Fine Arts Dept. sponsors Havana Trip

                                               

photo by Tyrone Shaw

Cruising in a 1960 Caddy in Central Havana. Old cars abound in this Caribbean island, one of the legacies of the U.S.-imposed trade embargo

Johnson State College students will have the opportunity to travel to Havana, Cuba, over spring break as part of The Art and Culture of Cuba: A Multi-Media Course for Creative Expression.

The three-credit course will take a group of students, faculty and staff to Cuba from March 31 to April 7.

Twelve to 14 students will be selected through an application and interview process, which is now underway. Interested students in the visual arts and writing programs are encouraged to apply by contacting Professors of Fine Arts Ken Leslie or Jon Miller.

“We’re still working out the travel fee for this course,” said Leslie, “but it’s sure to be around half of what the travel fee was for recent JSC course trips to Europe, because travel and accommodations to Cuba are so much less expensive.”

As with all travel courses associated with JSC, students will have a fee added onto the course. “Because it’s a fee attached to a course,” said Leslie, “it can work into a student’s financial aid plan or however it is that they plan to accommodate the experience.”

“It’s really going to enable the students to do more of a fieldwork emphasis and think about new ways in how to present information,” said Miller.

Students may choose their media source. “They will have done their course readings, which will be on reserve. There are four or five books,” Miller said. “You have to have a foundation. You don’t go out there cold and all excited and interested in something having no foundation. You have to do your homework.”

There will also be several meetings before the trip and a final meeting after the trip.

“While we’re in Cuba, we’re doing as much Cuba as we possibly can by seeing what there is to see – music, dance, theatre, art, architecture, landscape, ocean, you name it,” said Leslie. “Each student will be absorbing in their chosen media and then when we get back they have a month to put together a project.”

For American citizens, travel to Cuba has been heavily restricted since the U.S. government imposed a trade embargo on the Caribbean island nearly 50 years ago in efforts to cripple the communist government of Fidel Castro, who led the revolution that toppled the regime of U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature Tyrone Shaw, who has visited Havana on several occasions in the past, credits 2010 changes in that embargo law with making this trip possible.

“Thanks to initiatives by the Obama administration, educational travel has become much easier,” he said. “Cuba is an amazing place, with a vibrant, rich and exciting artistic life, and it is particularly interesting at this point in its political evolution, for better and for worse. Students will have a chance to see what comparatively few Americans have seen: real life in Cuba.”

Many of the logistics of the trip, including accommodations, access to artists and musicians, and transportation on the island, have been facilitated by Pedro Rodriguez-Diaz, a Cuban friend of Shaw and his wife, Nancy.

Rodriguez-Diaz, a preeminent promoter of Cuban Salsa dance and music in Havana, spent three weeks in Vermont this past summer with the Shaws, who are serving as trip coordinators, meeting at one point with Ken Leslie to begin planning the trip.
“Pedro has been indispensible, as has been Nance,” said Shaw. “They have put an incredible amount of time and effort into this venture.”

The trip will be leaving from Montreal, which, says Leslie, would present serious obstacles in entering Canada for any applicant with a DUI conviction.

Deadline for applications is Oct. 31.