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The practice of reading aloud has a long history, and the tradition still survives in Cuba as a hard-won right deeply embedded in cigar factory workers' culture. In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero deftly traces the evolution of the reader from nineteenth-century Cuba to the present and its eventual dissemination to Tampa, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In interviews with present-day and retired readers, she records testimonies that otherwise would have been lost forever, creating a valuable archive for future historians.

Through a close examination of journals, newspapers, and personal interviews, Tinajero relates how the reading was organized, how the readers and readings were selected, and how the process affected the relationship between workers and factory owners. Because of the reader, cigar factory workers were far more cultured and in touch with the political currents of the day than other workers. But it was not only the reading material, which provided political and literary information that yielded self-education, that influenced the workers; the act of being read to increased the discipline and timing of the artisan's job.

El Monte's New Itineraries is the first book fully devoted to the study of Cuban author and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954), one of the most influential books in Caribbean cultural history. Highly referenced, if understudied, El Monte is a comprehensive work that intertwines ethnobotany, popular orality, and Afro-Cuban traditions. Its pages have enjoyed a transnational influence, enriching domains such as ethnography, politics, theater, and even science fiction literature in the Caribbean, and the knowledge contained in it lies at the heart of Afrodiasporic spirituality and ethnomedicinal practices across Hispanic Caribbean cultures and beyond.