Ana Andrea Cairo Ballester (November 10, 1949 – April 3, 2019) was a Cuban writer, researcher and professor of literature and philology.
[4] In 1964, she began high school at the newly founded Raúl Cepero Bonilla Special Pre-University Institute, where she first became interested in the humanities.
Cairo was a longtime professor in the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Havana, where she began teaching in 1973 after completing her undergraduate studies.
[2][5] She led the department's instruction on Cuban literature and taught multiple subjects, including an annual seminar on Jose Martí.
[8][7][9] As her colleague Pedro Pablo Rodríguez wrote:"With professorial wisdom—and not without a certain malice, I would say—Ana would open a book and ask unimaginable exam questions from it: calling on students to recount specific episodes from the fictional texts, attitudes of the characters, the human problems demonstrated in the stories.