Embracing our Neighbor: Cuba
By: Kate Simpson, President of Academic Travel Abroad
“Cuba: I haven’t stopped thinking about it,” wrote Autumn Phillips, Editor-in-Chief of The Post and Courier of her time on this island nation. Ms. Phillips, a seasoned journalist and world traveler, and recent winner of the Journalist of the Year Award by the North American Travel Journalists Association, went to Cuba for the first time in January this year. In advance of her trip, I had shared with her that most visitors to Cuba shed tears at some point. Cuba has a way of touching our hearts, of catching us off-guard and sensitizing us in unexpected ways. It is a place like no other, and one that deserves attention and deference.
Since the late 1990s, Academic Travel Abroad has designed and run hundreds of itineraries in Cuba—each with an educational focus—from culture and the arts to public health and education, and everything in between. Over the years, the pendulum swing from one US administration to another means that our Cuba work has gone from feast to famine multiple times. In May 2022, the Biden Administration’s reinstatement of the People-to-People generally-licensed category of travel and resumption of commercial flights from the U.S. to the island reopened the oft-shut door. The Post and Courier and Chautauqua Institution are both working with ATA to offer meaningful experiences to their readers and members.
Under Autumn’s expert guidance, The Post and Courier readers are challenged to engage in an activity that is “hard” for them and then write about the experience. Their curated choices? A boxing lesson, a salsa dance, or percussion class. The travelers will also hear from Cuban entrepreneurs during an animated panel discussion. With Chautauqua’s Deborah Sunya Moore, a percussionist, arts educator, and Chief Program Officer for Chautauqua, travelers delved into the topic of climate change during a panel discussion at the Antonio Nunez Jimenez Foundation and met a ground-breaking female rap duo to learn about gender and race in the Cuban music scene.
Every facet of Cuban life holds lessons in creativity, community, resilience, adaptability and strength in adversity. Taking a people-to-people approach, as ATA does with its programs across the globe, we connect with Cubans in all walks of life, we dig into topics, we explore our differences and our shared humanity.
Cuba lies less than an hour’s flight from our shores. And as Autumn so elegantly noted: “… Cuba is not just our neighbor but an estranged part of us. A complicated relationship we’ve been in our entire life. And understanding it better is part of understanding ourselves.”
