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Enrique Labrador Ruiz, Cuban journalist, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and poet, was born in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, on May 11, 1902. He was a member of the Academia Cubana de la Lengua and also of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Labrador Ruiz was a well-learned and traveled man who created his own style of writing novels, which he called gaseiforme. In 1933, he published his first novel in this style, El laberinto de sí mismo, which forms a trilogy with Cresival(1936) and Anteo (Novela gaseiforme) (1940). With his collection of short stories, El gallo en el espejo(1953), he established his cuentería cubiche style.

In 1976, Labrador Ruiz and his wife María (Cheché) were exiled from Cuba. After residing in Spain and Venezuela, they moved to and maintained their permanent residence in Miami, Florida. During his years of exile, Labrador Ruiz wrote for many literary journals and newspapers, including Réplica(Miami), El Diario de Caracas, and Linden Lane Magazine.

Enrique Labrador Ruiz received numerous awards and honors for his works of literature. In Cuba, Conejito Ulánwon the Hernández Catá Prize in 1946, and in 1950 his novel Sangre hambrientawon the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Some of his most important works are: El gallo en el espejo(1953), El pan de los muertos(1958), and his final work, Cartas a la carte (1991).

Enrique Labrador Ruiz died in Miami on November 10, 1991.

Cristina Khuly is a Cuban-American sculptor, actress, environmentalist, and film director and producer based in New York. She was born in Miami, Florida on January 20th, 1970. She is best known for making the 2008 documentary, “Shoot Down.”

Khuly’s early career was in acting and modeling in the United States and abroad. From 1989-1999 she appeared in numerous print and screen advertisements including for Vogue, Mademoiselle, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, New Woman, Brides, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and was in fashion campaigns such as ESPRIT, Valentino, Lilly Pulitzer and Benetton. She was featured in commercials for Meji ice-cream, Kirin beer, Honda's Vita in Japan, as well as for the cosmetics brand Clinique.

In the mid 1990’s, Khuly pursued an education in fine arts, studying at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, and Florida National University. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the Florida International University in Miami in 1994. She worked in sculpture, painting, industrial design, graphic design and film and has won various awards for her art, including an Award in Sculpture from the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, PA, the New York Foundation for the Arts' Felissimo Design Award, and was the Miami Beach Art in Public Places "Electrowave Shuttle" Competition winner.

Her sculptural works have been displayed in gallery spaces and museums, including the Cooperstown Art Association in Cooperstown, NY; the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, PA; the Carnegie Mellon University's Hewlett Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA, and the Florida State University's Museum of Fine Arts in Tallahassee, FL. She has also produced commissioned works such as "Flight," which is on view as a permanent installation in Downtown Miami, Florida since 2002.

Khuly is Creative Director of Entertaining Ideas, which she co-founded in 2005 with her husband, Douglas Eger. Khuly has directed and produced films, including investing in the 2007 documentary film, “War/Dance,” which went on to win a number of awards and an Oscar nomination and making a short film about the Cuban sculptor Enrique Gay García. Khuly directed, narrated, and financed the 2008 documentary “Shoot Down,” which is about the events that took place on February 24th, 1996 around two aircraft operated by the Miami-based anti-Castro organization “Brothers to the Rescue” that were shot down while trying to enter into Cuban airspace. As the documentary shows, the details of the incident are still disputed to this day due to political interests and tensions. The “Brothers to the Rescue” incident resulted in the death of four men, including Khuly’s uncle, Armando Alejandre Jr, which created a deeply personal connection to the topic of the documentary. As Khuly says in a 2007 Miami Herald interview regarding making the film, “I was walking over the graves of dead relatives.''' Despite the political nature of the film, it was received by a wider audience. Currently, Khuly works on land conservation projects in Upstate New York with her husband.

Alberto Sarraín is a Cuban theater director, playwright, actor, and educator. He was born in Cuba in 1949. He graduated with a degree in psychology from La Universidad de La Habana in 1976. In 1979 he immigrated to the United States where he has worked and lived. He founded the Cuban Cultural Group, also known as La Má Teodora in 1996. He has taught theater, directed Cuban works, and been involved in festivals in the United States, Cuba, Spain, and other Latin American countries. He was the co-recipient of the 2001 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award, for leading a legal battle to allow the performances of Cuban plays in Florida.

Carlos Márquez-Sterling (1898-1991) was a Cuban lawyer, professor, writer and statesman active in island politics from the 1930s to the 1950s, and whose stature and political clout made him a leader of the exile patriotic movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. Márquez-Sterling was a congressman in Cuba’s House of Representatives from 1936 to 1946, acting as president of that body in 1936 and 1941. In 1940, he presided over the constitutional convention that created a more progressive constitution for the country; the document was in effect until Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 coup d’état.  Márquez-Sterling also worked as a professor of political economy at the University of Havana. Expanding on his political calling, he was appointed Minister of Labor and Minister of Education from 1941 to 1942, and would eventually become a presidential candidate in 1958 before the rise of Fidel Castro.

Early on Márquez-Sterling had qualms about Castro’s revolutionary movement, predicting it would lead to totalitarian rule: “Una revolución sólo podrá traer la anarquía y desembocar en una dictadura de tipo totalitario que Cuba nunca ha experimentado.”

Márquez-Sterling was an exile leader, founding the Movimiento Patriótico Cuba Libre in New York in the early 1960s, lobbying the United States for the establishment of a Cuban government in exile and organizing exile groups across the country. He moved to Miami in 1979, teaching and writing in his retirement.

The Cuban Refugee Program was authorized by the President of the United States in February 1961. Federal assistance for Cuban refugees had begun in 1960 under President Eisenhower in response to the growing number of Cubans fleeing the Castro regime. President John F. Kennedy, recognizing that the situation was beyond the scope of individual states and volunteer agencies, assigned responsibility to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), at the time Abraham Ribicoff, who delegated implementation and administration to William L. Mitchell, Commissioner of Social Security. The “Migration and Refugee Assistance Act,” enacted in 1962, provided the legislative basis for the program and authorized appropriations. The Florida State Department of Public Welfare, representing the federal government, set up an office in Miami for the assistance, child welfare services and medical care of Cuban refugees.

The Miami Cuban Refugee Emergency Center, located at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Boulevard, became the focal point of refugee registration, assistance, relief and resettlement, as well as coordination of government and independent agencies’ programs. Federal funding provided for the center’s operations, record keeping, publications, coordination of agencies and research on different aspects of the refugee situation, as well as for programs. The latter included financial assistance, educational loans, health care, adult education and re-training, resettlement and care of unaccompanied children. By 1962 between 1500 and 2000 Cubans were arriving weekly.

In 1963 the newly formed Welfare Administration succeeded Social Security in overseeing the Cuban Refugee Program. The decrease in influx of refugees following the cessation of regular flights and the implementation of programs such as home visits facilitated the transition from crisis response to a more efficient, better organized program.

In the years to come, however, the program would have to adapt to new emergency situations such as the arrival of Bay of Pigs Brigade 2506 prisoners in 1963 and the Camarioca boatlift of 1965. Perhaps the most taxing year was 1980 when the Mariel boatlift brought more than 125,000 Cubans to the United States. Simultaneously, Haitian refugees had started to arrive in growing numbers. The federal government declared a state of emergency and charged the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with processing and assisting the entrants. On July of the same year the Cuban-Haitian Task Force (CHTF) was created to coordinate federal resources in support of county and state efforts, and to address community problems related to the influx of refugees into the Miami area, replacing FEMA in this capacity.

The Center closed its last location on Ponce de Leon Boulevard and 8th Street on July 1994, after more than three decades of providing assistance to thousands of refugees. Its archives were donated to Professor Juan Clark of Miami-Dade College who in turn donated them to the Cuban Heritage Collection.

Juana Rosa Pita is a Cuban writer, poet, and academic. She taught and co-founded Ediciones Solar in Washington D.C., as well as teaching at Toulane University in New Orleans and multiple institutions in Boston, Massachussetts. She has published over 22 volumes of poetry.

Mario Girbau was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1916. After being educated in the United States, Girbau graduated as an accountant from the University of Havana in 1943 and worked as an official in the government's Ministerio de Utilidades until 1960, when he left Cuba for Miami.

Actively involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Girbau managed funds for Brigade 2506, the CIA-funded incursion force that invaded Cuba in 1961. His counter-revolutionary activities continued into the 1970s.

Girbau died in Miami in 2002.

Antonio Fernández Reboiro was born in Nuevitas, Camagüey, the son of Spanish immigrants Antonio Fernández de La Fuente and Julia Reboiro Vásquez. Between 1960 and 2003 he designed works for theater and music groups in Madrid as well as different groups all through Spain. His works are located in The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Musée de L’Affiche et la Publicité and the Centre National d’Art et de Culture George Pompidou in Paris; the National Gallery in London; the Museo del Cartel in Varsovia; the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami; and the Museo Carlos Maside in Spain, along with many other museums all around the world.