Teach-in reveals truth about Cuban culture, government
Summer Witts
Issue date: 2/18/04 Section: News
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"Who would have thought, a Cuban man who can't dance," Kotula said Abel joked about Naomi's aversion to dancing. Abel loved to dance, but Naomi, a sound technician, preferred listening to music instead and hoped to study music in the United States in hopes of becoming a disc jockey.
Kotula talked about his meeting with the pair to a small group of professors, students and humanitarians gathered together to discuss the social, economic, political and artistic aspects of Cuban culture in a daylong teach-in sponsored by the URI Multicultural Center.
As Kotula went through his slides of a policeman, an out of work fisherman, a lawyer and a landlady, as well as a dozen or so photographs of famous Cuban artists and their work, one could gain a sense of Cuban culture people in the United States are not usually exposed to.
Cuba and the United States haven't had a good relationship over the past 40 years. The U.S. placed an embargo on the country in 1962, ending all U.S. trade, in an effort to stop the spread of communism. The U.S. government also passed a series of acts, which prevent foreign countries from trading with Cuba and limit travel to the country.
Jennifer M. Ungemach, a program officer from Oxfam America, an organization that works to prevent poverty in the international community, said that the relationship hasn't improved in the wake of Sept. 11, when Cuba was declared part of the "Axis of Evil."
Martin Lepkowski, a member of Witness for Peace of Rhode Island, said the embargo prevents a flow of information between the two countries, which leads to a lot of disinformation in the United States about Cuba.
Witness for Peace, a grassroots organization, which promotes peace in other countries by trying to reform U.S. policy, allowed Lepkowski to see other cultures and ask questions to better understand them.
