About

Compelled by the current situation in Cuba, since Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced their mutual intentions to reactivate the relationship between the United States and Cuba, we created the University of Connecticut of a Cuban Studies Working Group. To unravel the hemispheric and global dimensions of the current political and economic transition is crucial. If we reflect upon the island, we will immediately recall that, in order to stand up to the “empire,” the United States, Cuba was bound up in numerous “friendships” that were unaligned with the United States. The current détente obliges us to not only reassess the new affiliations that this historic thaw may make possible, but also the global fall-out, from those friendships, that it may induce.

Our goals as engaged scholars is to broaden the scope of U.S. American interests and help create critical thinkers who will brave putting forth new humanitarian initiatives, highlighting mutually beneficial motives on the ground and in theory when it comes to thinking about and acting in Cuba.

We put our expertise in the service of the whole UConn and surrounding communities to facilitate our colleagues’ and students’ work and research on the island, providing advice and consultations–activities that we already have carried out, but in an informal basis, for decades. We also believe that UConn has an extraordinary potential to become a key site in Connecticut to develop this initiative.

Upcoming Events

 Talk and Creative Writing Workshop with an award-winning Cuban writer and creative writing professor Raúl Aguiar in the Fall 2016. Having taught for more than a decade at the Onelio Jorge Cardoso workshop in Havana, Cuba, Aguiar will conduct a workshop in Spanish on prose writing that is open to anyone able to express themselves in written Spanish with a desire to improve that expression.

For more information on this event can be seen here.

 

Undergraduate courses:

• Spanish 3250 online. Strong Cuba component. Offered by J. Loss in Fall 2016
• Spanish 3260. Strong Cuba component. Offered by O. Casamayor in Fall 2016.

Graduate courses:

• Spanish 6416/Latin American & Latino Studies LLAS 5105. Afro-Latin America: History, society, cultures. (Strong Cuba component). Offered by O. Casamayor in Fall 2016.

 

In the news:

http://wnpr.org/post/after-president-obamas-visit-changes-coming-cuba#stream/0

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-29/miami-s-soviet-time-machine-gives-cuban-expats-nostalgia-fix

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/odette-casamayor/the-obamas-and-the-blacks_b_9555624.htm