My love story with Havana started in 2011 when I visited to present a paper on women’s healing practices in Santería at a conference that was part of an ongoing collaboration between the University of Alabama and the University of Havana. I was fortunate to meet the wonderful Tomas Fernandez Robaina, a historian of Afro-Cuban Religions the day I arrived. Tomas became my first window on Havana and its many cultures, and through him, I met other wonderful people whose kindness, openness, and intellectual generosity made me feel at home.

 

After a few visits, I knew I wanted to take my students with me and share my experience of Havana with them. I kept wondering about the kind of effect Havana would have on them as students of Gender and Race Studies. How would they react to the palpable presence of Africa in Cuba? What would they think about gender politics when they see straight men walking in the streets with the most flamboyant colors, and women of all ages dressed in the most provocative outfits, uninhibited by their shape, weight, and age? How would they react to the lack of advertising and absence of billboards that remind you at all times of how imperfect your body is, or how much you lack: the latest phone, clothes, and the like.

 

Havana is also a feast for anybody interested in learning about African diaspora religions.  Afro-Cuban religiosity is everywhere. You see it in the colorful beads people wear around their necks, arms, and ankles, and in the white outfits worn by initiates walking in the street; you hear it in Rhumba songs; and you notice it in the offerings of food and cigars to Ellegua in the street corners, and on the Malecón in the boats carrying offerings of flowers for Yemaya.

 

With the support of the College of Arts and Sciences, Capstone International programs, and the Cuban Institution of Research Juan Marinello, I created a graduate seminar on “Race, Gender, and Religion in Cuban Popular Culture” and embarked to Havana with seven of my students: Dott, Elle, Gabby, Jenna, Kiara, Vanessa, and Kenny. To my joy and relief, I could see that, like me, my students were touched by the magic of Havana. As one of my students put it “I felt I was having an intellectual orgasm!”

 

To document their experiences and share them with a wider audience, my students and I decided to create an online magazine to allow those who want to take this class in the future to learn from the experiences of those who embarked on the journey before them, and to allow subsequent particpants to have a ready format that will allow them to channel their own experiences and continue the tradition and write future issues of the magazine. But beyond that, we also wanted to share this with anybody who is interested in any aspect of the work and research done in connection with this trip.

 

Thus, this first issue of “US in Cuba” symbolizes the birth of this magazine that I hope will continue for many years. It contains my students’ impressions, thoughts, and ideas about their experiences of Cuba. These are students with different research backgrounds who are interested in an array of issues: gender and race politics, family relations, community outreach, activism, politics, immigration, the Holocaust, and their pieces reflect these interests. These pieces also speak to the interdisciplinary nature of research conducted in the Gender and Race Studies program.

 

What I also hope that this magazine communicates is the spirit of learning and the intellectual transformation that studying abroad can provide, taking students beyond the traditional setting of the classroom to an experience of learning that is more concrete and visceral.  

 

For our group, this experience was made even more special and shaped by the presence of two wonderful persons: the colorful and ever intellectually generous Tomas Fernandez Robaina, who also became my students’ window into the religious culture of Havana, and Henry Heredia, our coordinator from Juan Marinello who was the soothing and calm presence we all needed in our hyper state of cultural and intellectual excitement.

 

I hope everyone who visits this website finds it useful in some way. Comments are also welcome. Just go to the contact page and drop me an email!

 

Maha Marouan