José Antonio Echeverría (1932-1957) was a Cuban student leader who played a major role in the popular movement to overthrow Fulgencio Batista's government. Yet his historical significance and relevance have been selectively appropriated by the Castro government, despite his Catholic background and strong support for a democratic state in Cuba.This lecture will attempt to recover Echeverrfa's revolutionary ideals, based on national sovereignty and free elections, through his own words as documented in public speeches and writings.
Dr. Lillian Guerra is the Waldo W. Neikirk Professor of Latin American History at the University of Florida. She is the author of many scholarly essays as well as three books: Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 (2012), The Myth of José Marti: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (2005), and Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico (1998). Visions o f Power in Cuba received the 2014 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association. Dr. Guerra has also received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. She recently completed a fourth book of history, Making Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1959, forthcoming from Yale University Press, and a fifth work on state programs to engineer "ideal citizens"through political re-education in Cuba in the 1960s and 70s. A graduate of Dartmouth College, she received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.