Aguilar was a professor at Columbia University, Cornell University and at Georgetown University where Bill Clinton was one of his students.

He was Director of the Opinion Section of El Nuevo Herald from 1993 to 1995 and taught at the University of Miami until 2002.

He wrote extensively for several Latin American newspapers and magazines on Cuba-related issues. He also wrote books including Pasado y Ambiente en el Proceso Cubano, Marxism in Latin America, Cuba 1933, Prologue to Revolution and Todo Tiene Su Tiempo.

Lydia Cabrera, (born May 20, 1900, Havana, Cuba—died September 19, 1991, Miami, Florida, U.S.), Cuban ethnologist and short-story writer noted for both her collections of Afro-Cuban folklore and her works of fiction. She is considered a major figure in Cuban letters.

The daughter of Cuban historian Raimundo Cabrera, Lydia Cabrera was told African folk legends by her nanny and the household servants during her childhood. In 1927 she went to Paris to study at L’École du Louvre, and there she wrote Cuentos negros de Cuba (1940; originally published in French, 1936; “Black Stories from Cuba”), a collection of 22 folktales. Back in Cuba after 1938, she wrote the 28 stories collected in ¿Por Qué? (1948; “Why?”). She collected folklore from ex-slaves and from rural and urban Cubans. Personified animals and objects, supernatural beings, magic, and good and wicked Yoruba gods fill her stories, which nevertheless present distinctively Cuban landscapes and attitudes. El Monte (1954; “The Bush”) is her noted study of the Santería religion; it discusses Santería’s merging of Yoruban deities with Roman Catholic saints and its herbal pharmacopoeia. Cabrera’s Anagó: vocabulario lucumí (1957; “Anagó: Lucumí Vocabulary”) studies the Lucumí language and its adaptation into Cuban Spanish. During the 1959 Cuban revolution, Cabrera was forced to flee the country. Thereafter she lived in Spain and the United States, mostly in Miami, where she continued to work for the rest of her long life.

In her later years she published books such as La sociedad secreta Abakuá: narrada por viejos adeptos (1969; “The Abakuá Secret Society: As Revealed by Former Members”), Refranes de negros viejos (1970; “Old Black Men’s Proverbs”), Vocabulario congo: el bantú que se habla en Cuba (1984; “A Congo Vocabulary: The Bantu Spoken in Cuba”), Reglas de congo: palo Monte Mayombe (1986; “The Congo Doctrine: Monte Mayombe Sect”), and Supersticiones y buenos consejos (1987; “Superstitions and Good Advice”).

After graduating from the University of Havana in 1940 with a doctorate in philosophy and letters, Castellanos worked as a professor of history and literature at the Institute of Secondary Education in Santiago de Cuba and the University of Oriente.

Castellanos had been associated with the Popular Socialist Party, Cuba’s communist party, during his early career, but eventually shifted his political leanings toward that of the Christian Democrats by the 1950s. He also came to oppose the dictatorial rule of Fulgencio Batista during this period.

Exiled to the United States by way of Jamaica in 1961, Castellanos was working as a history professor at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan, by 1962. He retired in Miami in 1987, but continued to publish books on Cuban culture, most notably his series Cultura Afrocubana, co-authored with his daughter Isabel Castellanos, from 1988 to 1994.

In 1977, Cauce earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in English from the University of Miami. In 1979, she earned a Master of Science in psychology and in 1982 a Master of Philosophy from Yale University. In 1984, she earned a PhD doctorate from Yale University in psychology, with a concentration in child clinical and community psychology.

Cauce began her teaching career as a lecturer at the University of Delaware. In 1986, she moved to Seattle to work as an associate professor at the University of Washington, where she gained tenure in 1990. In 1996 she was named chair of the American Ethnic Studies department and later became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.  In 2007, Cauce helped launch The Husky Promise, which provides full tuition to eligible Washington students who otherwise could not attend college. In 2012, she became Provost of the University of Washington.  On October 13, 2015, Cauce was appointed president of the University of Washington by its Board of Regents after serving as interim president since March 2015.  She is the first permanent woman president, and is also the first gay and first Hispanic selected as president.

She has received numerous awards, including the Dalmas Taylor Distinguished Contribution Award, the Luis Fernando Esteban Public Service Award, the James M. Jones Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Psychological Association, the Grace Hopper Exemplary Leadership Award and the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Society for Community Research and Action. In 1999 she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor the University of Washington gives to faculty members for their work with students in and outside the classroom.

Currently, Cauce is also a professor of Psychology and American Ethnic Studies, with secondary appointments in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and the College of Education. She maintains an active research program, focusing on adolescent development, with a special emphasis on at-risk youth. She is also a strong advocate for women and underrepresented minorities to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Domínguez began his teaching career at Harvard in 1972, and by 1979 was granted tenure.  He was the Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard until his retirement in June 2018.

From 1995 to 2006, he served as director of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. From 2006 to 2015, he served as Harvard’s first Vice Provost for International Affairs in the Office of the Provost, and as Senior Advisor for International Studies to the Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Prior to his retirement, he also chaired the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and also as an associate of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and an associate of Harvard’s Leverett House.

He is the author of U.S. Cuba Relations in the 1990s; Cuba: Order and Revolution; Economic Issues and Political Conflict: U.S.-Latin America Relations.

Eire received his Bachelor of Arts in History and Theology in 1973 from Loyola University, Chicago. He obtained his doctoral degree from Yale University in 1979. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, Eire taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  He is currently the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University and is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe.

He is the author of War Against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (Cambridge, 1995), A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, 2009), and Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1450-1700 (Yale, 2016), for which he received the R.R. Hawkins Award for best book and the American Publishers Awards for Professional & Scholarly Excellence of 2017. He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (Prentice Hall, 1997). His memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2003), won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction and has been translated into many languages. A second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (November 2010) focuses on the early years of his exile in the United States.  All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state – a distinction he regards as the highest of all honors.

His family settled in the United States from Cuba in 1971 seeking freedom. In 1990, he co-founded Cuban American NGO, Directorio Democratico Cubano, seeking human rights and democratic change in Cuba. In 2005, Dr. Gutierrez-Boronat launched Radio República, a radio station offering uncensored news and information to Cubans on the island. Radio República recently launched a podcast driven website allowing for programming to be downloaded and heard world-wide.

Dr. Gutierrez-Boronat holds a PhD in the Philosophy of International Studies from the University of Miami, alongside graduate and undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Communications from Florida International University.

He attended Corpus Christi School in Morningside Heights, and public schools, and later Bronx Community College, Lehman College and Manhattan Community College. He studied writing at the City College of New York (B.A., 1975; M.A. in Creative Writing, 1976) under Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, Frederic Tuten, and others. Barthelme became his mentor and friend. He practiced various professions, including working for an advertising agency, Transportation Displays Inc., before taking up writing full-time.

Hijuelos started writing short stories and dramas.  His first novel, Our House in the Last World, was published in 1983, and won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This novel follows the life of a Cuban family in the United States during the 1940s.

His second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, narrating the American immigrant experience, received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was adapted in 1992 into the film The Mambo Kings, starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas, and as a musical in 2005.

His influences included writers from Cuba and Latin America, including Carlos Fuentes, José Lezama Lima and Gabriel García Márquez.

Hijuelos taught at Hofstra University and was affiliated with Duke University, where he was a member of the faculty of the Department of English for 6 years before his death.

Hijuelos also received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1983, the year he published his first novel, Our House in the Last World. In 2000, he received the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. In 2003 he received the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.

On October 12, 2013, Oscar Hijuelos collapsed of a heart attack while playing tennis in Manhattan.