Nitza Villapol

Nitza Villapol Andiarena (November 20, 1923 – September 20, 1998) was a chef, teacher, cookbook writer, and television host in Cuba. She has been called, by some, the "Cuban Julia Child" for her ability to communicate culinary arts to a popular audience. Born in New York to Cuban immigrants, Villapol lived there until the age of 11, after the collapse of the Machado regime. It is unclear whether she studied nutrition at the University of London during the early 1940s, or if she attended Harvard and MIT in the 1950s, or whether she completed her doctorate degree in Havana in 1955. By the 1950s, Villapol was famous in Cuba for her standard cookbooks on Cuban cuisine ''Cocina al minuto'' (1950). From 1948 to 1997 she had her own cooking show on Cuban television, one of the longest-running shows in television Cuban history. After 1959, she sided with the revolution and remained a fixture in Cuban popular culture throughout her life. During Cuba's "Special Period" of the early 1990s, she managed to demonstrate on her show how to prepare traditional Cuban recipes under the difficult circumstances of rationing, poverty and shortages. Though she came from a wealthy background, her father identified himself as a communist, and gave her a Russian first name in tribute to the Russian revolution (Santiago, 1998); following in his footsteps, Villapol found an accommodation with Cuban communism and succeeded in winning over her audience by cooking within the limitations present during the existing socialist regime. She died in 1998 in Havana, Cuba. Provided by Wikipedia