Secrets, Spies, and Spanish Rice: Six Decades of the Cuban-American Experience

Award-winning author Robert Arellano, With a Special Introduction by Levi Romero

6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

October marks the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For millions of Cubans exiled by the Revolution, it was the point of no return — time to settle in for a long embargado as immigrant Americanos. Join us for a multimedia presentation on la vida cubana-americana, a dance with one foot on the island and the other in the United States: three generations trying to keep in step with their cubanidad. Arellano will span six decades in 60 minutes while bringing this rich culture and complex history to life through stories, photographs, and a healthy dose of Latin jazz, offering you more than a few secretos sabrosos of the Cuban-American experience.

This is a free, ticketed event. Please register HERE.

Robert Arellano is an award-winning Cuban-American novelist and scholar. His Cuban Noir series, beginning with Havana Lunar and Havana Libre, has received starred reviews from Booklist and CrimeReads and been shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe Prize. Arellano has also written short fiction for collections like the recent Let’s Hear Their Voices: Cuban American Writers of the Second Generation (State University of New York Press), poems for the forthcoming first edition of the New Mexico Poetry Anthology (Museum of New Mexico Press), and five more novels including Curse the Names: a New Mexico Noir. He has been awarded fellowships by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Family Foundation and served on the faculties at Brown University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, UNM-Taos and Southern Oregon University. He is currently at work on the third novel in the Cuban Noir series as well as a nonfiction book about the hardcore-punk and metalhead youth of post-revolutionary Cuba titled Friki.