Today`s Cuba: Confounding Realities

About this trip

Participants will meet Cuban writers, visual artists, architects, and filmmakers (as well as a social scientist or two) to get a sense of the complexities and contradictions of contemporary Cuban life. Topics of discussion will include issues related to gender, race, equality/inequality, the recent protests, the relations between Cuba and the U.S., and the ways these have intersected as a result of the current and multiple crises on the island.

Highlights

• Meet with Fernando Pérez, perhaps Cuba’s greatest living filmmaker. We will see his film “Suite Havana,” a portrayal of 10 Habaneros in the course of their daily lives on a single day, and discuss the film with him.
• Take a guided walking tour with Jaime Rodríguez, one of the three architects who initiated, in the early 1980s, the project to restore Old Havana, undertaken by the Office of the Historian of the City. 
• Have a discussion with the sociologist Mayra Espina, whose work has focused for decades upon questions of equality and inequality, particularly in terms of race, gender, and generational divides.
• Visit the home of José Fuster, a ceramist and painter who has, with the help of his neighbors in the barrio of Jaimanitas, spent the last 25 years on a community development project centered around artistic production. Lunch with Fuster and a tour of the barrio.
• Meet a group of women who, when they were 15 to 19 years old, fought in the underground in Havana to overthrow the Batista regime during the 1950s.
• Also meet with a number of other Cubans, including David González, Eduardo Hernández, Daisy Rubeira, Roberto Zurbano, Janet Valdés, Alejandro Meroño, Marilyn Solaya, Fernando Funes of Finca Marta, and the drummers of Obiní Batá.

Meet your leaders

Carollee Bengelsdorf

Carollee Bengelsdorf is professor emerita of politics in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College. She is the founder of Hampshire’s Cuba Program, both with the Cuban Union of Artists and Writers and the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. Her first trip to the island was in 1969, and she has maintained close personal and scholarly contact since. She is the author of The Problem of Democracy in Cuba and numerous articles on Cuban women. Her current research involves an oral history of the girls and women who fought in the urban underground in Havana, from 1952 to 1959, to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. Her book, Clandestinas, will be published by Duke University Press in 2024.

Margaret Cerullo

Margaret Cerullo is professor of sociology and feminist studies in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College. She first went to Cuba with Carollee in 1978 and has avidly followed developments on the island since. She has returned to Cuba many times to attend conferences and to direct Hampshire’s semester-long program in Cuba. She is engaged in research about lesbians’ experiences in Havana before and after the Revolution.

What’s it like to go to Cuba with Carol and Margaret?

Responses from last year’s participants:

“Confounding indeed! What a trip. This could be retitled, “No sign of tourist traps-Cuba exposed.” Carollee and Margaret have deep roots in this country and they took great care to introduce us to extraordinary people: accomplished novelists, Afro-Cuban feminists, renowned architects, painters, and filmmakers. Meeting just one of them would have made it a special week but the culmination of these encounters with these honest, thoughtful Cubans who shared their stories so openly was a privilege. Carollee and Margaret have curated a trip like no one else could. It made me envious of the Hampshire students who have had the chance to work with professors like Margaret and Carollee and the colleagues they have in Cuba. Thank you so much.”

“The experience was deep and substantive yet broad in its cultural coverage. Interaction with and access to a wide range of people from film, literature, art, architecture and historical participants in raising Cuba to where it is today was incredible. This was a month’s worth of experience and exposure to the ‘anthropology’ of Cuba in a little more than a week. There was focus and order to our itinerary with added flexibility when needed.”

“An extraordinary week of cultural learning and connection with a resilient Cuban people together with great food and fun. This trip is like no other. The leadership of Hampshire professors Margaret and Carollee is deeply personal and intellectually stimulating. They built an itinerary designed to connect us to their longtime friends in art, music, writing and film, even farming and historical restoration architecture. Thank you for your trust bringing us into living rooms, on patios, to the farm, and on the streets with your friends in helping us discover the richness and challenge of Cuban life. I know we just skimmed the surface.”  

“I loved this trip! It was so much better than trying to see Cuba on my own would have been. A little pricey but well worth it! We met and heard from so many Cubans, including artists, writers, historians, filmmakers, entrepreneurs and those who had participated in the revolution. Their perspectives were varied and enriching. We never went to a single fortress, and only one museum. I felt so lucky to reap the benefit of the long relationship Carollee and Margaret have nurtured with this country over so many years. Their network of friends, thinkers, and ordinary Cubans is the greatest asset to the trip. We had a wonderful, simpatico group and an excellent tour guide in Atila, who made sure we never hesitated to ask a question, because he always had the answer, or found it out for us. And one last note, we had a comfortable tour bus with a wonderful driver (Vladimir) who took us everywhere, on time, and even on unscheduled excursions. Never having to worry about how to find a place or securing a taxi is a wonderful benefit to a well-run group trip. Meals in wonderful restaurants were all prepaid and pre-booked, another detail I appreciated.”