June 4, 2009
Cauce goes ‘home’ to country she left 50 years ago
It was the trip of a lifetime, although it lasted just four days.
Ana Mari Cauce, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, recently visited Cuba, the country she left when she was just 3 years old. She boarded a flight to Havana exactly 50 years to the day that she had left. But in reality, she has carried Cuba with her all her life.
“I grew up with Cuba all around me,” she said “Every day after school, until we were in fourth or fifth grade, my brother and I had lessons in Cuban history and culture from my father. My family figured that our move to the U.S. was temporary, that we’d be going back.”
Once in Havana, Cauce visited her family’s ancestral home, which had been divided into four apartments; she visited the church where she was baptized and spent time walking around Old Havana. She was immediately recognized on the street by her aspect as Cuban and by her clothes as American, and she was greeted with open arms.
Cauce’s father had accepted the position of Minister of Education in what was to become the waning days of rule by Fulgencio Batista. When Fidel Castro and his army toppled the government, Cauce and her family were forced to flee, first to Chile and Argentina and finally Miami. That was in 1959.
When her parents were alive, Cauce didn’t seriously consider returning to Cuba, out of respect for them and their views on the Castro regime. About a decade ago, when her parents were no longer alive, she began to think about going back. But the Bush administration had made travel to Cuba for any reason almost impossible.
“Since Obama has reopened dialogue with the Cuban government, there’s a sense of inevitability about the eventual normalization of relations between the two countries,” she said. “Even in Miami, there’s a slight majority among the Cuban community who believe that it’s time for the embargo to end.” She decided the time to visit Cuba was now, before things on the island changed too much, perhaps before it started to become too much like everywhere else.
Getting U.S. permission for the trip was relatively easy, but as a Cuban native she required a Cuban visa, which took a long time. She had hoped to spend Spring Break traveling, but the visa arrived too late for that — and in the midst of the UW’s budget cutbacks. The visa was granted for just a small window of time, so Cauce took what was essentially a long weekend to visit her homeland.
“As Americans, when we go to other lands, we often think about how we can help them, what we can teach them,” she said. “But I found that there’s so much to learn from the people of Cuba. Yes, they are very poor. People would stop me on the street and ask me to give them a bar of soap from my hotel, or a pen, things that are in short supply. They feel the oppression of the Cuban government. But their value system is something from which we could learn. They place a high priority on education and on the arts in all their forms. They have developed innovations in health care and sustainability. I’d like to find ways to get our students there in the near future, when Cuba is likely to undergo a period of great change.”
Although her trip was self-financed and had profoundly personal aspects to it, her mission was also professional. Cauce visited the University of Havana and met with their former dean of liberal arts. They discussed the idea of educational exchanges. “They don’t want to develop a program based on short visits by large numbers of students. They’d like students to come for at least a quarter, study at the university and live with a family so they can become integrated into Cuba’s culture and way of life. This is a way not just for the students to learn, but for the Cuban people to learn, too.” (Note: UW Tacoma does operate a 10-week program in Cuba, at the University of Cienfuegos, one of just three universities in the U.S. to do so.)
She was able to partake of the country’s thriving art scene and is engaged in discussions about opportunities for cultural exchange between the UW and Cuba. “It would be fabulous for our faculty to visit there, and to bring Cuban artists here as visiting faculty.”
In Cuba, Cauce encountered a country of contradictions whose values, she said, are deeply rooted in traditions that extend back well beyond the current regime. “My taxi drivers were college educated, for example. The response to that situation is not simple. On the one hand, those people are underemployed, they’re facing an economy that can’t use their highest skills. But on the other hand, these individuals had a great sense of pride, because their sense of identity is not caught up entirely in how they earn a living. The country still has the values in which I was raised. There is laughter, and joy, and a love for life, but also too much misery, decay, lack of opportunity and limitations to personal freedom that we take for granted. But through the good and the bad, people maintain a perspective on what constitutes a good and worthwhile life.”
Cauce brought this perspective back with her to the college, where she believes it has great relevance. “It is easy to become caught up completely in the utilitarian value of education,” she said. “But to me the aesthetics of education are just as important and of much broader value to the individual and to society. These should be at the core of the College of Arts & Sciences — research, scholarship, and performance that is driven by the joy of discovery and by human curiosity.
“The arts are a powerful force for sustaining people in difficult times. I know this first-hand, because as a child my family’s circumstances were difficult. We have to struggle against the forces that push the arts and humanities to the margins by our immediate needs, because those disciplines, and the life of the mind, are of deep and enduring value.”
Her four days in Cuba underscored this belief: “These people have been through hell. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they literally had nothing. What kept them going as individuals was culture and the arts. These are life-sustaining.”
For Cauce 50 years passed away in minutes and she truly felt at home. She predicts a bright future for Cuba: “It is a country with pretty good infrastructure and amazing human capital.”
