Lillian Guerra

Dr. Lillian Guerra is Professor of the History of Cuba and the Caribbean in the Department of HIstory at the University of Florida. She is the author of five books of history, among them Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959-1971 (UNC Press, 2012); Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958 (Yale University Press, 2018); and most recently Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981, to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2022. Guerra began researching in Cuba in 1996 when she lived and worked there for an uninterrupted year at the National Archive of Cuba, other provincial archives and libraries for her dissertation, eventually published under the title of The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (UNC Press, 2005). She has received a number of prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and this year, the National Endowment for the Humanities, in support of her scholarship. Her book, Visions of Power in Cuba won the Latin American Studies Association Bryce Wood Book Award for the best book of 2014 across all fields. Professor Guerra was born in New York and raised in Kansas. She is the daughter of a peasant farmer from Pinar del Rio and a mother from Cienfuegos. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1992 and received her Ph.D. in 2000 from the UW-Madison. Her first book, published by the University of Florida Press in 1998, is titled Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico.