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Teok Carrasco was a self-taught Cuban painter best know for religious scenes, landscapes, and brightly colored murals.

Paul L. Cejas was born in Cuba in 1943, where he lived before emigrating to Miami in the 1960s. He attended the University of Miami, where he graduated with a Bachelor's in Business Administration in Accounting in 1969. He also received a Doctorate honoris causa from Florida International University. He has been a business and civic leader in South Florida for over forty years.

Cejas served as US Ambassador to Belgium from 1998 to 2001. He was the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CareFlorida Health Systems, Inc., the largest Hispanic-owned healthcare company in the United States, which he sold in 1994. He served as the chairman and CEO of PLC Investments, a family-owned investment firm, and as a director of the pharmaceutical company IVAX Corporation, as well as Mellon Financial. A former banker and a certified public accountant, Cejas was a member of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools Board and held the post of chairman. He has been a member of the University of Miami's Board of Trustees since 2003.

Raúl Chibás Ribas (April 25, 1916 - August 25, 2002) was a Cuban politician and military official. He was an initial supporter of Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, opposing the government of Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s and serving in various positions within the revolutionary government, including railroad commissioner and as a judge at Castro's request. His older brother Eduardo was the founder and leader of the Orthodox Party (Party of the Cuban People - Orthodox); the younger Chibás took over as party leader in 1951 after the death of his brother by suicide.

Chibás eventually defected to the United States in 1960. He was an anti-Castro activist in the United States, calling for the overthrow of Castro's government in the 1960s. He worked as a teacher in New York City before moving to Caracas, Venezuela, in the 1980s. Chibás settled in Miami in 1991, where he lived until his death in 2002.

Luis Conte Agüero was born in Santiago de Cuba on July 6, 1924. He was a journalist and politician belonging to the Partido Ortodoxo. He was exiled to Venezuela in the 1950s and returned to Cuba on January 6, 1959, working in radio and television and initially supporting the Cuban Revolution. Within a few months of Castro's rule, Conte Agüero broke with the revolutionary movement's communist turn and was sentenced to death by firing squad. He escaped the island and settled in Miami, where he has been a critic of the regime.

He is the author of more than 40 books, including "Cuba: historia de su historia," "América contra el comunismo," and "Mis memorias: Cuba y América."

Jill Flanders Crosby holds an Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University, and is a professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Since beginning her research in Ghana in 1991, she has focused on ritual dance forms in Ghana, Togo, and Cuba, conducting fieldwork from 1997 to 2018. Her extensive research inspired a collaborative art installation that debuted in Havana, Cuba, in December 2010 and was later exhibited in Ghana in 2013 and San Francisco in 2014.

Flanders Crosby has presented her findings on Ghanaian and Cuban dance traditions at numerous scholarly conferences, including those of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the African Studies Association, the Congress on Research in Dance, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her research has been published in Making Caribbean Dance (University Press of Florida) and journals such as Southern Quarterly, Material Religion, Etnofoor, Revista Catauro, as well as on the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography website. Additionally, she has explored the origins of jazz dance, contributing to the edited volume Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches (University Press of Florida).

Currently, Flanders Crosby is conducting oral history research among dancers, choreographers, and composers in the Cook Islands of the South Pacific, focusing on their creative and cultural expressions in dance.

María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a self-identified queer Cuban-American playwright and director and leading figure in the avant-garde “off-off-Broadway” theater scene.1 Fornés wrote over forty original plays – many of which she also directed – and was the recipient of nine Off-Broadway Theater (Obie) Awards and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Alongside her writing and directing, Fornés was known for her innovative acting and playwrighting exercises, as well as her long teaching career in which she specifically mentored up-and-coming Hispanic playwrights. She taught at institutions such as New York University, the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in California, and the INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center in Manhattan as the Director of its Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory (1981-1992), among other roles. From 1973 to 1979, she was the managing director of the New York Theatre Strategy, an organization that was dedicated to producing experimental works. Despite being such a prolific writer, Fornés was not well known even within playwriting circles; in 2013, the playwright Tony Kushner stated, “She’s not spoken of as an important American playwright, and she should be” (qtd. in Weber) and the 1986 cover of The Village Voice named her “America’s Greatest Unknown Playwright.”

Fornés, known as Irene to her friends, was born on May 14th, 1930, in Havana, Cuba. Her mother, a schoolteacher, and her father, a Civil Service worker, were of modest financial means and had six children (three boys and three girls), Irene being the youngest. The pair both had a love of books and shared this with their children. In 1945, Fornés’s father died and her mother, Carmen Collado Fornés, immigrated to the United States with the fifteen-year-old Fornés and her older sister, Margarita. Having little education, Fornés’s first job was at the Capezio shoe factory in New York City; however, she was quickly dissatisfied with the job and learned English so that she could become a translator. By age nineteen, she had become increasingly interested in painting and decided to study abstract art in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, alongside the noted abstract-expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. In 1954, Fornés left the U.S. and relocated to Europe, where she lived, mainly in Paris, for three years. She had begun a romantic relationship with the writer and artists’ model, Harriet Sohmers, and relocated largely to be with her as well as to study painting. While in Paris Fornés saw the original French production of Samuel Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot" and was moved by the play despite the fact that she did not understand French and was unfamiliar with the play beforehand, but, nonetheless, the power of theater was apparent to her from this moment forward. The relationship between Fornés and Sohmers broke down and, in 1957, Fornés returned to New York.

In 1959, Fornés began a relationship with the late famed writer and critic Susan Sontag – before she had made a name for herself – and the relationship catalyzed the beginning of both of their writerly careers, although, for Fornés, her journey into writing began rather by chance as Scott Cummings, author of a 2013 monograph on Fornés relates: “By her own account, Fornés took up writing on a whim” (10). The story goes that in 1961 while out in Greenwich Village on a Saturday night looking for a party, Sontag complained to Fornés about wanting to begin writing a novel but found herself unable because of writer’s block. Fornés pushed her to begin regardless and claimed that she would write with Sontag in order to prove how easy it was, and they returned to their apartment there and then to begin. Fornés, however, struggled and resorted to picking up a cookbook from the shelf and forcing herself to form sentences using the first and last words on a given page. This spontaneous and organic way of creating would turn out to stick with Fornés for the entirety of her career; she later relayed, “There was no significance, really, but I tried to connect them. I realized that when you're blocked, you have to just accept anything, even if it doesn't make sense, because you can make it make sense. For what you write to have its own spirit, it's important not to focus on a desired result” (qtd. in Obejas). Though for Fornés the immediate result of that evening was a short story that she deemed insignificant, Sontag began an essay that was later published, initiating her career as a critic. The long-term result for Fornés was that she acquired a daily practice of writing and eventually her first fully-fleshed out characters emerged; she recalled, “They spoke very spontaneously. They were very clear, very vivid. I'd listen, then write a little scene. The next day, I did the same thing … I realized then that characters live in you, in your imagination. You don't really invent them or decide what they say” (qtd. in Obejas). In 1963, her first play, "There! You Died" – renamed "Tango Palace" in 1964 – was produced by San Francisco's Actors Workshop and then by New York City's Actors Studio.2

From the mid-1960s onwards, Fornés’s avant-garde style began to gain her a reputation, despite the fact that her plays vary dramatically in terms of time period, setting, and types of protagonists. After "Tango Palace" Fornés wrote "The Successful Life of 3" and then teamed up with the composer Al Carmines to write "Promenade," which is a musical that earned Fornés her first Obie in 1965. Fornés’s distinctive way of directing actors, staging sets, and experimenting with audience experiences came to be recognized as equally emblematic of her artistic oeuvre as her writing was. Marc Robinson, author of "The Theater of María Irene Fornés" (1999), stated in 2013, “It’s hard to separate Fornés the writer from Fornés the director [as] for her there was no division between writing dialogue for a character and thinking how the actor playing that character would hold her hands onstage, or where the chair would be placed, or how the light would fall at the end of the scene. She was also a master of stage silence” (qtd. in Weber). An example of her innovation would be her direction of perhaps her best-known play, "Fefu and her Friends" (1977), which is a feminist play set in the 1930s about the rivalries, conflicts, and sympathies between eight women. The second act has four different sets around the theater and the actors perform four scenes simultaneously while the audience is split into four groups and each group rotates between scenes until they have viewed all four performances. Examples of her playwrighting exercises, as related by Tabitha Parry Collins, included “seeing and using a movement, an object, or a written line to begin a scene and then watching the rest of the story unfold [and] drawing words or scenes out of a hat and then writing a script based around those concepts.” An inability to wed Fornés to a single, distinct, or consistent style is unfortunately why she is less remembered than she should be, as many have pointed out. The scholar Patricia Ybarra, for example, stated “One irony about Irene - given how intuitive she was - is that the primary attention she’s gotten in her life has been as much through academic scholarship as it has been through professional theater, just because she didn’t conform very easily to commercial norms of… playwriting” (qtd. in Lee).

In the early to mid-2000s, Fornés was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and had to give up writing because of her depreciating memory. Her last play was "Letters from Cuba" (2000), which was based on letters sent to her by one of her brothers who remained in Havana when she moved to the U.S. In 2018, however, filmmaker Michelle Memran released a documentary portrait of Fornés that had been fifteen years in the making. Mainly filmed between 2003 and 2006, the documentary is a collaborative project that chronicles the friendship between the two women. Fornés was diagnosed during filming, some viewing her predicament, as Hugh Ryan describes, as “a cruel trick of fate; time stealing the memories of a playwright who was already so little remembered.” Conversely, Memran felt that Fornés’s ever-creative mind simply lacked an outlet and felt the film could provide her with that. Eventually, however, filming had to end when Fornés’s condition worsened; Memran stated, “When she stopped recognizing what we’re doing, for me the collaboration was no longer. I wanted the film to be as much Irene’s as it was mine, and there was a sense of maintaining her dignity” (qtd. in Lee). Fornés lived out the remainder of her life in a nursing home in upper Manhattan – frequently visited by friends and family – and passed away on October 30th, 2018. She is survived by seventeen nieces and nephews.

Laura Bass
UGrow Fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020

Notes

1. The “off-off-Broadway” movement began in 1958 as part of an anti-commercial and experimental form of theater and drama. As opposed to large New York City Broadway theaters and still substantial off-Broadway theaters, off-off-Broadway theaters are very small and usually have less than 100 seats.
2. Fornés did write a play before "There! You Died"/"Tango Palace" called "La Viuda" (The Widow) in 1961, which was based on letters written to her great-grandfather in Cuba from a cousin in Spain that she later translated. The play was staged in Spanish in New York and never translated into English; Fornés had no role in the staging of the play and for this reason Cummings comments, “in her career, it stands more as a precursor than a first play” (10).

Aida T. Levitan, Ph.D., is a leading figure in the Hispanic advertising and public relations industry as well as a philanthropist in the arts sector. She transformed Sánchez & Levitan, the agency she co-founded in 1986, into the number one Hispanic advertising agency in the U.S., after selling it to Publicis, and served as its President. In 2006 she founded The Levitan Group, a consulting firm. In 1995 she founded ArtesMiami, a non-profit dedicated to promoting and supporting Hispanic artists and cultural organizations. Dr. Levitan currently serves as Chairman of the Board of U.S. Century Bank, making her the only Cuban-American female Chair of the Board of a U.S. bank. She is the immediate past Chairperson of the Amigos of the Cuban Heritage Collection and former Chair of Facts About Cuban Exiles. She was former Vice Chair of the National Smithsonian Latino Center, and served on the federal American Latino Museum Commission. She is a Trustee Emerita of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and serves on the board of the Spanish Cultural Center of Miami.

Humberto Mayol is an award-winning Cuban photographer and documentary filmmaker working with the Palomas Group of the National Film Institute of Cuba.

Tony Mendoza was born on July 21, 1941 in Havana, Cuba. After migrating to the United States in 1960 and adjusting to his new life in Miami, Florida, he received a Bachelor of Engineering from Yale University and later attended Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1973, he began to mainly focus on photography. In 1988, he became a professor of photography at Ohio State University. He has received over ten fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts.

Natalia Aróstegui Bolognini was born in Camagüey, Cuba. She was known for her cultivation of the fine arts in Cuba and New York. She worked with the "Pro Arte Musical" Society of Havana, starting in the early 1930s, first as librarian for the Society and then as dean of music and singing courses, being a performer herself. On June 30th, 1931, she facilitated the opening of the Society’s School of Ballet. It was the first ballet school to be founded in Cuba and likely the first in Latin America. The opening of the school was a first step towards the development of classical ballet in Cuba, which has since played a central role in society and is a highlight of Cuba’s cultural position in the world. Later she would go on to sponsor musicians and artists in New York, including Alicia Alonso, Rita Montaner, the composer Ernesto Lecuona, and more. Natalia was married to the famous violinist and concertmaster Remo E. Bolognini from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Aróstegui was named vice consul of Cuba in New York and served for almost thirty years before 1959. In 1938, she was distinguished by Las Asociaciones Femeninas (The Women’s Association of Cuba) as one of the first women to hold a foreign service consular position.

Aróstegui hailed from an Aristocratic Camagüen family that originally immigrated to Cuba from Spain in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Natalia’s work was influenced by her father, Gonzalo Aróstegui y del Castillo, a famous Cuban surgeon who also served as Secretary of Education in the 1920s. He was appointed Secretary of Public Instruction and Fine Arts in 1919, subsequently taking charge of founding the Institutes of Camagüey and Matanzas. Aróstegui’s niece, Natalia Bolívar, was deeply influenced by her aunt’s (her mother’s sister’s) cultural values and education and went on to become a well-known artist, writer and researcher of Afro-Cuban culture and religion in Cuba under Lydia Cabrera. In her interviews she mentions the influence that her family, including aunt Natalia and the time spent with her in New York before 1959, impacted her life and work.

Carlos Prío Socarrás (1903-1977) was born to Francisco Prío Rivas and María de Regla Socarrás Socarrás in Bahía Honda, Cuba. He became politically active during his time as a law student at the University of Havana, when he spent two years in prison for anti-government activities. In 1933, he was part of the coup that deposed Gerardo Machado’s government; it was around this time that he was involved in the founding of the Partido Revolucionario - Auténtico, whose nationalist and anti-liberal ideals originated during the 1933 revolution that ousted Machado. He was elected to the National Assembly in 1939 and became the leader of the Partido Auténtico in 1940. From 1945 to 1947, he served as Cuba’s Prime Minister, and then served as Minister of Labor from 1947 to 1948 before becoming president that year. Prío continued the centrist policies of his predecessor Ramón Grau San Martín, establishing agrarian reform programs, a national bank and a civil service.

In 1952, he was deposed in a military coup led by Fulgencio Batista, three months before the next elections, and left for the United States. He returned to the island in 1959, initially supporting Castro’s revolution, but eventually left the island again in 1961. He was an active spokesman for the exile community in Miami throughout the 1960s and early 70s. Prío spent the later years of his life in Miami working as a designer and businessman before his death in 1977.

Juan A. del Regato was one of several hundred Cuban medical students expelled from the University of Havana in 1927 due to protests against President Gerardo Machado. Approximately 130 of these students relocated and continued their studies at the Université de Paris in France. Many of these students returned to Cuba and acquired great prestige as physicians.

Juan A. del Regato graduated from the Université de Paris in 1937 and came to the United States in 1938. He collected the theses of several of his fellow Cuban scholars in France, and donated them to the Otto G. Richter Library in 1988.

Antonia Rey was born Maria Antonia Francesch on October 12, 1927, in Havana, Cuba to Antonio Francesch, a dentist, and Emilia Rey, a nurse. Antonia’s father died before she was born and she was given her mother’s surname. Rey’s grandmother raised her while her mother studied nursing. Her mother later married Rafael Rangel and had two sons. Antonia was a teenager when her mother remarried. From a young age, Rey wanted to be an actress, but she decided to study the law at the University of Havana, which garnered her stepfather’s approval, unlike her dream of acting on stage. However, Rey dropped out of law school and went on to pursue theater, making her debut in 1948 in “Numancia Cervantes,” at the University of Havana.

In the 1950’s she rose to prominence on the stage in Havana, playing principal roles such as Madge in William Inge’s “Picnic,” the title role in George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” and Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” During this epoch, she met her husband Andres Castro who owned the theater, Las Mascaras. Castro, born July 27, 1917, in Havana, Cuba, was from an affluent family that was in the furniture business. He and Rey married in 1958. Reportedly they tied the knot during the intermission of a show they were rehearsing at the time. After the Castros rose to power in 1959, Rey and her husband who were famous in the theater community and considered to be pioneers in the pre-Revolution theater movement. Post-1959 they were presented with the offer of National Theater and getting a plethora of roles in its productions. Rey and her husband, however, decided to flee to the U.S. in 1961 as part of the “first-wave” of Cuban political exiles, which mostly consisted of upper and middle-class professionals and their families. Although she left her illustrious theater career and possessions behind in Havana, Rey’s niece reports that Rey never regretted their decision to leave Cuba.

In the United States, Rey and Castro settled in New York City to continue being part of the theater world. Like many Cuban exiles, the couple had to start from scratch. Through a connection she made, Rey was given a small role, which expanded to further opportunities. Rey made her debut on Broadway in 1964, when she played the role of Lupa in the chorus of the musical “Bajour,” which starred Chita Rivera at the Shubert Theater. Rey also played a Mexican woman in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1973 and had small roles in two other productions of Tennessee Williams plays, “The Rose Tattoo” in 1995 and as Madrecita in “Camino Real” in 1970 at the Lincoln Center Theatre, New York City; as prisoner in, “Poets from the Inside”, and as Mamita, “The Wonderful Year”, both Public Theatre, New York City; as Fula Lopez, “In the Summer House,” Manhattan Theatre Club, New York City; as Maria in, “Back Bog Beast”, at American Place Theatre; as mother in “Blood Wedding,” INTAR Theatre, New York City; as Ranevsky in “The Cherry Orchard”, in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and as Mrs. Warren in “Mrs. Warren's Profession,” all Westside Repertory Theatre in New York City. She also appeared in “The Engagement Baby” in 1970, as Mrs. Murino in “42 Seconds from Broadway” in 1973 and “The Ritz” in 1975.

Antonia Rey began appearing on screen in film and television roles, although during the time period when Rey was active, many of the parts available to her were “ethnic” supporting roles that followed the tropes of maternal figures, Gypsies, witches, and fortune tellers. She appeared in 30 movies from comedies to psychological thrillers, including as the landlady in “Klute,” a 1971 crime thriller with Jane Fonda, the 1979 musical “Hair,” “Moscow on the Hudson,” the 1978 drama “King of the Gypsies”, “Coogan’s Bluff,” in 1968 was her first movie appearance,” “The Lords of Flatbush,” the comedy “Kiss Me, Guido” in 1997, the thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” in 1990, as Mrs. Stella in one of the “Die Hard” films, the voice of Trixie in the 2005 animated film “The Corpse Bride,” and the voice of “Abuela” on the children’s show “Dora the Explorer.” She won cameos and small roles in sitcoms as well as soap operas (“As The World Turns,” “All My Children”), police procedurals (“Law and Order” and “Third Watch”), the TV-movie pilot for “Kojak,” and “Who’s the Boss Her final appearance was as Assunta, Blue and Isabella Scaramucci's spiritual aunt on the second season of the series “Happy!” for the Syfy Channel, which premiered after her death.The episodes where she appeared were dedicated in her name.

In 2003, Rey received a lifetime achievement award from the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors. (HOLA) Her frequent appearance on television and in movies caused her to be recognized while out and about. She was beloved by those who world with her and fellow actress Gilda Miros referred to her as “Good-hearted Antonia.” Rey died at the age of 92 on February 21, 2019 in New York City.