My STEP signature project was traveling on an OSU Study Abroad trip to Cuba. The subject of the course and the trip was Race, Revolution, and Culture. We visited museums, heard lectures from professors, and attended musical performances that described the fascinating, complicated history of Cuba’s race politics. The day after I returned I wrote the following:
The fundamental basis of global capitalism is the systematic extraction of wealth from peripheral economies. The implications of this extractive relationship between core and periphery are vast, and in studying them the answers to the planet’s most challenging questions can be found. For example, we can see that this extractive relationship explains why the world produces enough food for eleven billion people but only feeds about half that many. We can see why for the first time in the history of humanity more people live in cities than in the countryside. The world system of core and periphery, along with all the contradictions in its execution, provide explanations for the root causes of environmental destruction, public health crises, war, and a million other global problems which have traditionally caused thinkers to shrug their shoulders. I brought with me to Cuba a strong understanding of these ideas. It seemed to me that I already knew the answer to all the questions that the country could possibly ask of me; I was confident that nothing viewed during my travels would pose any sort of challenge to the theoretical framework that made so much sense. I was wrong. In the past when I have studied countries through the lens of critical political economy I have done so as if I were solving a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece seems to have its peculiarities, but broadly speaking they are easy enough to sort and eventually fit together once arranged by their color and shape. When I picked up the piece of Cuba, it seemed to me that it must have been from another box. All of the crucial patterns in the global capitalist system – urbanization, the widening of inequality, the destruction of sustainable food systems, an uptick in all forms of xenophobia and “otherization” – act in a dizzyingly different way in Cuba that doesn’t quite match anywhere else in the world. The country seems to have its own set of rules and logic that separate it from the predictions or prescriptions of any sort of foreign “experts” who, like me, claim to have the answers to every single possible question.
The best example of this occurred on our tour of Los Pocitos, when I was talking with Professor Sanchez. I explained to him that I had studied informal “unplanned” communities like the one we were visiting extensively. The key trend that facilitates their worldwide growth is the destruction of agrarian life throughout the Third World by American food overproduction and exportation. I asked him that if Cuba wasn’t importing American food, why did such communities of former peasants exist? He explained to me that people moved to Havana for all sorts of reasons – because it’s easier to practice their religion there, because of the way those religions function as mutual aid societies, because of the social isolation of life in the countryside, and numerous other factors. I hope to one day soon study that neighborhood and that trend in Cuba more extensively, but for now I know enough to say that I still can’t quite fit it into my puzzle. In fact, my academic, intellectual, and personal experience in Cuba was defined by similar experiences to these, in which I looked at things and could not understand them. This was a journey that at various points challenged me to reconsider my core analytical framework for understanding the world.
Even though I became involved in actual struggles for racial justice, like the campaign to divest Ohio State from private prison corporations in the US and corporations that profited off the occupation of Palestine, I never did this explicitly because I wanted to fight racism. I did it to fight capitalism and to fight imperialism. I was not a deliberate antiracist, but rather a default antiracist.
Then, I took this class and went to Cuba. Looking back now, a few key moments stand out to me. The first is our discussion of racialization that occurred during the first week of class, when I inadvertently started an argument by bringing up the historical facts of the racialization of Jews, Irish people, and Italians. My point was that race was not a definite, predestined reality, but rather a dynamic process that resulted from the social conditions in a society and its place in the world system. The strong negative reaction to these comments sent me several messages: first of all that comparing the Black struggle with others is a technique used too often by reactionaries with a racist agenda to be appropriate in an academic setting; second of all that the seeming immutability of race for Black people today makes such ideas as a shifting “racialization” seem at best overly theoretical and at worst preposterous; and finally that I needed to rethink my conceptualization of the role of Black exploitation in the world.
The next essential moment came during the trip, when we met to resolve the strange and uncomfortable racial divide that had appeared between classmates. For the most part I was silent; it felt as if everyone would appreciate me for once keeping my mouth shut. As I sat and listened to my frustrated Black classmates berate my confused white ones, I considered the fact that I was among the berated. I was as much of a beneficiary of racism as any other rich white American, and I had been critical of the parts of the trip that focused on Afro-Cuban identity and spirituality. I realized the implication of this criticism: the way that Black Cubans lived and the things that they believed were unimportant to me. For the next several days, I grappled with this. It felt as if some sort of strange divide had been drawn between revolutionary justice that improves the material conditions of Black people and the rituals and cultures which uplift the Black soul.
The resolution to this conflict came at the Triunvirato sugar plantation. It was there that I understood that the fundamental lever for the phenomenon I described in the first sentence of this essay has always been the exploitation of Black people. The reason we have global capitalism is because of the triangle trade, and as I stood at that ground zero of the world economy I thought about how slavery never went away and just became more insidiously bound to everything we use and produce. I thought about the workers in the Congo mining the metals in my iPhone. I thought about where the wealth of my country came from, thought about the thousands of plantations like the one I was standing on scattered across the southern United States which had inflicted a systematic torture upon millions of Black people. I thought of the dashed hope of a thousand Carlotas and a thousand unfinished revolutions. I thought of all the Black people I love, whose bodies have been ground up for centuries by the gears at the center of the huge global machine that spits out profit to people like me.
In response to the final prompt, about why this is valuable to my life:
First of all, I have been inspired to begin my senior thesis. The subject of this thesis will be the impact of tourism on economic, racial, and geographic inequality in Cuba. My desire to learn more and research this has finally convinced me that I would be happiest in an academic career. I have changed my major to geography and set my sights on a PhD in the discipline. I’m also a better Spanish speaker now than I’ve ever been before. For the first time since I began my Spanish studies more than 10 years ago, I feel comfortable conversing with native speakers and reading advanced Spanish texts.
Personally, this has convinced me to devote as much of myself as I can to fighting for justice and against oppressions of all forms. Outside of the complicated theoretical lessons described above, the most important realization that occurred to me in Cuba was simply this: A better world is possible. Castro knew it. Guevara knew it. Celia Sanchez, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Antonio Maceo all knew it. Now I do too. 
