Anna in the Tropics Lesson Plan

Anna in the Tropics is the most successful and performed play of Nilo Cruz's fifteen plays. It competed against Edward Albee's The Goat and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play drew inspiration from the lives of Cuban cigar factory workers living in Tampa, Florida, and Cruz chose this setting because of the relationship he saw between this tradition and that of revolutionary Latino literature and politics. In particular, Cruz drew inspiration from the life and work of José Marti, a legendary Cuban freedom fighter and poet, who attempted to recruit Ybor City cigar workers to fight in Cuba's war for independence against Spain. Also inspired by his...