Course gives students a new perspective on Cuba

Most students' sense of "the classroom" is limited to the 50 minutes spent sitting behind a desk.

But for the 20 students in Tufts' "Special Topics in Cuban Culture and Society" class, "the classroom" extends all the way to a different country and continent.

The course, offered for the first time this semester, was highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education this semester for its unique structure, which combines travel to Cuba, regular classes, and the lecture series.

"There is no better intellectual approach to a different culture or society than the one offered by the combination of classroom study and research with different experiential learning," said romance languages Professor Claudia Kaiser-Lenoir, another of the course's teachers.

Through the combination of types of learning, the course seeks to deconstruct students' preconceived ideas about life in Cuba. According to Kaiser-Lenoir, these preconceptions include thinking "that Cuba has nothing to offer the rest of the world in terms of development, and of creative ways of addressing the sort of very concrete human and social problems that continue to plague most of the less-developed countries of the world."

This view was echoed by Salinas-Stern. "There's a sense in this country that Cuba is this stagnant society that is sort of stuck in the past," he said.

The professors' goal with the course's "Focus on Cuba" lecture series is to provide students with another way of broadening their understanding of Cuban society. "Since this sort of academic collaboration is highly unusual, we decided to turn the sessions taught by the outside experts into a public lecture series," Kaiser-Lenoir said. "This way, we also offer the broader community the opportunity to take part."

Through class, lectures, and the trip to Cuba, the students have been able to experience the country with an insider perspective. Nickerson regrets that more people don't have such a chance to learn about the country in this way. "One of the saddest side effects of the strict travel restrictions is that people from the United States rarely have the opportunity to meet and interact with Cubans, to hear their stories and learn about their lives," she said.

"It was important that we saw that people there do like the people in the U.S., but they don't feel okay with the fact that the U.S. has imposed a blockade on [trading with] them," Mayoral said.

"The history of the two countries has been so tightly bound that it's not possible to gain a better understanding of one without also understanding the other," Kaiser-Lenoir said.

The class's January trip was an attempt to provide students with a firsthand experience of Cuban society. "I applied to go to Cuba not knowing anything about it," sophomore Maria Mayoral said. "We got to talk to people on the streets, and professors there... we have so little information here in the United States about Cuba and the information we do have is very biased," because Cuba is not a democracy.

To gather unbiased information and impressions, the students visited museums, hospitals, schools and farms, and met with workers in those fields.

"Since Cuba is so poor, you'd have imagined they'd have made cutbacks to education and social services," Salinas-Stern said. Students saw that this was not necessarily the case. "What was most interesting to me was hearing what children had to say," Mayoral said. "Everyone there has education and health care, they all know how to read and write... they all know how to do math, they all have computers in their classrooms. When you see that, knowing that Cuba economically is not doing too well, it's a very enriching experience."

"Even though it's a very poor country, they're doing a lot of things that the U.S., with all its wealth, is not," Salinas-Stern said.

"Before taking this trip, my knowledge of Cuba was negligible," sophomore Amara Nickerson said. "When I thought Cuba, I thought Fidel Castro. I was entirely overwhelmed upon visiting Cuba by how much there was for me to learn."

"If you go to Cuba, you can't help but come back with a million questions," said Tufts Latino Center Director Ruben Salinas-Stern, one of the ten individuals involved in team-teaching the course. Three of the teachers are Tufts faculty members while the rest are outside Cuban society experts who speak at the course's six "Focus on Cuba" lectures.

The class, Salinas-Stern said, does not provide "black-and white" answers to questions, nor does it encourage students to view Cuba through a certain political framework.

Rather, "it teaches students that [the situation in Cuba] is complex. We try to show students that it's not just black-and-white, democracy-versus-no-democracy."