Interview with Dr. Bita Amani, on the CDU Public Health Department 2023 Trip to Cuba, Part 2
What new insights did you as a leader, learn from the experience and were there any activities that reinforced or changed your impressions of the value of making the trip? It was a meaningful and hard trip. Each one is remarkable and hard in its own way. For this one, all the lessons learned from previous trips, I had made an effort to implement them. I went into this one with a little bit more resources in terms of support. I think the places where it was hard were the challenges within the economy of Cuba itself because of the pandemic and the blockade.
We continue to be struck by the impact of the sanctions and that the people are still doing their job. You have the most migration of Cubans out of Cuba since the revolution at this time. They’ re economic refugees, right? Not necessarily ideological refugees as we have seen in previous waves of migration. This is hard to contend with when we are in Cuba. It can be both hard and inspiring for the students to see how folks are doing so much with so little and how they want to stay but feel like they have no choice but to leave.
It was their first opportunity to be around each other for longer periods of time since the pandemic had started. And they were pushed to reflect on things of comfort and the ways we do things in the United States that it would be hard for us to live like Cubans do. You spend some time saying to yourselves that maybe the analytical framework that I use in the United States isn’ t going to serve me here.
My question to the students is that when you come someplace for such a short period of time, and you’ ve maybe read books or heard about it yourself, how do you really know what is happening? Because you could hear them all want to fall back on their authoritative-like voice, to be able to say things from a perspective of like,‘ oh, this is what’ s happening here, or this is what’ s going on here?’ Or this waiter told me something, and that must be what the situation is. And then, you know, I remember at one point we were talking about how, if you were in Florida, or anywhere in the United States and you went to a restaurant and asked the waiter to tell you the politics of the country. What perspective of the politics are you going to get? Are you going to see the whole picture?
As tourists, our opportunity to connect directly with our peers is challenging if we spend our time in places that most Cubans themselves can’ t access themselves. So, we spent some time talking about whose stories are we able to hear and how the stories we get access to shape our perspective on what is happening. The persons we listen to become the authority.
In different contexts, workers have different class status. For example, in Cuba, waiters make three to five times more money than the doctors do. These waiters are in the tourist industry. Many of them are actually also doctors, not practicing medicine, but instead participating in the more financially lucrative economy of tourism. This is very different than doctors
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 28