Cuban students and scholars desperately await improvement amid continued blockade

“Four months after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring an oil embargo on Cuba, the crisis struggles to maintain a place in the news cycle, despite increasingly dire circumstances in the Caribbean nation. In February, Canadian airlines repatriated nearly 28,000 citizens from Cuba. One of the few remaining ways in which Canada continues to maintain contact with Cubans is through academics and students, including Karen Dubinsky, professor emerita of Global Development Studies and History at Queen’s University. She recently published a book focused on the relationship called Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban Canadian Encounters (2025) and from 2008 to 2023 taught Queen’s “Cuban Culture and Society” course, which culminated in students spending two weeks at the University of Havana. In return, the university regularly reciprocated with invitations to Cuban scholars and musicians to visit campus. Dr. Dubinsky still attends the Havana Jazz festival every January and this year was planning to stay on for the wedding of one of her four Cuban graduate students when the Canadian evacuations started in February. “He wanted his family to be part of it, and they’re all still in Havana. That came to a screeching halt with the airplanes. I was there and the groom was there, but that was it. No bride, nobody else. I was there for the first two or three weeks of the oil blockade. It was already a mess,” she recalled. However, Dr. Dubinsky is careful to note that the situation did not begin with the blockade. “I’ve never seen it as bad as I’ve seen it in the past few years,” she said. “Now there’s a lot of images of garbage not being collected and literally burned in the streets. That started to happen two or three years ago.” She’s regularly in touch with friends in the country, who report on the struggle of dealing with the daily blackouts. Longtime frustration over government incompetence and even the failure to recover fully from the pandemic disruption have all contributed to the decline. “People feel either active opposition, or at best, a kind of abandonment. That was the word that I kept hearing before this super dramatic moment, from people who still had some sense that they were looking to their own government for help when inflation ran wild, with the economy in shambles,” she noted. With the added pressure of the blockade, the mood has only gotten worse. “They’re super frustrated. I think many are despairing. If you have the misfortune of getting sick or having an accident, you’re really in trouble,” said Dr. Dubinsky. Regular protests happen nightly with citizens banging on pots and pans after dark. International media reported that students at the University of Havana held a rare sit-in on March 9 to protest class disruptions. Reporting on Cuba’s decline often points back to the country’s “Special Period” in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the country was in similar decline. Since Fidel Castro’s death in 2016, his brother Raul has led the ruling communist party, with daily operations run by president Miguel Diaz-Canel amid rumours of corruption and noticeable media repression. While Trump’s interference heightened an existing crisis, many Cubans have been calling for change for years. Dr. Dubinsky has heard all perspectives from support for regime change to homegrown bootstrapping. Like most, she is at a loss to grasp the best way forward. “I believe in the rule of law. I believe in national sovereignty. I think people have a right to make their own nations, their own decisions,” she said. “Just in this case, it’s harder to imagine what that looks like.” She said that as the struggle continues, it becomes more challenging to return to normalcy, pointing for example to the huge effort needed to fix the electrical grid. Still, she’s cheering for Cuba’s resilience, noting that its fascinating history attracts scholarship in social change and culture including its incredible music and film industry. Although there are many Cuban scholars throughout the world including the United States, only a handful of Canadian scholars are focused on Cuba, and none are explicitly trained Cubanists. Dr. Dubinsky herself is a Canadianist, although her work veered into Canada-Cuban relations via an interest in Cuban music and culture. She has now written several books on Cuban culture (particularly as it intersects with Canada as in her most recent book) and co-produces a podcast series on the history of Cuban musicians in Canada. She’s also pleased to see the next generation take up new topics, including a master’s student she just supervised with a thesis on Canada-Cuba economic ties. The good news? He’s planning to continue his research with a PhD. The post Cuban students and scholars desperately await improvement amid continued blockade appeared first on University Affairs .

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