This course is an experiment in how to think about the world from a perspective outside of Europe and the United States. Since we are creatures of our time and place, we have no choice other than to use the tools and languages available to people like us—those who live at the center of a global empire and sit in university class rooms like this one. In this undertaking we will not simply proceed as though from the theoretical void. This is not a course in abstract thinking. It is, rather, an exercise in thinking concretely and humanistically. Cuba is a lugar encontrado, where geography, empire, nationhood, capitalism, race, and revolution have collided spectacularly, generating deep traces of human experience through time. We could do this with regard to almost any human grouping in the world. I have chosen Cuba precisely because of what it represents to estadounidenses at this moment in time—a kind of Rorshach test for the U.S. American outlook on the world.

The premise of the course is that our classroom experience will be incomplete without taking what we have learned into the wider world—specifically to Havana. Even as we do so we will want to ask what it means that we are able to treat Cuba and its people as the object of our curiosity.

Class will consist of weekly seminar meetings, plus a number of other less formal gatherings to be announced as we go along. Each week we will discuss a text or series of texts. Your responsibilities extend well beyond the readings assigned for a given week. From the perspective of your interests and passions, each of you will read as widely and deeply about contemporary Cuba as you can, following news from and about Cuba on everything from Cuba-U.S. relations, to what’s going on in the Cuban music scene. Written work for the course will consist of one shortish essay (5 pages) regarding a specific set of readings, a journal which you will keep all semester long and while in Havana, a 10-page paper toward the end of the semester, and full participation in the elaboration of a collective electronic journal throughout the semester, which will be posted to the course’s website after the trip.