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The Cuban exile paramilitary organization known as Alpha 66 was first organized and founded in Puerto Rico in 1961 with 66 men. The group was created with the intention of maintaining the fighting spirit of the Cuban people after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. General Secretary Andrés Nazario Sargén was a founder of Alpha 66 along with other prominent anti-communist fighters such as his older brother Aurelio Nazario, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and Antonio Veciana.

Other organizations joined this armed struggle against Cuban communism, and thus began the first movements and incursions into the Cuban coast. In 1962, the Second Escambray Front (Segundo Frente del Escambray – SFE) and Alpha 66 became one, with Veciana as a coordinator and Gutiérrez Menoyo in charge of the military training. Later, Alpha 66 joined forces with the Revolutionary Movement of the People (Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo – MRP) in the Revolutionary Alliance (Alianza Revolucionaria).

In 1964, the Revolutionary Alliance executed “Plan Omega” that involved situating a well-equipped guerrilla force inside Cuba. Delegations from California, Florida, New York, Puerto Rico and Venezuela assembled a War Council carrying out propaganda and finance operations with the slogan, “El Plan Omega está en marcha” (“The Omega Plan is in motion”). The central goal was to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.

“El Plan Omega” failed, and Ernesto Díaz, Pedro Rodríguez, and Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, were captured along with three other Alpha officers: Domingo Ortega, Ramón Quesada Gómez, and Noel Salas Santos. After their capture, broadcast and propaganda campaigns were launched to gain release for these political prisoners. Their failure and imprisonment affected many of the rebel groups in Cuba and the Cuban exile community as a whole. The previously fiery enthusiasm diminished, and the Revolutionary Alliance split up, reduced once again to merely The Second Escambray Front and Alpha 66.

In 1965 El Correo, Alpha 66’s bulletin, announced that the new commander in chief would be Dr. Armando Fleites Díaz, who was dedicated to continuing the fight and rebuilding military strength. The renewed force initiated new paramilitary campaigns and fundraising for ships and military and radio equipment. Alpha 66 persisted in organizing and executing military operations, sabotages, and creating clandestine cells on the island. Many officers and members were killed during these infiltrations. In 1970 Coronel Vicente Méndez died in combat, and Aurelio Nazario was captured and executed.

After the 1970s, Alpha 66 restructured its underground network. New members were recruited and political activities implemented. The organization established the “Plan Máximo Gómez” in 1980 to promote internal destabilization in Cuba. As of 2010, Alpha 66 continued to operate from its headquarters in Miami, continuing to advocate for an armed civil uprising in Cuba.

Esther Herrera was a leader of the Cuban exile community in Los Angeles, particularly active in the 1980s. She worked with several exile organizations, including the Sociedad José Martí of Hawthorne, California, and Comité Pro-Acto 10 de Octubre.

Caridad Svich is an award-winning playwright, director, actor, composer, translator, and educator. She is considered one of the most prolific contemporary Latinx American playwrights. Svich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. on July 30, 1963 to Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents. She notes that her frequent moves from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, New York, and California among other travels and “living between cultures” has “instilled a nomadic strain” in her, which “has become an inevitable part of [her] writing vision.” She says that, “visions of migration (both physical and spiritual) dominate the plays, which have become, in turn, documents of internal diasporas. As a playwright, songwriter, editor and translator living between many cultures, including inherited ones, the idea of departure has always been not only an actual or metaphorical basis for writing the work.” In fact, during her career Svich continued to travel throughout the United States and internationally to places as varied as Traverse Theater in Edinburgh and the Royal Court Theater and Paines Plough Theater in London, Greece, Argentina and the US-Cuba Writer's Conference in Havana.

Svich earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1985 and her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, San Diego in theatre-playwriting in 1988. In 1988, she became a student of María Irene Fornés’ Latino playwriting workshop in New York, followed by playwright residencies at INTAR, Theater Communications Group, Lake Placid Institute for the Arts, and a 7-year residency with the New Dramatists in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, N.Y. In 1990, Svich directed a production of But There Are Fires for INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory Festival. In 2000, she acted in a production of Scar at Perishable Theater in Providence, Rhode Island. She also created the Original Score for Alchemy of Desire/ Dead Man's Blues (Text with Songs) which was performed at the Hal B. Wallis Theater in Evanston Illinois and William and Mary Theater in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Svich has written over forty full-length plays and fifteen translations as well as other short works. She says that “Explorations of wanderlust, dispossession, biculturalism, bilingualism, construction of identity, and the many different emotional terrains that can be inhabited onstage form the basis of my plays and other writing projects.” Her full-length works produced include: Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues (a play with songs), A Little Betrayal Among Friends, Any Place But Here, Archipelago, Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, The Booth Variations, Brazo Gitano [text with songs], The Breath of Stars, Corazon Eterno (always in my heart), DE TROYA, Fugitive Pieces (a play with songs), FUEL, GERTIE AND ALICE BY THE SEA, Guapa, Hide Sky, The House of the Spirits/La Casa de los Espiritus, In the time of the Butterflies/En el tiempo de las mariposas, Instructions for Breathing, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), JARMAN (all this maddening beauty), Love in the Time of Cholera/El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera, The Labyrinth of Desire, Magnificent Waste, The Orphan Sea, RED BIKE, Sanctuary (American Psalm), SPARK, Thrush (a play with slaughter songs), TOWN HALL, The Tropic of X, Trouble in Kind, Turn the Dark Up, Bow Down, This is a Hymn, Twelve Ophelias (a play with broken songs), Prodigal Kiss [text with songs], The Way of Water, Wreckage, Upon the Fragile Shore. She has also adapted for the stage novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez and Jose Leon Sanchez, and has radically reconfigured works from Wedekind, Euripides, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Her plays have been directed by Annie Castledine, Maria Irene Fornes, Lisa Peterson, Neel Keller, William Carden, Nick Philippou, Annie Dorsen, Katie Pearl, Stephen Wrentmore, Daniella Topol and Jose Zayas, among many others.

About Svich’s work, Lillian Manzor writes: “The themes, styles and concerns that shape Svich’s dramaturgy are: a critique of the American Dream and a constant search for home through the prism of diaspora and migration; the mixing of rituals and traditional cultural elements from the Americas with global pop culture; obtuse treatment of love and desire; and a poetic and nonrealistic use of language and musical elements.Svich’s characters survive by becoming “professional” nomads. Like their creator, they find themselves at the intersection of identities. As hybrids or transcultural beings, they live in a United States that is figured as the borderlands, a consumer society inhabited by nomads and the dispossessed. She writes from the position of a Latina, and there is a Latina sensibility or affect in all of her oeuvre. Her plays, however, defy and question the simple categorization or easy boxing of Latinas and Latinos both in content and in form. She stages the drama of her characters in such a way that they become an expressionistic allegory of the uncertainty of post-modern times: displaced human beings reconfigure the maps of home in a nonlinear fashion so that we can inhabit our imagined and imaginary communities of Mexico-Hollywood-Buenos Aires-Granada-Havana-New York.” (Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Volume 1. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 (184-6)

In 2003, while Svich was a TCG/Pew National Theatre Resident Artist at INTAR in New York City, she founded NoPassport, an unincorporated, artist-driven, grass-roots theatre alliance & press devoted to cross-cultural, Pan-American performance, theory, action, advocacy, and publication. NoPassport exists as a virtual and live forum for the exchange of work and dreams, a network between theatres and the academy, and a mobile band of playwrights, directors, actors, producers and musicians and provides mentoring for young artists. Early stages of NoPassport developed in New York City and Brooklyn at Little Theatre at Tonic, Low Bar and BRIC, and at the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, the latter where Svich had done a residency post-MFA. She has also published over twenty titles with NoPassport Press by authors as diverse as Todd London, John Jesurun, David Greenspan, Carson Kreitzer, Rinde Eckert, Lenora Champagne and Octavio Solis. NoPassport has also responded with creative action to incidents such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, and Climate Change. For example, with the work After Orlando: an international theatre action, a collective of over seventy playwrights from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom (England and Wales), Australia, and Uganda. Women, men, genderqueer playwrights, LGTBQ, Latinx, Latin@, playwrights of many colors and ethnicities was presented at more than thirty theatres and colleges, universities, and high schools across the U.S. and UK in the fall of 2016. In addition to her work with NoPassport Press, she is the Associate Editor, and Editor of BackPages, Contemporary Theatre Review theatre and performance journal in the UK, and since 2004, a Contributing Editor to TheatreForum, an international theatre and performance journal, UC-San Diego and the Drama Editor of Asymptote literary translation journal.

Svich has maintained a career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca, published in Federico García Lorca: impossible theater: five plays and thirteen poems; in new translations by Caridad Svich (Smith & Kraus, 2000), Lorca Major Plays Volume I, and Lorca: Major Plays Volume II (NoPassport Press), as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain. She is the editor of a number of publications including Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes, Smith & Kraus, NH (1999), Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/o Theatre and Performance (2000), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2002), Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries, conversations on media, culture, language and performance, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2004), Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks, Back Stage Books (an imprint of Watson-Guptill), NY (2005) Emerging Territories: Latino/a Theatre and Performance, special issue eds. Caridad Svich and Maria Delgado, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Vol. 16, No. 3, CUNY Grad Center, NY (Fall 2004), Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre, special issue, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.16, No. 8, Routledge, UK (2006), Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance, Eyecorner Press, Denmark and USA (2012), The Breath of Theatre 2003-2013, conversations with artists and critical reflections, NoPassport Press, CA (2013), Innovation in Five: Strategies for Theatre & Performance (2015).

In 2019, Svich was shortlisted for the American Shakespeare Center's Shakespeare's New Contemporaries Prize. She won both the Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Tanne Foundation Award in 2018. Other theatre awards and fellowships include the National Latino Playwriting Award (2013), OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012), Edgerton Foundation New Play Award (2012), American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize (2011), and HOLA Award for Playwriting (2009). Earlier awards include the Whitfield Cook Prize for New Writing at New Dramatists (2007), National Latino Playwriting Award (2003), TCG/PEW National Theatre Artist Residency at INTAR (2002-2003), Radcliffe Institute fellowship at Harvard University (2002-2003), Jonathan R. Reynolds Playwright in Residence at Denison University (2002), Thurber House Fellow at Ohio State University (2001), NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre (1996-1997), and Rosenthal New Play Prize at Cincinnati Playhouse (1994).

Darío Espina Pérez was born in Limonar, Matanzas, Cuba on October 25, 1920, to a family dedicated to beekeeping. He received his elementary education in public school and through exams received a scholarship from the Ministry of Agriculture to study to become an agricultural sciences teacher at the Alvaro Reynoso Principal Agricultural School in Colón, Cuba. After earning a bachelor of science degree, he attended the Faculty of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Havana, where he graduated with the degree of Agricultural Engineer in Sugar Chemistry. He later returned to the University of Havana to earn his law degree.

Espina's activities in Cuba were centered in the banking and agriculture industries. He was part of the accounting department at the Banco Continental Cubano, chief of construction for the Public Works Ministry's "Via Blanca" project, a math professor in the Alvaro Reynoso Provincial Agricultural School, inspector at the Provincial Schools of Agriculture, held various posts at the Banco de Fomento Agricola e Industrial, was consultant and deputy administrator at the Banco Núñez in Havana, manager of a branch of the Banco de la Construcción, professor and Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural Engineers of the University of Havana, professor of the Faculty of Law of the University of Pinar del Río, chief of the appraisal department at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform in 1959, and finally, officer of the Banco Nacional de Cuba until he left Cuba in 1961 during a scientific congress in Spain.

In 1961, Espina was granted asylum in the United States. Outside of Cuba, Espina continued to be an active professional through his position beginning in 1962 as sector specialist, consultant, and project manager with the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C. Espina worked and lived in various countries in Latin America, including Honduras, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Ecuador, Haiti, and Costa Rica.

In 1981, Espina retired from the IDB and settled in Miami, Florida, with his wife, lawyer Hilda Díaz Espina, and their three children, physicians Hilda Tejero and Darío M. Espina and management and information technology specialist Carlos Espina.

Espina authored nearly forty technical and literary books and co-authored several more, all edited in collaboration with his wife, Hilda. In 1989, he founded and directed La Academia Poética de Miami literary society. His writing has received various awards, including Premio Garcilaso de la Vega in 1995, given by the Instituto de Cultura Peruana for his poem La Naturaleza and the Premio Carlos Márquez Sterling in 1992 for the best journalism article on the reconstruction of Cuba. Espina has received many other numerous awards for his engineering work. These include: the Víctor M. Peraza award (1948), recognition from the Municipio de Guamacaro en el Exilio (1989), the Primer Poeta Épico award given by the Colegio Nacional de Pedagogos en el Exilio (1992), the Alvaro Reynoso award from the Colegio Nacional de Ingenieros Agrónomos y Azucereros Cubanos (1992), the Premio Certamen Poético García Lorca (1995), and the Premio Instituto de Cultura Peruana (1995). In 1995 Espina was recognized as the teacher of the decade by the Cuadratura del Círculo Poético Iberoamericano.

Espina passed away in Miami on September 6, 1996.

Mariel, Revista de Literatura y Arte was a magazine published between 1983 and 1985 by a group of Cuban writers and artists who had arrived to the United States during the Mariel Boatlift. The magazine focused primarily on Marielista works and issues.

Elia Rosa Fernández de Mendia was a Cuban sculptor, potter, and clay worker. She studied ceramics in New York. She also started a studio in the Santiago de las Vegas area of Havana, Cuba. She had a ceramics exposition with three other artists, Amelia Pelaez, Maria Garcia Buch, and Rebeca Robes at the Lyceum y Lawn Tennis Club in 1961. She sat on the Directive board of the Lyceum y Lawn Tennis Club, heading the exhibitions committee.

Gina Pellón is a Cuban artist, educator, and poet. She was born on December 26th, 1926 in Cumanayagua, Las Villas in the province of Cienfuegos, Cuba. She studied fine arts at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes "San Alejandro" in Havana, and graduated in 1954. She then taught children for three years, from 1954 to 1957 at the Velado Polytechnic Institute. Of her few years of teaching, Pellón said that she “allowed children to express themselves freely, to tell their stories through colorful strokes of the brush. My painting is just that, a kind of multicolor graffiti. I believe that every artist has preconceived innate ideas; but when an artist goes into the world, the universe unfolds before them.”

In 1959, she applied for a scholarship to obtain a visa to study in Paris. She was one of the finalists, but didn’t receive the scholarship. Undeterred, she reached out to a steamship company to find a means to travel to Europe. They offered her a free ticket if she brought them the twelve scholarship recipients. In the end, she brought 50 people. Pellón arrived in Paris in 1959 and did not return to Cuba after her 3-month visa expired, drawing the ire of Cuban cultural attache in Paris, Roberto Fernandez-Retamar. She ended up living out the rest of her life in Paris, working as a successful artist and displaying her work around the world, as well as publishing collections of poetry.

In 1961, she had her first solo exhibition at Gallery Kasper in Lausanne, Switzerland. She noted that, “When I arrived with my tropical colors to the sober and gray tranquility of Scandinavia, it was as if I had brought the sun to them.” In Europe, she interacted with the surrealists in Paris, and then joined the COBRA group, a European movement of innovative abstract expressionism. Her work was also displayed in many exhibitions in cities in Europe and Scandinavia, including Paris (1968, 1986, 1990, 1999), Lausanne, Brussels, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Silkebour and Copenhagen (Denmark), Larvik (Norway,) and Spinea-Venezia, Italy in 2002, and Albisola Marina, Italy in 2003, as well as major cities in the Americas, such as Miami (in 1981, 1991, 1994, 2001) New York, and Caracas (1975).

In 1978, she received the Order of Arts and Letters in France and won a CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in New Jersey, United States in the same year. Pellón was a prolific painter, using intense colors, abstract forms, and often painting figures and faces of women. She noted that “I paint every day… from sunrise to sundown. In this process, I have the need to create, to portray emotions, and once I am about to complete a work, I get the urge to attack another.” She also made collages and prints. Her work has most recently and also posthumously included in collections and catalogs by Cernuda Arte gallery in Coral Gables, Florida. She died on March 27, 2014 in Paris, France.

Leila Míccolis (b. 1947) is a Brazilian author, poet, script-writer, and literary critic. A native of Rio de Janeiro, Míccolis holds a Master of Science degree in Literature and Literary Theory from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has edited over thirty books, and is internationally renowned for her involvement in the Brazilian poetical generation of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as her scriptwriting for soap operas in the 1980s and 1990s.

In addition to being a participant and authority in Brazilian alternative poetry and literature, Míccolis was also a collector. Her collection was painstakingly accumulated over the course of forty-five years. The collection is of an "alternative" character because it contains materials that reflect countercultural resistance, in its widest possible sense, and includes, but is not limited to, political and countercultural pamphlets and periodicals, concrete poetry, neo-concrete poetry and other vanguard/avant-garde artistic experimentation, fanzines, film reviews, university publications, theater, and musical pieces. As opposed to the commercial and widely-circulated press of "official” Brazilian governmental venues, the publications contained in the collection especially treat stigmatized or marginalized groups, such as Afro-Brazilians, women, sexual minorities, in various forms including literary pieces, editorial cartoons, political comics, sociopolitical critiques of "Brazilianness," humor, and the promotion of ecological and environmental awareness. The collection also contains a large variety of materials from the 1970s Marginália movement, a term used to describe a series of underground publications which circulated during the military dictatorship.

As such, her collection tells the story of contemporary Brazil (1960s to the present) from an "unofficial" perspective, one which often diverts from the stereotypical images of what Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike have come to understand as "brasilidade" (Brazilian character) during the second half of the twentieth century.

Steven Butterman, assistant professor of Portuguese in the University’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, came across the Collection while conducting research for his book, Perversions on Parade (Hyperbole Books, San Diego State University Press, 2005), the first book-length scholarly treatment in English of Brazilian poet Glauco Mattoso’s work. Mattoso, who was a co-collaborator in the creation of "Lampiao da Esquina," explored themes of homosexual transgression as a form of cultural resistance. “Ms. Míccolis has managed to preserve a diverse host of alternative voices which sought creative expression despite being officially silenced. Collectively these works represent Brazil’s burgeoning civil rights movement within the surrounding culture of repression,” states Professor Butterman.

Leila Míccolis resides in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Leila Míccolis (b. 1947) is a Brazilian author, poet, script-writer, and literary critic. A native of Rio de Janeiro, Míccolis holds a Master of Science degree in Literature and Literary Theory from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has edited over thirty books, and is internationally renowned for her involvement in the Brazilian poetical generation of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as her script writing for soap operas in the 1980s and 1990s.

In addition to being a participant and authority in Brazilian alternative poetry and literature, Míccolis was also a collector. Her collection was painstakingly accumulated over the course of forty-five years. The collection is of an "alternative" character because it contains materials that reflect counter cultural resistance, in its widest possible sense, and includes, but is not limited to, political and counter cultural pamphlets and periodicals, concrete poetry, neo-concrete poetry and other vanguard/avant-garde artistic experimentation, fanzines, film reviews, university publications, theater, and musical pieces. As opposed to the commercial and widely-circulated press of "official” Brazilian governmental venues, the publications contained in the collection especially treat stigmatized or marginalized groups, such as Afro-Brazilians, women, sexual minorities, in various forms including literary pieces, editorial cartoons, political comics, sociopolitical critiques of "Brazilianness," humor, and the promotion of ecological and environmental awareness. The collection also contains a large variety of materials from the 1970s Marginália movement, a term used to describe a series of underground publications which circulated during the military dictatorship.

As such, her collection tells the story of contemporary Brazil (1960s to the present) from an "unofficial" perspective, one which often diverts from the stereotypical images of what Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike have come to understand as "brasilidade" (Brazilian character) during the second half of the twentieth century.

Steven Butterman, assistant professor of Portuguese in the University’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, came across the Collection while conducting research for his book, Perversions on Parade (Hyperbole Books, San Diego State University Press, 2005), the first book-length scholarly treatment in English of Brazilian poet Glauco Mattoso’s work. Mattoso, who was a co-collaborator in the creation of "Lampiao da Esquina," explored themes of homosexual transgression as a form of cultural resistance. “Ms. Míccolis has managed to preserve a diverse host of alternative voices which sought creative expression despite being officially silenced. Collectively these works represent Brazil’s burgeoning civil rights movement within the surrounding culture of repression,” states Professor Butterman.

Leila Míccolis resides in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.