To mark the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, which officially took place on July 20, 2015, Cuba Counterpoints asked U.S. academics, involved in academic and cultural exchanges with Cuba, to appraise the impact of this new diplomatic regime. While the general outlook is one of optimism, little seems to have changed in bureaucratic terms to facilitate academic and scholarly exchanges. Richard Feinberg, Jorge Duany, Carolina Caballero, Chris J. Raxworthy and Ted Henken offer their thoughts on the two countries rapprochement and its impact on their specific projects and plans as educators, administrators and researchers in the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities.
Richard Feinberg, Professor of International Political Economy
University of California, San Diego, School of Global Policy and Strategy
The D17 diplomatic breakthrough was the result of many factors, including the unanimous Latin American demand that Cuba be invited to the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama, and the gradual softening of opinions within the Cuban-American community. But U.S. academics should also take some credit! For years many of us argued that comprehensive U.S. sanctions were outmoded and counterproductive. We pointed out that Cuba, too, was changing, and in ways that would allow for the U.S. to play a more constructive role—that there was an opportunity to be seized. One senior policymaker told me that I was “among the influential academics that gave us a good kick in the shins – to push us to do the right thing.” Academics often feel powerless and ignored when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, but the turnaround on Cuba is one case where the realm of ideas and the realm of policy merged.
Since December 17, 2014, officials in the U.S. government have been in constant touch with U.S. academics specializing in Cuba.
In many areas, the bureaucracy has remarkably little expertise on Cuba, especially with regard to Cuba’s internal structures, its laws and regulations, its bureaucracies and procedures. So U.S. officials have turned to academic experts to assist them as they redesign, refine and relax U.S. regulations governing our many and growing bilateral interactions. When you get down into the weeds, you see how complex the web of sanctions and counter-sanctions has become, and how it will take time to unravel them. Academics are playing a valuable and rewarding role in that ongoing saga.
Similarly, many academics are seizing the opportunity of the opening to build upon existing cultural and educational exchanges. In the case of my own institution, the graduate School of Public Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, we are proud to have just graduated our first Cuban student, Marla Recio Carbajal, from our two-year Master’s program and we will be admitting another Cuban student this fall. I hope these ties will grow over time, limited only by our imaginations and abilities to marshal resources.
Looking to the future, the Clinton-Kaine campaign has pledged, through the candidates’ own statements and the Democratic Party Platform, to work to persuade the U.S. Congress to repeal the embargo. I fully anticipate that the new administration will look to U.S. academics to help it cross the finish line—by guiding public opinion, working the halls of Congress, offering informed advice on policy details, and identifying the best way forward.
Jorge Duany, Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies and Director of the Cuban Research Institute
Florida International University, Miami
The reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba has opened up new opportunities and challenges for scholarly research and academic exchange. For FIU’s Cuban Research Institute, the opening of a Cuban embassy in Washington and a U.S. embassy in Havana has meant that Florida state laws prohibiting the use of university funds to cover travel expenses to and from the Island are no longer applicable. Since July 20, 2015, FIU’s relations with educational and cultural institutions in Cuba have been more frequent, intense, and fluid than before. We have been able to invite several scholars residing in Cuba to participate in our public events, such as symposia and lectures, and to conduct research at the Díaz-Ayala Music Collection at FIU. For the first time in many years, FIU graduate students have received fellowships to carry out fieldwork in Cuba. A small group of undergraduate students traveled to Cuba during the spring break as part of the Hospitality School’s study abroad program. Last summer, we hosted 15 young entrepreneurs from the Island to take a six-week training program in business administration and English language at FIU.
So far, restoring diplomatic ties has not entailed a full “normalization” of relations, in a broad political, economic, or cultural sense.
A labyrinth of bureaucratic and legal obstacles to the free flow of information, ideas, and people remains in place both in Cuba and in the United States. Travel and visa regulations are still very lengthy, complicated, and expensive, especially for Cuban-American scholars like myself. Decades of Cold War animosity, suspicion, and lack of trust cannot be erased in a year. In the short run, we hope to rebuild confidence, explore opportunities for mutually-beneficial collaboration, expand the reach of our professional networks, and seek funding sources to re-engage academically with Cuba. FIU’s official policy, as top university administrators have publicly expressed, is to take the necessary steps to develop a significant institutional presence on the Island, culminating in a campus or two sometime in the future.
Carolina Caballero, Associate Director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Tulane University, New Orleans
As a Cuban-American, my initial reactions to the announcements on December 17th, 2014 were intensely personal. Campus visits by State Department officials to talk about Cuba made Ana López, director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute, and I optimistic about the potential for change.
Yet a US embassy in Havana has not significantly impacted the institute’s activities. We continue to write letters of invitation to scholars and artists; yet, unfortunately, not all are able to travel due to an only-slightly improved visa process that remains arbitrary. Attaining academic visas for our students to do research on the island is still a chore that continues to depend on good relationships with important Cuban institutions and, even better, well-placed contacts. In terms of our regular educational travel to the island, it is business and bureaucracy as usual for our fall semester (2009-) and our revamped summer (2012-) programs. Furthermore, in 2016, we retooled two short programs from previous years for MA students in Historic Preservation from Tulane’s School of Architecture and a K-12 teacher institute, sponsored by the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, with support from the UNEAC -not the embassy. This semester Tulane University is pleased to welcome its fourth Cuban graduate student from the island—the first two having arrived in August of 2014.
Unhappily, our attempts to expand programming into the provinces remain challenging.
For example, the initial itinerary for the architecture group included a few days in Camagüey but, while the Office of the City Historian supported the plan enthusiastically, our “application” to the asamblea provincial was neither approved nor denied. We are currently in a similar limbo with a proposal to create a spring semester abroad program with the Universidad de Oriente in Santiago; seven months have passed since our visit to the city and institution and still we hold our breath for an official sí o no.
While our general approaches at CCSI continue mostly unchanged, we hope that an embassy on-site will allow us to be more creative and efficient with our programming. Cultural exchanges (bringing Cubans to the US) should become easier to plan and execute. The recent approval of non-charter flight options to the island should facilitate travel and lower costs. We also hope that the embassy’s presence will promote more exchange throughout the country. Now, more than ever, it is time to see and learn from Cuba beyond the capital. At Tulane, we will continue to propose and push this agenda.
Christopher J. Raxworthy, Associate Curator of Vertebrate Zoology
American Museum of Natural History, New York.
On December 17, 2014, my colleagues and I were stunned by the surprise announcement that Cuba and the U.S. were beginning the process of normalizing relations. The restoration of diplomatic relationships officially occurred on July 20, 2015. This announcement coincided with a period during which the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) was in discussion with one of the museum’s long-term collaborators, the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Cuba (MNHN), about conducting a joint biological survey of the Humboldt National Park in Cuba. Although AMNH scientists had been conducting individual research in Cuba for many decades, and the two museums had an existing Memorandum of Understanding since 2009, there is no doubt that the process of normalizing diplomatic relations facilitated the approval process for this major biological expedition. The expedition included more than twenty scientists from AMNH and MNHN—who surveyed invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals—and took place during October and November 2015.
As a result of the success of this expedition, longer-term collaborative research plans and exchange visits are now being developed, and a major grant submission has been made to the National Science Foundation.
Another consequence of D17 and the subsequent Humboldt National Park expedition was the decision to develop a travelling exhibition about Cuba, to be produced by AMNH in collaboration with MNHN. Again, the restoration of diplomatic relationships between Cuba and the U.S. has facilitated the planning of this exhibition, and in January of 2016, colleagues from MNHN visited New York for a Cuba exhibition content seminar at AMNH. This bilingual exhibition ¡Cuba!, co-curated by Dr. Ana Porzecanski, Director of AMNH’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation and myself (Dr. Chris Raxworthy, Associate Curator in AMNH’s Vertebrate Zoology Division) will open on November 21, 2016, and will feature Cuban biodiversity, culture and life. Of course, the process of normalizing relations between Cuba and the U.S. is still far from complete, and so this continues to create challenges to both conducting collaborative scientific research and producing exhibition content. However, I am personally excited and optimistic about the future, as diplomatic relations will provide academics in both countries new opportunities for scholarship and collaboration.
Ted Henken. Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies (Baruch College, New York). Vice-President of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE)
The ongoing process of normalization between the governments of Cuba and the United States has dovetailed with the efforts of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE)—dating from well before December 2014—to deepen our academic collaboration with a wide array of public intellectuals, leaders of civil society organizations, economists, and other scholars on the island. For example, over the past five or six years we have welcomed about one-hundred people who work and reside on the island to our annual conference in Miami. This work has been supported by various grants from private foundations, including the Christopher Reynolds Foundation. Apart from the normalization process itself, our ability to bring our colleagues from the island to our annual conference—over twenty-five came to this July’s conference, more than ten of whom received financial support from us—has been greatly facilitated by two key factors: the Cuban government’s decision to reform its previously restrictive migration policies in January 2013 and the dedicated work of the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Havana (previously the U.S. Interests Section) in obtaining academic visas for our invitees in a coherent and timely manner. This opening has created an historic opportunity for ASCE to directly engage, dialogue, and collaborate with a diversity of our island counterparts.
Fundamentally, it has transformed our annual conference into a more dynamic and better-grounded exercise in serious analysis of a changing Cuban reality, and a respectful exchange of differing arguments and ideas.
On a more personal note, the process of normalization has allowed me the opportunity to begin to travel to the island again after a four-year absence. In fact, my multiple trips to Cuba in 2015 and 2016 were sparked directly by the rising interest stateside in unfolding changes and new academic, technological, and economic opportunities on the island, and in its improving relationship with the U.S. since December 2014. Moreover, I have noted a broad and growing boldness on the part of a variety of actors in academic institutions, civil society organizations, independent digital media projects, and the emergent small business community on the island to take risks, pioneering new relationships of trust and collaboration with their U.S.-based Cubanólogo colleagues like myself. This would have been impossible in the highly polarized political context that reigned between the two countries prior to the end of 2014.
Cover image by Christopher Raxworthy. Second smallest frog in the world -Eleutherodactylus iberia -found only in Cuba.