Maria del Carmen Raquel de Jesus Fernandez Caubi “Mara” was born in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, on January 23, 1924, the daughter of Luis Fernandez Aleman and Etelvina Caubi Torrens. She had a younger brother, Luis, who later became a prominent attorney in Cuba and the United States.
A graduate of the Escuela Normal de Santa Clara, she earned a teaching degree. In 1942 she married Lino Gutierrez Novoa, a mathematics college professor at the University of Havana. From 1944-45, the coupled lived in Princeton, N.J., where her husband took post-graduate courses at Princeton University. A son, Lino Jr., was born in 1951.
In 1961, the family left Cuba for Cali, Colombia, where they lived for a year. In 1962, they moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where her husband was offered a professorship at the University of Alabama. In 1968, Mara began attending the University of Alabama, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1972. A year later, she earned her Master of Arts degree in Spanish at the University of Alabama. She then began a teaching career in the Tuscaloosa schools system, where she taught Spanish for the next decade.
After her husband’s death in 1979, Mara taught school for a few more years, and then moved to Miami, Florida. For a few years, she worked part-time in the office of her nephew, Dr. Carlos Fernandez. She traveled with friends on several cruises, and visited her son and his family often, which by now included granddaughters Alicia, Diana, and Susana.
Mara is survived by her son, Lino, daughter-in-law Miriam, granddaughters Alicia Dunlap of Dayton, Ohio, Diana Cosgrove of Philadelphia, Pa., and Susie Gutierrez, also of Dayton. She has six great-grandchildren, Nicolas Lino Dunlap, Isabel Sofia Dunlap, Silvia Catherine Cosgrove, James Joseph Cosgrove, Lucas Messina Dunlap, and Hugo Xavier Cosgrove. A loving mother, wife, grandmother, great-grandmother, a caring teacher, and a true Cuban patriot and American citizen, she was a remarkable person who will be missed by all of us.
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