Prof. Latner will talk about his forthcoming book, a biography of a US political exile in Cuba named Charlie Hill. A Vietnam veteran and a member of the Republic of New Afrika movement, which sought reparations for slavery and the creation of a sovereign nation-state for Black Americans in the US south at the height of the Black Power era, Hill hijacked a commercial airliner from Albuquerque to Havana in 1971 and has lived in Cuba ever since. Mixing biography and historical narrative, the biography uses Hill’s story as the starting point to illuminate a broader set of encounters between North Americans and Cuba during a tumultuous era of radicalism, anti-racist struggle, and Third World revolution.

Teishan Latner (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine) is currently an Associate Professor at Thomas Jefferson University. A scholar of the United States with a secondary emphasis on Cuba and Latin America, Professor Latner’s research lies at the intersections among history, global American Studies, and Cuban Studies, with special emphasis on social movements, race/racial justice, political theory, globalization, US-Cuba relations, and US foreign policy. His first book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018 for the Justice, Power, and Politics book series. Latner’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Diplomatic History, SOULS: a Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and garnered mention in BBC Mundo, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post.

Sponsor(s): Latin American Institute, Department of History