Special Collections Internship at the University of Central Florida

Week 3: VIVA CUBA!

Organizing his masterpiece!

I had to work with his drafts of the four encyclopedias called Cuba Infinita. He completed them in 2008. He had papers with the information and photos. Each of the pages had numbers. However, most were not in the right order. I had to use the published books as a guide to place them in order. I got to see the changes and edits he made. For instance, in Volume III and on page 208, the first photo to the left had additional words to its caption. The video presents a usual day at the Special Collections seen below. I believe his work on the encyclopedias were inspired and guided by an eight-volume encyclopedia of Cuba. The books are organized similarly to Alemán: poems; prose, theater; novels and costumbrism; history; arts and society and philosophy; prose of war; geography and folklore and education and economy; municipals. Although he divided his encyclopedias by decades, his work follows under the categories above. Then, I found Esteban Roldan Oliante’s Cuba en la Mano Popular Illustrated Encyclopedia and it seemed to follow after Alemán’s encyclopedias because Oliante’s work was published in 2010. It was two years after Alemán’s.

In the process of organizing his encyclopedias, I found to potential works he collaborated with others. First, Alemán, Margarita Vidal, and Maria Elena Ruiz’s Peso del Hospedante de Sustitución Galleria Mellonella Linneo and the second Alemán, ML Richards, and L. Plana’s Comportamiento de indicadores de Calidad en Poblaciones salvajed y de laboratorio de Lixophagadiatraeae are works he may have contributed to the scholarship. In addition, another draft I found was his book Barro y Cenizas: Diálogos Con Fidel Castro ye El Che Guevara. In this work, I found something significant the Alemán did in terms of his research. His crew and he went to the Sierra Maestro Mountains with Castro and Guevara. He interviewed them and had a face-to-face interaction. He was a part of history. His work on Cuba is not just of interest, but he also lived the pivotal changes it had made throughout the decades.

From previous week, I mentioned that in 1947, he went back to Cuba and founded CINEPERIODICO with the help of José García y Eduardo Hernández.

They made similar films like Caida Del Machado. The video can be seen in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIPoAU0ueg0 or see below. It was informative as a documentary film can be. I could not believe the amount of work and time Alemán put in delivering the public with Cuba's history. He has done significant work, but he has not be given the rightful recognition that he deserves in any setting, especially in academia. It is the many aspects of unknown history and researching the people from below like Alemán. He was a veteran, journalist, nontraditional historian, founder of a news business and Cuban. Who knew he lived close by....in Florida with that historical knowledge?!? I mean he interviewed Fidel Castro and Che Guevara!