manifested in his writings for the periodicals Élite, Sábado (de Colombia), El Nacional, and El Universal, and in his own magazine, Cubagua (1938).

Guillermo Meneses married the journalist Sofía Ímber in 1944, and they had four children: Sara, Adriana, Daniela, and Pedro. They left Venezuela to live in Bogota following the coup d'etat against president Isaias Medina in 1945, and the family soon moved to France in 1949, when Guillermo assumed a diplomatic position after being nominated by president Rómulo Gallegos. In the following years, during the regime of General Marcos Perez Jimenez, Meneses continued diplomatic service as secretary of the Venezuelan embassy in Paris and Brussels. There, Sofía and Guillermo became close to thinkers and artists, such as Picasso, Andre Malraux, and William Faulkner, in addition to Venezuelan expatriate intellectuals. As soon as General Jimenez’s regime came to an end, Meneses had his diplomatic post terminated, and the family returned to Venezuela. With a keen desire to share his ideas to a wider national audience, Meneses and Sofía created CAL (acronym for Criticism, Art, Literature) magazine in collaboration with the designer Nedo MF. The publication provided a platform for experimentation, combining the arts and thought in a Venezuelan context.

He eventually passed away at 67 years old in Caracas, Venezuela.

–Vanessa Rodrigues Barcelos da Silva
Graduate Student Assistant for Manuscripts and Archives Management, Summer 2024

Sources: https://www.voanews.com/a/venezuelan-art-promoter-journalist-sofia-imber-dies/3733068.html https://www.artnexus.com/en/news/5d5c2594c70855f6b9ef74b5/sofia-imber https://www.venezuelatuya.com/biografias/guillermo_meneses.htm#
Gil, Diego Arroyo. La senora Imber: Genio y Figura. Editorial Planeta Venezoelana, 2016.