HYBRID - Human Rights in Cuba: A Community Forum

Tuesday, November 297:00—8:30 PMLarge Meeting RoomCary Memorial Library1874 Massachusetts Avenue, Lexington, MA, 02420
Virtual

Panelists Ana Hebra Flaster, Tom Díaz, and Manuel Navia are Lexington residents with roots in Cuba. They will be joined (via Zoom) by Anamely Ramos González, recently forced into exile by the Cuban government because of her advocacy for human rights. The panelists will have a moderated discussion, with questions from the audience, about civil rights problems in Cuba and what U.S. citizens can do to help.

About Our Panelists:

Tom Díaz

Tom Díaz has spent most of his professional life in the computer business, with a  sojourn in public school teaching between 2008 and 2014.  He was born in Indianapolis, the son of Ramiro Díaz, who immigrated from Holguín, Cuba in 1936, and Mary Clay Díaz, a Spanish teacher born in Indianapolis.  

Tom has served in Lexington Town Meeting since 1997. From 2004 to 2010, he also served on the Lexington School Committee.   

He was a member and sometime co-chair of the Lexington Democratic Town Committee from 2004 until 2015, when he moved to New Mexico.  He returned to Lexington in 2021.

Ana Hebra Flaster

Ana Hebra Flaster was five years old when her family fled post-revolutionary Cuba in 1967. She has written about Cuba and the Cuban American experience for NPR’s All Things Considered, PBS’s Stories from the Stage, and for national publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Time. She speaks regularly with high school students, in English and Spanish, about writing, Cuba and refugee/immigrant topics.

Ana’s forthcoming memoir, Radio Big Mouth, explores her family’s journey from disillusioned revolutionaries in a working-class Havana barrio to stunned refugees in a snowy New Hampshire mill town.

For the last 25 years Ana has lived in Lexington, Massachusetts, where she and her husband raised their two children and have been active in Temple Isaiah, Fiske, Diamond, and LHS communities. Ana has worked on town campaigns aimed at improving public school funding and served as a Town Meeting Representative for Precinct 5.  

Manuel Navia

Manuel Navia's parents came to the US during the Eisenhower administration in 1953. He grew up in the New York area (...including some time in the hard-edged part of Manhattan in "West Side Story"). His father was a trained electrician in Cuba, and it was that job skill that got them their green cards. In many ways, Manuel and his family were quintessential "economic refugees", and because of his parents' hard work, Manuel was the first in his extended family to get a higher education. For the last 40+ years, he has been in drug discovery research, and over a dozen of the lead compounds he has worked on have gone into clinical trials. Five of those are now approved drugs. Manuel is also a  veteran, called to serve by the draft in 1970. 

Anamely Ramos Gonzalez

Anamely Ramos Gonzalez, is a respected art curator, professor, and prominent member of the San Isidro Movement (SIM), a collective of Cuban artists, journalists and other intelligentsia that gathered in 2018 inside Cuba to oppose the regime’s crackdown on freedom of expression. Ramos has a master’s in art history and is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology at la Universidad Iberoamericana de México. She has curated art exhibits in Havana and Camagüey, Cuba, and in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Luanda, and New York.

Ramos’s human rights activism and support of Cuba’s independent artists led to expulsion, in 2019, from the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba, where she had been a professor of Cuban and African art for twelve years. Ramos has led the campaign to free fellow SIM members and Amnesty International Prisoners of Conscience Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel “el Osorbo” Castillo.

Questions may be sent in advance of the program to caryprograms@minlib.net.

This is a HYBRID program. Please register to attend via Zoom . In person attendance is on a first come basis. Although we don't require registration for in person events, it enables us to contact you if the program is cancelled.

This program is made possible by the generous donors to the Cary Library Foundation.

Registration for this event has now closed.