The Production Team

Click on any name below to see a brief bio:

Thomas W. Miller - Producer / Director

Andy Garcia - Narrator

Joe LoMonico - Director of Photography

Gustavo A. Moller - Production Sound Recordist

David Emrich - Editor / Post Production Supervisor

Drew Levinson - Additional Photography & Sound

Rene Barge - Composer

Mirta Ojito - Consultant/Advisor

María Cristina García - Consultant/Advisor

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera - Consultant/Advisor

Alexis Romay - Associate Producer / Translator

Thomas W. Miller - Producer / Director

Thomas Miller was born and raised in Miami, and witnessed the migration of Cubans to South Florida first-hand. Voices From Cuba represents a personal exploration of a culture he grew up completely immersed in, but never fully understood. Few of his friends ever described why they or their parents left Cuba for the United States.

After working on a Steven Spielberg project called Survivors of the Shoah capturing the testimonies of holocaust survivors, Mr. Miller began to truly appreciate the value of the personal testimony as a documentary story-telling device. He went back to his Cuban friends and family and started asking the questions he never asked growing up. Their astounding stories led to more stories and more research, and eventually to this documentary.

Mr. Miller graduated from the University of Florida in 1988 with a B.A. in Film and Television Production. While there, he received the May Burton Award for Production Excellence for a documentary short he produced and directed called Cross Creek, about an artist's efforts to save a Florida waterway from development.

Since then, Mr. Miller has worked on many award-winning documentaries and television programs as producer/director, director of photography, interviewer, researcher, writer, or editor. Credits include the thirteen-part PBS series On the Waterways with Jason Robards; various programs for National Geographic, A History of God, and other projects for A&E; Outside the Lines and Sportscentury programs for ESPN, Storm Warning! and others for Discovery Channel; and many other independent documentary, television, commercial and corporate productions. Other credits include programs that have aired on PBS, ABC, NBC, HGTV and The Food Network.

Mr. Miller founded the production company Big Pictures in 1991. He recently finished a documentary short called Across the Bridge, about the effects of microcredit on Mayan women in Guatemala.

To see more of Mr. Miller's credits and information about Big Pictures, please click here.

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Andy Garcia - Narrator

Andy Garcia was born in Havana, Cuba. At age five, he and his family fled in exile to Miami Beach, Florida as a result of Fidel Castro's takeover of his homeland.

He has since established himself as one of today's most talented and versatile actors - working in such films as The Godfather III, The Untouchables, and Ocean's Eleven. Garcia received an Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe nomination for his starring role as the legendary Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval in HBO's 2000 biopic For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story.

In addition to numerous other awards, Garcia has been honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Star of the Year Award from the National Association of Theater Owners, a PRISM Award, a Harvard University Foundation Award, and a Hispanic Heritage Award for the Arts. He is also the recipient of the Oscar de la Hoya Foundation Champion Award, Father's Day Council Father of the Year Award, and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts Degree from St. John's University.

Mr. Garcia has expressed his interest in narrating Voices From Cuba, pending his availability, and seeing a final script and rough cut of the program.

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Joe LoMonico - Director of Photography

Joe LoMonico is a multiple Cine and Emmy Award winning Director of Photography who has traveled to over 40 countries around the world shooting documentary features for news magazine shows. He has worked with noted journalists including Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Mike Wallace. Credits include Bitter Harvest (ABC Primetime), Guantanamos Camp Delta (PBS Now with David Branaccio) and the ABC News 20/20 Barbara Walters interview with Fidel Castro.

Mr. LoMonico attended the School of Communications at Iona College in Rochelle, NY, and founded Sunrise Video Productions in Miami after leaving ABC news with more than ten years as a network television cameraman.

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Gustavo A. Moller - Production Sound Recordist

Gustavo Moller has worked on a variety of productions as a field sound technician - including network news programs, feature films, and many documentary and commercial projects.

Mr. Moller was born in Havana Cuba, and immigrated to the United States during the Freedom Flights in 1960 at age 11. He has a BFA from Florida State University and has worked towards his MFA in film at Rochester Institute of Technology.

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David Emrich - Editor / Post Production Supervisor  

David F. Emrich, editor of the Academy award winning documentary short A Story of Healing, began his production career 25 years ago working at Western Cine, a film lab in Colorado. In 1988, Mr. Emrich began offering his expertise in sound and film editing on a freelance basis. He fully embraced the newly emerging digital technologies, and was one of the first editors to cut a feature film on the Avid Film Composer. In 1992, he founded Post Modern Company. Today Post Modern is one of the premier post houses in the Denver market.

Mr. Emrich has edited a number of documentaries including A Story of Healing, and the Gracie award-winning The Other Angels. He has supervised post on two series for ESPN and edited programs for PBS, CBS and The Discovery Channel. One of the projects for Discovery, Spirits of the Rainforest, garnered two national Emmys.

Mr. Emrich received a bachelor's degree and from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and currently serves on the advisory board of the Governor's Colorado Motion Picture and Television Commission. He also serves as the state's film archivist.

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Drew Levinson - Additional Photography & Sound

Drew Levinson has been active in the motion picture industry and specifically the documentary realm since 1984, when he started his career at a PBS affiliate in Springfield, Mass. Shortly afterwards, he began working for the PBS affiliate in Denver on documentaries as a sound recordist and camera operator. Currently he travels the world on a variety of productions. His credits include Survivor, The Today Show, Mission to Mars for the BBC and The Discovery Channel, The Lewis and Clark Story, Aliens in Roswell, and Journals of Uzbekistan. Other credits include programs airing on CBS, NBC, ESPN and The Learning Channel.

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Rene Barge - Composer

Rene Barge was born in Havana, Cuba and came to the United States in 1960. From an early age he started playing drums, and at age 14 he was already performing as a professional musician in various New York bands. Later he moved to Miami, produced various Latin artists, and played drums for renowned artists such as Celia Cruz, Jose Jose, Rafael, and Jose Luis Rodriguez.

Mr. Barge graduated from the University of Miami in 1972 with a master's degree in Music Theory and Composition. In 1981, his arrangement represented the United States at the "Festival de Benidorm" in Spain, where he served as the Orchestra Director.

Mr. Barge is the founder and main composer at the Miami-based Music à la Carte, a full-service music production company that has garnered a number of Emmys, Addys, Beldings and "Se Habla Español" awards. His most recent productions include the score for the feature film Escape From Cuba, Jelly Bean Jungle (children's show syndicated across the U.S.), and Punto de Encuentro for The Travel Channel/Latin America.

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Mirta Ojito - Consultant/Advisor

Mirta Ojito is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, and author of the recently published book Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, about the Mariel Boatlift.   She has been a newspaper reporter for more than 17 years, first in The Miami Herald Publishing Company, where she worked in a variety of jobs for both The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, and, from 1996 to 2002, for The New York Times, where she covered immigration, among other beats, for the Metro Desk.

Throughout her career she has received several awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editor's writing award for best foreign reporting in 1999 for a series of articles about life in Cuba, and a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2001 for a New York Times series of articles about race in America.

Ms. Ojito has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University and the University of Miami. She is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University and of the mid-career master's degree program at Columbia.

Her work has been included in several anthologies including To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11 (White Pine Press, 2002), Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times (Henry Holt   and Co., 2001), by Heart/De Memoria (Temple University Press, 2003), and How Race is Lived in America (Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2001).

Ms. Ojito, who was born in Cuba, came to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift when she was 16. Her first book, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, has just been published by The Penguin Press.

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María Cristina García - Consultant/Advisor

María Cristina García is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, and head of the Graduate studies program. Within American History her specialization is Immigration and Ethnic History and Latino Studies.

She received her B.A. from Georgetown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in the American Studies Program. From 1990-1998 she was a member of the History Department at Texas A&M. She is currently at Cornell. She has written several articles on the Cuban and Mexican American communities.  

Her book entitled Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994 was published in 1996 by the University of California Press. She has also completed work on a book on Central American immigration to Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. Professor García has been a Fulbright Lecturer in the United Kingdom. She has also lectured in the Netherlands, Spain, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Cuba. She has also worked as a folklorist for the Institute of Texan Cultures, documenting Mexican American folk crafts in south Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.

María Cristina García is a first generation Cuban American who came to the United States with her family in 1961.

(Not to be confused with Cristina García, the author of Dreaming in Cuban)

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Andrea O'Reilly Herrera - Consultant/Advisor

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera is a Professor of Literature and Director of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.   She received her Ph.D. in literature from the University of Delaware in 1993. Before assuming the Directorship of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS (fall 1999), she taught multicultural literature in a global context, with a special emphasis on U.S. minority and Caribbean/Post-colonial literature and theory, for the Department of English at the State University of New York in Fredonia (1993-1999). During her tenure at Fredonia, she helped found and co-direct the Women's Studies Program and create and direct their Ethnic Studies Program.

Ms. Herrera is a published poet, novelist, and playwrite. Her recent scholarly works include a collection of testimonials drawn from the Cuban exile community and their children residing in the United States entitled ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora , (University of Texas Press, 2001).

Her novel, The Pearl of the Antilles (Bilingual/Review Press, 2001), chronicles the lives of four generations of Cuban women. It explores the interrelated themes of exile, loss and the preservation and perpetuation of cultural memory. It was awarded the Golden Quill Book Award in 2005. She recently completed a play based on this novel , which was presented at a public reading by Theatreworks in Colorado Springs in December 2004 and is currently being considered for production.  

Ms. Herrera's forthcoming critical works include an edited collection of essays titled Cuba: The 'Idea of a Nation' Displaced , which aims to place Cuban diasporic discourse in a more global context.  She is also working on a monograph that focuses on the traveling exhibition Café , which features a wide range of Cuban artists living outside of Cuba.   (contracted by the University of Texas Press and tentatively titled 'Defying Liminality': The Journeys of Cuban Artists in the Diaspora)

Alexis Romay - Associate Producer / Translator

Alexis Romay is a Cuban-born writer, editor, translator and teacher. His first novel, Salidas de emergencia, was selected a finalist in a literary contest in Puerto Rico. In December 2006, Salidas de emergencia will be published in Spanish (Baile del Sol, Tenerife) and in Italian translation (NonSoloParole, Naples). He has translated into Spanish the novel Flight to Freedom, by Ana Veciana-Suarez, and, into English, the novel Al norte del infierno, by Miguel Correa Mujica. He is a contributor to Encuentro en la red and Letralia, Tierra de Letras, as well as to the quarterlies Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana and Artima(ñ)a. Alexis was born and raised in Cuba, and came to the United States in 1999 as an adult.

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