Ana Cairo Ballester

Ana Andrea Cairo Ballester (November 10, 1949 – April 3, 2019) was a Cuban writer, researcher and professor of literature and philology.

Early life and education Ana Cairo Ballester was born in Havana in 1949. Her father was a mechanic, and her mother was a housewife. Her early years were marked by the massive upheaval of the Cuban Revolution. As a young teenager in 1962, she traveled to Baracoa to work harvesting coffee, but her work was interrupted by the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1967 she enrolled at the University of Havana, where she received a doctorate in philology in 1985. She was known as a deeply knowledgeable professor; intimidating despite her casual uniform; an old-school scholar who never used a typewriter, much less a computer. As her colleague Pedro Pablo Rodríguez wrote:"With professorial wisdom—and not without a certain malice, I would say—Ana would open a book and ask unimaginable exam questions from it: calling on students to recount specific episodes from the fictional texts, attitudes of the characters, the human problems demonstrated in the stories. ... In truth, Ana taught her students how to read and how to think." She created the weekly Radio Havana Cuba show Contrapunteo

Personal life Cairo had one son, Carlos Enrique del Toro Cairo.

Selected works

El movimiento de Veteranos y Patriotas (1976) El Grupo Minorista (1978) Historia de La Universidad de la Habana (co-authored, 1983) Teatro cubano (1987) La Revolución del 30 en la narrativa y el testimonio cubanos (1993) 20 de mayo, ¿fecha gloriosa? (2002) Mella, 100 años (2003) Heredia: entre cubanos y españoles (2003) Bembé para cimarrones (2005) José Martí y la novela de la cultura cubana (2014) Letras. Cultura en Cuba (series editor)