Sugar, Cigars & Revolution: Lisandro Pérez and Esther Allen

Lisandro Pérez and Esther Allen talk about Pérez’s recent book, Sugar, Cigars & Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York. A hundred years before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cubans were settling in New York City in what became the largest community of Latin Americans in the 19^th-Century Northeast United States. Pérez traces the formation of this community and how it was shaped both by the sugar trade and the struggle for independence from Spain. 

Lisandro Pérez is Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at John Jay College, City University of New York. Founder of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, which he also directed for twelve years, he has devoted his academic career to the study of Cuba, especially the Cuban presence in the United States. Pérez worked on Sugar, Cigars & Revolution during his Cullman Center Fellowship in 2004-2005.

Esther Allen is a writer and translator. Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in French and in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at City University of New York Graduate Center and at Baruch College (CUNY), she is a two-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowships. A 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and co-founder of the PEN World Voices Festival, she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Art et des Lettres by the French government in 2006. Her translation of Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto, won the 2017 National Translation Award. She is currently working on a biography of José Martí. She was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2009-2010.

This event is co-presented with the Cuban Cultural Center of New York.

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