Exploring Cuba through an art history study abroad course allowed Penn senior Adriana Ramirez to also explore her own family’s history.
Her father’s parents had fled after the revolution decades earlier and settled in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she was born and raised.
“It’s hard to put it into words,” says Ramirez, who is majoring in philosophy, political science, and economics. “Going to Cuba and seeing how it is, actually discovering this mysterious, abstract place I grew up hearing about, was incredible. I think Cuba is filled with many contradictions and complexities.”
The complexities of Cuba’s history and the reflection of some of its artists were the focus of “Penn-in-Havana: Visual Culture and Public Art in Cuba.” The summer abroad course included two weeks of readings and research to prepare for the trip, two weeks in Cuba, and two weeks back on campus to discuss what students learned.
The course was designed by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, associate professor and undergraduate chair of Penn’s History of Art Department in the School of Arts and Sciences, and taught with Will Schmenner, who earned his Ph.D. from Penn in 2017 in art history and cinema and media studies.
“I’m really evangelical about the experience. Cuba is a life-changing place,” says Shaw. “We don’t want the students to come back thinking that they understand that place, but that they can constantly ask questions and be curious and find multiple answers.”
The team traveled more than 700 miles around the island nation to research and participate in the community arts scene, starting in Santiago on the eastern coast, going across the island to Trinidad, and then on to Havana on the western coast, staying several days in each place.
They met visual artists and dancers and musicians, went to museums and concerts and religious sites. They met and stayed with Cuban families and experienced in person what they learned about the history of the nation while in class on campus.
Shaw first traveled to Cuba as a faculty host for the Penn Alumni Travel program, and created the summer abroad course four years ago. “I like exposing students to new communities and objects and worlds,” she says.
Most of the 12 undergraduate students who participated in the 2018 iteration of the course did so in part because it was supported by the Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grant from Penn Arts and Sciences, which covered all travel costs, except tuition for the academic credit.
“I am a first-generation, low-income student, so the grant really mattered to me. The grant made it attainable for me,” says sophomore Misha McDaniel, an English major from Atlanta who is also pursuing a minor in Africana studies and French. “I hadn’t been out of the country before, and I was really interested in going abroad.”
She is now taking a global seminar on South Africa that will travel there during Winter Break as part of the coursework. “Going to Cuba made me realize how important it is to learn about other countries,” McDaniel says.
This was the fourth year of the Penn in Havana summer abroad course, but the first time it was supported by the grant, which afforded an expansion to help members of the Cuban arts community. Working with a community-based arts collective in Havana, the Penn team distributed myriad art supplies, much of it not available in resource-strapped Cuba: paint brushes, tubes of paint, a six-foot wide roll of canvas.
“Cubans are so resourceful in terms of recycling and reusing things and makeshift repair, but these are basic materials; if you are an academically-trained artist and you don’t have paint or brushes or canvas to paint on, you can’t make your work,” Shaw said.
The Penn team partnered with the art collective and Afro-Cuban cultural center, Cayo Hueso, in Havana, collaborating with founding artist Salvador González Escalona, who has been working in public art, performance, and cultural exchange since the 1980s. González painted a mural here through Mural Arts Philadelphia, which the students visited before traveling to Cuba.
Ramirez says contributing to the arts center and working with the children there was one of the highlights of the experience. “I would argue it was one of the best parts of the trip to attempt to make a difference, to contribute to development of these kids where we worked,” she says.
A main goal was to show Penn students “what it means to build community and be resourceful,” Schmenner says. “In making a difference in Cuba, it was making a difference in the lives of our students as well.”
Students in the course come from all four undergraduate schools at Penn, and are pursuing a variety of majors. Speaking Spanish is not a requirement. Their reasons for taking the course varied; some are interested in investment in Cuba, others in politics and diplomacy, others for family and cultural reasons. Several are pursuing Africana studies with an interest in the Caribbean.
“There is a real curiosity about this country that really drives them,” Will says. “They all have different motives and different interests, but an academic context really is the priority so they can understand more of what they are seeing more of what they are reading.”
For two weeks before traveling, the students studied the history of Cuba and Cuban art. “Together we built a timeline of Cuban history and talked about everything from pre-colonial all the way up to Fidel Castro’s death. In that span we find what part of Cuban history speaks to different students,” Schmenner says. “We need a common pool of knowledge that also allows everybody to express his or her individual interests.”
Ramirez had not previously studied art history. “I think that was one of the beauties of it. That’s one of the reasons I came to Penn; the school really encourages you to try all sorts of things and take courses not related to your major,” she says.
Jordain Mann from Atkinson, N.C., is a junior in the School of Nursing. Although he has always been interested in going abroad, he cannot go during the school year, given his course requirements and his position as a resident assistant at Harnwell College House.
Mann was interested in the summer course in Cuba, he says, because of an African literature course he took last year. He says he especially appreciated the input from the faculty guest on the trip, Tukufu Zuberi, the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and a professor of both Africana studies and sociology.
“He was really helpful to unpack complicated ideas of race relations in Cuba, and how Afro Cuban traditions are very different from African traditions,” Mann says. “We had really good conversations with him about Cuba in the larger sense of how the African diaspora have shifted.”
Senior Ka Yee Christy Ching from San Lorenzo, Calif., is a major in art history and minor in material science and engineering. She has studied primarily Eurasian art and says she wanted to research another region.
“This trip gave me a chance to apply the Eurocentric ideas and methods of thinking I have encountered to other areas of the world. The program at Penn provided me a tool kit that could help me understand art history in another place,” Ching says. “Going to Cuba was a way for me to experiment; I wanted to see if the art historical methodologies I have learned would apply to another country.”
Ching says she may pursue a career as an art conservator, and the experience in Cuba inspired her to learn more, especially exploring the art museums. “To what extent is the presentation of telling of art history influenced by political narratives and beliefs?” she asks.
She was especially struck by artworks included in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. “I just had so many questions. I’m still answering them after going to Cuba,” she says. “It makes me want to go to other places to study art history.”
McDaniel says that in order to satisfy U.S. government travel regulations they “had to do three educational things a day,” and were busy from morning through the late evenings. “Our days were packed,” she says.
In addition to the visual artists and filmmakers, McDaniel says she especially liked the variety of dancing and music, from ballet to hip hop, and the ceremonies and symbols of Santería, a religious and cultural practice with origins in West Africa.
“I really liked the positioning of it that it wasn’t only art; it was also music and dance and film and architecture, which was really cool,” Mann says.
He says a highlight of the trip for him was using American Sign Language he is studying at Penn. “I had an interaction with a man who was deaf when we were in Camaguey, and I was able to communicate with him. It was a really cool, nice communication,” he says.
The students were divided into groups for overnights in licensed casas particulares, similar to bed-and-breakfasts, in the homes of Cubans. Students who spoke Spanish were paired with those who did not, so they could talk with their host families.
And they got to know each other and became friends. “We got really close. It was a really good group,” says Ching. “Everyone was really open-minded, from various backgrounds, and open to sharing their opinions while respecting and appreciating everyone’s differences. We had many great and insightful conversations.”
The home-stays and the experiences together were important for the required journal entries, written by hand. They also were required to write an art history or travel piece based on description. “I care a lot about what the students are interested in,” says Schmenner. “I want them to value description, to value seeing and be able to describe what they see, and to use that to make an argument.”
They posted photos to Instagram with the #penninhavana hashtag to share and document their journey. They had an opportunity for extra credit as well, to make a video with their own pictures. The team also brought a Polaroid mini-printer so students could print and share pictures with the people they met there.
When they returned, they spent two weeks going through their journals and photos and descriptive assignments. “They can’t stop talking about their experiences,” Schmenner says. “I feel like the experience has changed every one of our students for the better.”
Usually there is a student with Cuban ties on the trip, Shaw says. In some families there is a reluctance to participate because they fled Cuba when the communist regime came into power.
That was true for Ramirez, as well. Her grandparents left Cuba for Puerto Rico in 1960. Her father was born there, and he then raised his family there as well. Her 82-year-old grandmother at first did not want her to go to Cuba, but then she came around.
“It was amazing to walk through the streets and visit the home where my grandmother lived when she was my age, and to go to the University of Havana and walk through these places,” Ramirez says. “It was amazing to see the other side of the narrative, and see how people there today live.”
Although Ramirez was not able to connect with her distant family members, she did see her grandmother’s home in a Havana suburb, the cement structure now divided into three dwellings, painted blue, green, and gray. She took photos and sent them to her.
“It was pretty emotional for me. I can’t really explain how it felt to walk into the houses, and talk to the people who live there now,” Ramirez says, explaining that she met two brothers who live there. “It gives me a connection to the past I’ve never had before. It was great. It was amazing.”
That connection to the past is now affecting her future.
“It has encouraged me to read more about Cuba and the politics and the impact I want to have in the world. It got me thinking a lot about what I’d like to do for Puerto Rico,” Ramirez says. “It’s given me a larger consciousness to participate in government in Puerto Rico, and that is not something I ever considered before this trip, and now I am.”
