Dominican students bound for Cuba in May

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 10:00 PM

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By Megan Dooley

Staff Reporter

In 2004, when President George W. Bush installed new regulations regarding educational travel to Cuba from the United States, more than 1,000 American students were studying on the island that sits a mere 90 miles from our shores. Once the restrictions went into effect, the number quickly dropped to less than 100.

But now a group of 20 Dominican University students are just days away from jetting off to Cuba for a three-week educational excursion, a program made possible when President Barack Obama finally lifted Bush's restrictions in January of this year.

"I'm so excited," said Dr. Christina Perez, director of the Women and Gender Studies Department at Dominican and organizer of the Cuban study abroad trip. She leaves on May 6. The students will meet her in Havana the following week.

Their time in Cuba will be short — three weeks total — but in that time the students will travel to Havana, Baracoa, and Santiago de Cuba.

"A lot of people when they go to Cuba, they only go to Havana," said Perez. The other two cities are less frequently visited. "The eastern part of the island has a very distinct cultural and even colonial history." For instance, Christopher Columbus landed in Baracoa during his first voyage to the Americas in 1492. "There's a lot of aboriginal history here that doesn't exist in other parts of the country," Perez said.

The syllabus and itinerary for the trip is well mapped out, and full of culturally rich experiences. While in Havana, the students will attend morning lectures and, in the afternoon, further explore the subjects of each lecture. For instance, "if the morning lecture is on agriculture, then in the afternoon we go visit an urban organic farm. If the morning lecture is on the political system, in the afternoon we'll go meet with a politician," Perez said.

The evenings will be more open to individual preferences. Students will be given the opportunity to attend ballets, cheer with the crowds at a Cuban baseball game, or get to know native Cuban students.

"We're trying to really make the experience be not just a classroom experience but kind of an applied experiential one as well," said Perez, whose acquaintance with Cuba began when she spent time doing research for her dissertation at the University of Havana between 2000 and 2002. When she came to Dominican in January of 2004, she was interested in trying to set up a Cuba study program for students. But by May of that year, Bush had imposed the new restrictions. Student travel to Cuba would be highly regulated, and therefore very difficult, for more than seven years.

The wait was long and frustrating at time. After he promised to revisit American policies regarding Cuba during his presidential campaign, President Obama took two years to actually implement changes to the educational travel policies. But that didn't stop Perez from mapping out a Cuban student travel program with sponsor FLACSO Cuba, the Latin American School of Social Sciences. She traveled to Cuba herself last year, as part of the planning process.

But the ensuing months were a waiting game, even as White House sources continuously suggested that the lifting of the restrictions was just around the corner. "November passes, nothing happened. December passes, nothing happened," said Perez. By the time Obama finally lifted the restrictions in mid-January, she was ecstatic but extremely pressed for time if she wanted to plan a program for the coming spring.

"That was a very short timeline, institutionally, to recruit students, do all the internal paperwork that we needed to do, and to also be able to meet in classes and orientation. We knew that if we tried to do it, it would be really ambitious. But we decided we had to try."

Twenty-two students applied, representing majors spanning Spanish to Political Science to International Business to Sociology. "We even have some science majors, Biology, who just wanted to go to Cuba," Perez said.

In the end, the program selected 20 of the applicants, and all 20 accepted. Perez said that acceptance rate is almost unheard of in foreign study programs. A small percentage, at least, end up dropping out. "I was thinking we'd take 15 students," she said. "In this case, everybody was going."

In Cuba, everything will be taught in Spanish but translated to English for the students. It's not a language program, Perez said, because they wanted it to be available to a wide range of students. But they are operating on a buddy system, with those stronger in the language paired with others with less experience.

Which will make for better opportunities to get out and actually get to know the Cuban people, who are welcoming to Americans, despite the historically negative portrayal in our culture.

"My experience with Cuban people is that they're not at all antagonistic towards people from the United States," Perez said. "Almost everybody in Cuba has a family member who lives in the United States. They're fascinated with us."