June 2017

Arts & EntErtAinmEnt
American Museum of the Cuban
Diaspora is ready for visitors.
Storytellers:
The American
Cuban Diaspora
A look inside the museum.
by Aaron Krause
Over a 58-year period, they left their homes, probably
for good, with their clothes on their backs. Some
brought their families as they fled their oppressive
homeland, while some might not have had any choice
but to leave their family members behind – perhaps
never to see them again. They could no longer stand
the oppressive regime that tormented them and even
killed their loved ones.
they sought freedom; freedom from the totalitarian state in
which they lived, and the freedom that comes with living in
a democracy, one in which they could pursue the American
Dream. it’s a true story, one likely familiar to almost everyone living
in south Florida. And it’s a story that a miami museum with one of
the city’s newest buildings, the American museum of the Cuban
Diaspora, seeks to relate to visitors in detail.
Founding Director, Ileana Fuentes, addressing the
media at the opening of Luis Cruz Azaceta: Dictators,
Terrorism, War, and Exiles exhibit.
Founding director Ileana Fuentes wants to be clear:
Miami’s “new kid on the block,” as she calls it, is more
than an art museum. She won’t refer to it merely as a
“cultural institution” either.
“it’s a much larger historical storytelling type of institution,” said
Fuentes, who left her home country of Cuba at age 4 as part
of Operation Peter Pan – a “mass exodus of more than 14,000
unaccompanied Cuban minors to the United states between
1960 and 1962,” according to Wikipedia. A Catholic priest
created the program to fly Cuban children to the United states.
Fuentes, 68, left her home country without her family at age 13
and spent her first year in the United states in an orphanage in
Denver, Colo. Within a year, Fuentes’ parents arrived in the U.s.
“Other people weren’t so lucky,” the author and historian said.
A mix of trustees of the museum, sponsors, and supporters of
the museum, along with members and staff of the Greater Miami
Convention and Visitors Bureau attended the May 4 event.
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JUNE 2017