Anna in the Tropics is a play by Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz, originally commissioned in 2001 and performed for the first time in Miami in 2002. Later, it premiered on Broadway in 2003.
When writing the play, Cruz has stated that his intent was to create a testimony to the unique Latino-American experience, through the lens of those Spaniards and Cubans who arrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Important to remember, Cruz has also stated, is that many of the Cubans who arrived in the United States in the early 20th century may have been very controversial figures: while they may have been traditional immigrants, many may also have been exiles from Cuba, expelled for supporting Cuban independence under the threat of death. Cruz paid homage to this fact by setting his play in Ybor City, a small (heavily Cuban) subdivision of Tampa, named itself for a Cuban cigar factory owner that supported Cuba's war against Spain.
With this starting point of documenting the early Cuban-American experience in mind, Cruz then set to work on what may seem to be a rather unusual focus—cigar factories. As Cruz himself has recounted, his fascination with Cuban cigars dates back to an early age, when he was given a cigar box to use for his colored pencils. The images of women, exotic places, and relaxation on the boxes and each of the cigars themselves instilled in a young Cruz the idea that cigars provided a realm of fantastical yearning or escape from the realities of the everyday. Moreover, as a young boy in Cuba, Cruz learned to observe the way his parents smoked cigars—reading his father's exhales as smoke signals calling out for political asylum, and reading his mother's smoke rings as a form of religious incense used during her prayers. Suffice to say, Cruz was always intensely invested in the relationship between cigar smoke and aesthetic escape, indulgence, or ecstasy.
Another factor which got Cruz interested in the cigar factory as a potential setting for his play is the relationship between cigars and revolutionary Latino literature and politics. As Cruz has recounted, he initially intended to set the play in the late 1800s, during which time José Martí (a Cuban freedom fighter and legendary poet) visited the tabaquerias (cigar factories) of Tampa in an attempt to drum up support for Cuba's war against Spain. Eventually, however, Cruz realized that such a heavily historical setting and focus would force him to do a great deal of research; moreover, he realized that all of his research would dwarf the intimate, human drama of the play's action if he carried this idea through to its conclusion. As a result, Cruz instead decided to focus on the tradition of lectors in cigar factories—a tradition dating back to the Taino people of Cuba in which an individual reads to those rolling cigars, so that they can stay abreast of world literature, proletarian political trends, and mainstream media news. When Cruz learned that these lectors, integral to the the traditional cigar rolling process, began to be fired in the early 1930s with the advent of mechanization, he decided that this would be where his play was staged—at the cusp of modernity and tradition, and with the lectors at center stage. It is this intimate, simple, and lyrical treatment of human relationships, shackled to tradition but poised on the brink of changes, that earned Cruz a great deal of critical acclaim for the play.
Cruz's play itself revolves around a factory run by a man named Santiago and his wife Ofelia. Their daughters Marela and Conchita are workers at the factory, and so are Conchita's husband Palomo and Santiago's half-brother, Cheché. Cheché is a dastardly and dejected character whose wife left him for a lector, and as such he spends the majority of the play arguing for modern conditions at the factory and the expulsion of lectors. Nonetheless, when a lector named Juan Julian arrives at the factory and reads to the workers from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, he serves as a catalyst for the characters' personal lives and romantic relationships spiraling out of control. Moreover, these changes to the characters' lives seem to curiously mirror the lives of the characters in the novel, despite the differences between them—be they related to climate (hot Florida versus cold Russia), nationality (Cuba versus Russia), or romantic diversions (with multiple love triangles emerging in each case). The play, like the novel, has a tragic ending in which Juan Julian meets his death, but through his presence, the characters in Cruz's play are also able to learn and grow as individuals.
The play premiered not on Broadway, but rather at the New Theater in Coral Gables, Miami, in 2002. Because of this geographical idiosyncrasy (i.e., that it did not open in New York), it was considered to be an extremely unlikely candidate for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was also competing against some weighty competition: Edward Albee's The Goat and Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg were also under consideration. However, despite popular expectations, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003, making Cruz the first Latino ever to win the prize. The play was also nominated for two Tony Awards in 2004, for Best Play and Best Featured Actress.
