Based on my delegation visit to Cuba with two activist arts groups, Street Poets from Los Angeles and Solidarity Collective from Minnesota
June 14 to 23, 2024

One of the joys of travel comes from the realization that: I have more to learn from others and from Cuba than they could possibly learn from me. I hope to return to the classroom this fall, and every fall thereafter, with these realizations.

I am an aspiring college professor and PhD candidate in architecture at the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture & Urban Planning. My research – in the broadest sense – examines how financial power and prejudice influences the way we design our cities, our public housing projects, and social services for the poorest among us. In our department’s work and in my teaching with undergraduates and Master of Urban Planning students, we use the words “imperialism,” “incarceration,” and “decolonization” a lot to describe the United States. But each of these words describe dynamic processes that evolve and shift across time and in each historical moment.

U.S. corporations and state powers have extracted resources from working peoples and foreign lands for centuries. From a sugar beet farm employing “undocumented” labor at sub-minimum wage in the Upper Midwest to a sugar cane farm in Cuba unable to export its products abroad due to a trade embargo, corporations produce employment in some places, or underemployment and unemployment in other places. An American employee laid off when Whirlpool closed its refrigerator factory in Ohio will experience American Empire differently from a Mexican employee hired when Whirlpool opened its newest factory in Apodaca, Nuevo León, Mexico. But in all ways, except for differences in language and immigration status, the lives of both are shaped by American Empire. The toolkit of this American Empire includes NAFTA for those who agree with it, and trade embargoes for those who disagree with it.

In this context of my background, joining Solidarity Collective’s delegation to Cuba about “Art & Revolution” informed my understanding and teaching about American Empire. In teaching, we often use the words “colonized” and “Global South” to describe in abstract terms a vast region of the world stretching from Southeast Asia to Latin America. But visiting Cuba allowed me to assign specific names and faces to peoples experiencing the effects of Empire. There is the arts school at Korimakao, whose young artists from challenged family backgrounds will never travel to the U.S. because of visa restrictions. There is the avant-garde art in Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts that will never travel to foreign nations on loan because it will be confiscated by the U.S. as “reparations.” There is the supermarket around the corner from where we stayed at the Centro Martin Luther King in Havana that sells only one variety of each necessity because of the trade embargo. There are the local artisans in Trinidad who can only accept payment in crisp and freshly printed dollar bills because they have no way to exchange old money, and no access to international currency exchange. More than images of military hardware and the images of American soldiers that we saw at the Bay of Pigs of Museum, colonialism takes the forms of thousand daily indignities, manufactured to make life difficult.

At the World Social Forum held each year, in Latin America and abroad, one of the calls of organizers is the statement: “Another World Is Possible.” Author Arundhati Roy remarks in her writing: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Visiting Cuba helped me realize that this other world is indeed possible, but its realization and existence must be part of a larger and transnational project of collective solidarity.

For all the images of financial distress we saw in Cuba, we also saw moments of resistance – not armed resistance, and not resistance in the form of street protestors either. Solidarity Collective exposed me to a different form of resistance altogether: Resistance in the form of simply existing. Resistance in the form of refusing to become invisible. Resistance in the form of refusing to be made invisible. Faced with the trade embargo, there are the hundreds of thousands of antique cars that are kept in perfect working order. It is a statement that we do not need the newest model of the consumer car; one car – if cared for – can last a lifetime. Faced with lack of access to medical supplies, there are the thousands of doctors who soldier on at low wages, and who continue to work for reasons other than profit. It is a statement that the right to health is a human right. Faced with the shortage of goods, there is the culture of make-do with the resources that are available – through recycling newspapers into handicraft art, through adaptive reuse of old building materials, through giving new life to the consumer products that other nations have rejected as too old and too worn out. It is a statement that we do not need profits and material wealth to live quiet lives of dignity. From these moments in Cuba, I realized that another world is possible. But for this other world to become reality, we – as people from the U.S. – need a new toolkit to measure the value of labor and the value of life.

Most of all, the Cuba delegation trip helped me realize that Cuba is embarked on a social experiment – the only one of its kind in the world. It is an experiment to see if it is possible to build a society based on social capital, instead of financial capital as the measure of what makes life meaningful. This experiment in building social capital – in a world governed by financial capital – must be allowed to survive because it shows that another world is possible.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes the process of resisting Empire. “If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first and the first last.’ Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence.” On the last night of the Cuba delegation, the hosts from Solidarity Collective brought us to the Club Habana restaurant for a final meal. The restaurant was located in what was once a golf course and country club. Before the Cuban Revolution, it was the Havana Biltmore Yacht and Country Club, a place for wealthy Americans to invest and spend the winter. Now, the food prices were reasonable, the dress code paired away, the place a bit shabbier for age, and the country club’s golf course converted into housing. Away with dress codes, away with material objects to symbolize differences in social class, and away with the gatekeepers. What this place and city were now lacking in material riches, they more than made up for in a wealth of spirit. A nation can be wealthy in material objects, but poor in spirit. A nation can alternatively be poor in material objects, but wealthy in spirit. Many nations, Cuba among them, have chosen to be wealthy in spirit, instead of wealthy in objects.

The Memorial de la Denuncia museum in Havana documents attempts by the U.S. to undermine the Cuban revolution, extraterritorial killings by the CIA, and state-sponsored terror attacks from the Bay of Pigs to present that have killed thousands of people and broken millions of families. In the museum gift shop, printed Spanish-language books by Cuban, African, and Spanish-speaking authors cost less than bottled water. The books were no doubt being sold either at a loss, or deeply subsidized through state sponsorship.

The U.S. Department of State declared in 2021 that Cuba was a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” Faced with a toolkit that includes military strength and weapons, however, perhaps the most dangerous export from the Cuban Revolution is nothing less than the power of an idea.