(Editor’s Note: MagnoliaReporter.com invited Southern Arkansas University professor and Cuba expert Ed Kardas to provide his views about President Trump's decision, announced Friday, to reinstitute trade and travel restrictions against the nation of Cuba. We got permission to reprint Kardas' column here; you can the original post here.)
Friday's news about Cuba was disheartening to me given that I have visited there four times in the last two years and lived there as a child during their Revolution.
Jetting into Havana for the first time since I boarded a Miami-bound DC-3 55 years ago seemed like I was having an improbable dream. But I was awake and my mission was to make contact with Cuban universities and set up an exchange program with Southern Arkansas University.
It took two more trips, but we did it. SAU and the University of Artemisa began collaborating last November when I accompanied Steven Ochs, chairman of the SAU Art Department, and Veronica Ramirez, an SAU art student. In Artemisa, our two artists and a small contingent of Cuban artists created a large mural on their campus. At the end of that project we all believed we had done the impossible.
Just Thursday, we finally heard that three Cubans will be visiting SAU for a week to paint another mural, this one on our campus. The visitors will include their college president, Carlos Eduardo Suarez Ponciano; Abel Alfonso Castro, a member of their art faculty; and Yoán Pérez Nuñez, an art student. They plan to arrive on Aug. 5 and depart on Aug. 12.
Our arrangement with the University of Artemisa is that the visiting group pays for their travel expenses and the host pays for food and lodging and is responsible for local transportation.
When we visited Artemisa we three stayed in the Campoamor Hotel and all of our meals were provided by the Cuban government through the university.
This simple account fails to demonstrate the amount of work and time necessary in Cuba and here to accomplish our goal. Our Cuban counterpart, Margarita Gonzalez, had to cut through red tape daily.
The words of an old Cuban song came to us. The sad refrain, "no pongas piedras en mi camino" (don't put rocks on my path), sustained us as we removed rock after rock daily. Our SAU group left Cuba having worked more than eight hours every day to create that mural. Language was no barrier even though Ochs spoke no Spanish and the Artemisa artists had no English. But as soon as the topic turned to art, to line, to shading, to composition or to any other artistic convention, there was no need for language. Art, it turns out, needs only itself for artists to communicate with each other.
Friday's news is just another rock, albeit a really big one. President Trump has not closed off Cuba to us, but he has made individual travel there much more difficult but not impossible. On top of that, the Department of Commerce noted that it "will implement any necessary changes via amendments to its Export Administration Regulations. OFAC expects to issue its regulatory amendments in the coming months. The announced changes do not take effect until the new regulations are issued." Hopefully, our visitors will still be able to be here as planned.
What about the future? SAU has scheduled a signing ceremony in Little Rock between President Trey Berry and Ponciano. In addition, Berry is scheduled to visit Havana and Artemisa in February in conjunction with an international meeting in Havana, Universidad 2018. It was at the 2016 version of that meeting that Juping Wang and I first met our new colleagues from Artemisa. All of us have come a long way since then and we do not wish to bring our efforts to a halt.
Arkansas' two U.S. senators announced Friday that they, too, were against the new Trump policy toward Cuba. They know that Cuba is a prime market for Arkansas rice. In fact, there were several rice farmers with us on that first trip to Cuba two years ago. Hopefully, other officials at all levels of government will work to undo the changes.
Cuba is almost beyond description. I always say there is no place on earth like it. I also wonder how Cuba can be so geographically near yet so distant otherwise. Its people have overcome hardships most of us can hardly imagine. They bear those hardships with a smile and a song. In Artemisa, people played music and danced on the city's central square well into the early hours of the morning.
Our group was always treated well by friends and strangers alike. Go to Cuba; you'll like it. Let's take the politicians out of the equation and, instead, meet people face-to-face with handshakes and not threats.
(Ed Kardas was the son of an American diplomat and lived in Cuba before the revolution led by Fidel Castro. He is a professor of psychology and has worked at SAU since 1980. He is director of the SAU Honors College.)