Noteworthy Immigrants

Xavier Cugat (January 1, 1900-October 27, 1990) was a Catalan-Cuban-American bandleader whom many believe to have been critically important in the introduction of Latin music into the United States’ popular music scene.

Born Francesc d’Asis Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru I Deulofeu in Girona, Catalonia, Spain, Cugat immigrated with his family to Cuba when he was five. There, he trained as a classical violinist. Cugat and his family again immigrated to the United States in 1915, where he began playing with a band called The Gigolos during the tango craze. He also worked as a cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times. Cugat began appearing with another tango band in feature films in the early 1930s, and the band became the Waldorf Astoria Hotel’s resident musicians in 1931. He shuttled between New York and Los Angeles for the next thirty years of his career. He followed musical trends closely, releasing records for the conga, the mambo, the cha-cha-cha, and the twist when each was popular.

Source: Wikipedia.com

José Canseco (July 2, 1964-present) is a former outfielder and designated hitter in Major League Baseball who began his career with the Oakland Athletics in 1985 and ended it with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2004. He played on 11 major league teams. Canseco was a distinguished ballplayer and throughout his career an All-Star member, Rookie of the Year, American League’s Most Valuable Player and World Series player on two separate teams. Beyond baseball, Canseco is most known for his exposé book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big, in which he admitted to using anabolic steroids and claimed that up to 85 percent of major league players took steroids. Born José Canseco y Capas, Jr. in Cuba, Canseco immigrated with his family as an infant to the Miami area, where he and his twin brother Ozzie both grew up to become major league baseball players.

Albert Einstein--(March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888-September 22, 1989) was an American composer and lyricist, and one of the most productive American songwriters in history. Berlin composed more than 3,000 songs, including such classics as “God Bless America,” “White Christmas,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” In addition to his individual songs, he also composed seventeen film scores and twenty-one Broadway scores. Berlin was born Israel Isidore Baline to an Ashkenazi-Jewish family in Mogilev, present day Belarus. His family immigrated to the U.S. in 1893, where his father, a cantor, obtained work certifying kosher meat.

Joseph Pulitzer (April 10, 1847-October 29, 1911) was a Hungarian-American publisher best known for establishing the Pulitzer Prizes and for being one of the originators of yellow journalism, which focused on human interest, scandal, and sensationalism. Born in Mako, Hungary, Pulitzer emigrated to the United States in 1864 to serve in the American Civil War. Following the war, he settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he developed a career in journalism and in high stakes newspaper publishing. Pulitzer was the first publisher to include the comics in his newspapers. Despite a reputation as an unscrupulous newspaperman, Pulitzer provided the funds to establish the first graduate school of journalism at Columbia University. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917, well after his death in 1911.

Madeleine Korbel Albright (May 15, 1937-present) was the first woman to become United States Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration between 1997 and 2001. Albright was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia as Marie Jana Korbelova, and raised as a Roman Catholic by parents who had converted from Judaism to escape persecution. Her family fled to London during World War II, returned until the Communist takeover in 1948, then moved to the United States. Albright is fluent in English, French, Czech, and Russian, and has good speaking and reading knowledge in German, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian. Since the end of her term of public service, she continues to lecture on and participate in international politics.

Henry Alfred Kissinger (May 27, 1923-present) served as National Security Advisor and United States Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, and was named Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1973. Kissinger was born in Furth, Bavaria, Germany as Heinz Alfred Kissinger to Jewish parents who moved to New York in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. Kissinger became a naturalized citizen on June 19, 1943, while in military training in South Carolina. Kissinger, untainted by the Watergate Scandal of the Nixon Administration, continued to play a role in international politics after leaving his term of public service.
Source: Wikipedia.com