After more than half a century of isolation of the island nation 90 miles off the coast of Florida, President Obama announced late last month that the U.S. and Cuba would begin normalizing relations once more.
The news is likely to spark many changes in areas like business and tourism, but another impact that is quietly taking advantage of the relations thaw is education.
Reviving the diplomacy between the U.S. and Cuba could have broad impacts for students in both countries. Dennis Patterson, an associate professor of political science at Texas Tech, has been working to establish an exchange program between Texas Tech and the University of Havana for the last few years, anticipating a change in the status of foreign policy regarding Cuba, but not knowing when to expect it.
"Because we have this formal relationship and the restrictions on travel are going to be removed, we can be much more free to pursue a true educational connection," Patterson said.
He credits Texas Tech's Vice Provost for International Affairs Tibor Nagy with the foresight of reviving dialogue with Cuba, allowing Tech to be a university at the forefront of the movement towards Cuban educational exchanges.
"He said, ‘You know, the one thing I have hope for, is that Obama’s going to open up relations with Cuba and I want us there. I want Texas Tech to be right there, ready to go when this happens. I really believe before Obama leaves office, this is going to happen.’ And so we’ve anticipated this for a while," Patterson said. "We just didn’t know when it was going to occur."
Nagy, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia and Nigeria before returning to Texas Tech, said Tech's participation in the International University Network - of which the University of Havana is also a part of - introduced the idea of a partnership with the Cuban university.
"We’ve been members of the consortium for a couple of years, we’ve done back and forth exchanges, and we’ve hosted some of the consortium members including the Cuban partner," Nagy said.
The exchange, Patterson said, would include bringing Cuban students to study at Tech, and allowing American students to study areas like Spanish in Cuba.
"This is a great thing, and what we want to do is build a university-to-university memorandum of understanding connection so that we can have mutual exchanges of students," Patterson said.
But not everyone was thrilled with the news of Obama reaching out to the Castros.
Texas Tech physics professor and Cuban expatriate Luis Grave de Peralta came to America in 1996 to escape the regime that he said Obama is embracing.
"I am Cuban, I am American also. I don’t like the decision of President Obama," de Peralta said. "Why I don’t like [it]: because I think [it’s] the not the right moment to establish relations with Cuba. The basic thing is the following: The Cuban government is not the friend of the United State[s]. The Castro brothers, I think, they hate the United State[s]."
De Peralta's story is an incredible one, and one that he credits to his education.
He earned a master's degree in physics from Oriente University in Santiago de Cuba in 1982, but physics wasn't his original dream. He wanted to study philosophy when he was in high school, but realized that studying 'philosophy' in Cuba was little more than a few Russian language classes and studying Marx and Lenin.
After switching to physics and earning his degree, he attended a conference in Trieste, Italy in 1989 that was also attended by scientists from former Soviet blocs like Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.
After hearing news of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing from Italian media and other scientists, de Peralta said he realized that the government controlled media - the only media in Cuba - was censoring the news and he renounced communism. After discussing the manuscript of a book he had written about the censorship with other physicists, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison. He served four years of his sentence, where he went on hunger strike to protest his situation before organizations like Amnesty International and the National Academy of Sciences stepped in to negotiate his release from prison, according to his website.
He managed to escape to America, where he earned his PhD in electrical engineering from Texas Tech, and now teaches.
Despite his qualms about restoring relations with the Castro regime, de Peralta said he is in full support of establishing an educational exchange with Cuban institutions, in part because of his previous attempts to bring Cuban students to study in America.
"The decision of President Obama make[s] an opportunity to do something good, and it's to try to bring Cuban students to Texas Tech."
