Fidel/Post-Fidel: Legacy and Change

January 24, 2017 - 4:00 PM

Fidel/Post-Fidel: Legacy & Change


Weighing Fidel’s Legacy and Assessing Trump’s Reality
Anthony DePalma, Author & Journalist

Photo commentary:
Eyewitness to the Mourning
John McAuliff, Fund for Reconciliation and Development

Discussant:
Mauricio Font, Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies

Moderator:
Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York, CUNY

anthony-depalmaAnthony DePalma spent 22 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. For much of that time he focused his attention on Latin America, especially Mexico and Cuba. He traveled widely and reported from places as diverse as Albania, Montenegro, Guyana and Suriname. In 2001 he published “Here: A Biography of the New American Continent.” His second book, published in 2006, was “The Man Who Invented Fidel,” about U.S.-Cuba relations. The book has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. He left The New York Times in 2008 to become writer-in-residence at Seton Hall University, where he completed his latest book, “City of Dust,” (2010) about the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster. DePalma is also a member of the faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His professional accomplishments include: the 2009 Maria Moors Cabot Prize for reporting on Latin America; Donal Regan Distinguished Lecture at St. Thomas University, MN (2009). The CNN documentary “Terror in the Dust,” based on DePalma’s book “City of Dust,” received the 2010 Sigma Delta Chi award for Excellence in Journalism. DePalma was among the contributors to the CBC documentary “Toxic Legacy,” which was nominated for the 2007 Emmy; and to the “Portraits of Grief,” a series of articles published in The New York Times that won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

John-McAuliffJohn McAuliff is founder and Executive Director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, now based in Riverhead, NY. For the past two decades he has traveled frequently to Cuba on behalf of normalization of relations, with special attention to travel and academic exchange.

 

 

Araceli TinajeroAraceli Tinajero  (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of Spanish at The Graduate Center and City College of New York, CUNY. She is the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericanoEl lector de tabaquería (Eng. El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader); and Kokoro, una mexicana en Japón. Professor Tinajero is the editor of Cultura y letras cubanas en el siglo XXIExilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica (2013) and Orientalisms of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian World (2014).

Mauricio FontMauricio Font is director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies and Professor of Sociology at The Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY. Professor Font’s most recent publication is The State and the Private Sector in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He is co-editor of Handbook of Contemporary Cuba (Paradigm Press, 2013), Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts (Paradigm Press, 2014), Cuban Counterpoints: The Legacy of Fernando Ortiz (Lexington Books, 2005), La República Cubana y José Martí (1902-2002) (Lexington Books, 2005), Toward a New Cuba? (Lynne Rienner, 1997) and Integración económica y democratización: América Latina y Cuba (Instituto de Estudios Internacionales, Universidad de Chile, 1998).