Ariana Hernandez-Reguant (PhD University of Chicago) is Cuba Counterpoints editor-in-chief. An experienced globetrotter, she grew up mostly in Spain and tried out a few places, including Havana, before settling in the United States. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist specialized in mass-media, the arts, and urban culture and politics with a two-decade history of engagement with Cuba – as educator, researcher, journalist, writer, and critic. Her doctoral dissertation was about the commercialization of Cuba’s cultural industries, beginning in the mid-1990s – she focused on the mass media and the music industry, and on the rise of a short-lived advertising industry, and the debates over intellectual property and artistic labor in the new economic regime. She is the author/editor of Cuba in the Special Period. Culture and Ideology in the 1990s (Palgrave 2008), as well as of numerous articles on Cuban and Cuban American culture and affairs. She is founder and moderator of the Cubanist network EthnoCuba, with about 700 scholars members on Facebook. She has been a consultant and an expert witness on intellectual property, artistic value, music and advertising industry issues, and is currently a research associate at Tulane University Stone Center for Latin American Studies. For the most part, Ariana lives in Miami, FL.
Susannah Rodríguez Drissi (PhD UCLA) is Cuba Counterpoints’ literary and at-large editor. Cuban-born writer, poet, translator and scholar. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in Hemispheric American Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. In addition to numerous academic articles and books chapters, her writing has appeared in journals including Saw Palm, Literal Magazine, Acentos Review, Diario de Cuba, SX Salon and Raising Mothers. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on links between Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Arab world, with a special focus on Cuba and North Africa. She is a UC-Cuba Affiliate Scholar since 2012 and contributing member of UC-Cuba Academic Initiative since 2008. She is finishing a scholarly book titled Let Us Be Moors: The Arab & Islamic Presence in Cuban Literature & Culture from the 1830s to the Present, and has recently completed her first novel.
You can follow her on Twitter @rsdrissi and through her website: https://susannahrodriguezdrissi.com/
Raquel A. Otheguy is Assistant Editor at Cuba Counterpoints. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History from Stony Brook University (SUNY) in May of 2016. Her dissertation, titled “Education in Empire, Nation, and Diaspora: Afro-Cubans’ Struggle for Schooling, 1850-1910,” uses archival sources in Cuba and the United States to explore how Afro-Cubans mobilized educational strategies in response to segregationist policies created by Spanish colonial officials and local authorities. Raquel received her M.A. from Stony Brook University and her B.A. in History from Columbia University. She was born in New York to Cuban parents, and currently lives in New Haven, CT.
SECTION EDITORS
Esther Whitfield is to a great extent responsible for Cuba Counterpoints’ star section FEATURES. A Welsh native, her studies took her to Cuba and never let her go. An Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University, her current research focuses on war metaphors in Latin American political speech and culture, and includes work on representations of the Guantánamo naval base in art and literature. She has published on Cuban literature of the post-Soviet period, and on the Welsh language in Patagonia. She is author of Cuban Currency: The Dollar and ‘Special Period’ Fiction (2008); co-editor with Jacqueline Loss of New Short Fiction from Cuba (2007) and with Anke Birkenmaier of Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989 (2011).
Kristine Juncker (PhD Columbia University) is editor of a section on visual memory (Souvenirs). As an educator and a writer, her work delves into the past through the analysis, and organization, of material and digital culture. The University of Florida published her first book, Afro-Cuban Religious Arts, in 2014. She has received a small 2016-17 grant from the Winterthur Museum at the University of Delaware to start working on a second book, tentatively titled “Addressing Stereotypes,” about photographic postcards mailed between Cuba and the United States.
You can follow her through her website: https//kristinejuncker.com.
Prof. Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas, Austin, U.S.)
Prof. Ruth Behar (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Michigan, U.S.)
Dr. Joaquín Borges-Triana (El Caimán Barbudo, Cuba)
Prof. Larry Catá Backer (School of Law, Pennsylvania State University)
Prof. Karen Dubinsky (Dept. of History, Queens University, Canada)
Prof. Alex Gil (Columbia University)
Prof. Ted Henken (Dept. of Black and Latino Studies, Baruch College- CUNY, U.S.)
Prof. Henry Eric Hernández (Instituto Superior de Arte/University of the Arts, Havana, Cuba)
Prof. Albert Sergio Laguna (Dept. of American Studies, Yale University, U.S.)
Prof. Ana López (Dir., Center for Cuban and Caribbean Studies Inst., Tulane University, U.S.)
Prof. Jacqueline Loss (Dept. of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, University of Connecticut. U.S.)
Prof. Lillian Manzor (Dept. of Modern Languages, University of Miami, U.S.)
Prof. Anna María Pertierra
Prof. Eliana Rivero (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Arizona, U.S.)
Prof. Alan West-Duran (Dept. of Global Studies, Northeastern University, U.S.)
Prof. Esther Whitfield (Dept. of Comparative Literature, Brown University, U.S.)