#  Patria over Profits: The Story of Afro-Cuban Boxing Champion Teófilo Stevenson 

 



    ![Patria over Profits](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2024-10/GA8WWH.jpg?itok=o_avT2pb) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 17, 2024** 

 12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South S216**  



 

 



 

To receive the pre-circulated paper to be discussed in this session, [register here](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/patria-over-profits-the-story-of-afro-cuban-boxing-champion-teofilo-steven-tickets-1028187304907?aff=oddtdtcreator).

Abreu will share stories from her research on Afro-Cuban heavyweight boxer Teófilo Stevenson. Stevenson remains one of only three fighters to win three Olympic gold medals, taking home heavyweight titles at the 1972, 1976, and 1980 Olympic Games. Rather than abandon amateur sport in Cuba for what could have been a lucrative professional boxing career in the United States, Stevenson remained “a totally loyal Cuban,” publicly declaring his commitment to the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. Abreu’s workshop/lecture will chart the official and unofficial narratives that followed Stevenson’s rise to Cuban national hero and international sports celebrity in the 1970s and 1980s. What follows is as much a story about a sports icon as it is one of revolutionary Cuba and its evolving relationship with sport and race, particularly in the context of its Afro-Caribbean past and its proposed black internationalist future.

Speaker: **Christina Abreu**, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University.

Moderator: **Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof,** Professor of History, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History, Harvard University .

**Speaker and Moderator Bios**

**Christina D. Abreu** research and teaching focus on U.S. Latinx and Caribbean history with particular emphasis on race, ethnicity, and popular culture. Her work has been published in *Cuban Studies*, *Journal of Social History*, *Latin American Music Review*, and *Journal of Sport History*. Her first book, *Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino/a New York City and Miami, 1940-1960,* was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. She is currently working on her second book project, a cultural biography of Afro-Cuban boxer Teófilo Stevenson, which is under contract with the University of Illinois Press. She earned her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2012.

**Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof** is Professor of History at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on the history of Latinx people in the United States, the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, immigration and asylum law, publicly engaged humanities, and digital humanities.

His first book, A Tale of Two Cities, Santo Domingo and New York After 1950 (2008) tells an intertwined history of working-class neighborhoods in New York and Santo Domingo in the period when Santo Domingo grew from a small town into a sprawling metropolis and Dominicans became the largest immigrant group in New York. A second book, Racial Migrations: New York and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (2019), traces the history of one of the earliest Afro-Latinx communities in the United States: a group of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants to New York City who became writers, intellectuals, and close allies of the Cuban poet, politician, and revolutionary José Martí. Migraciones raciales, an open access Spanish translation, is available here. He is co-editor and translator with Paulina Alberto and George Reid Andrews of Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960. He is currently at work on a project about a group of African-born people who, after securing their freedom, left Cuba to settle in Key West, Florida at the end of the 19th century.

This event is presented in collaboration with the Department of History and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI).



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cambridge ](/locations/cambridge-office)
- [ Cuba Studies ](/programs-initiatives/cuba-studies)
 
 

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