ABSTRACT
Academic, educational, and cultural exchanges between Cuba and the United States have created a complex field of relations in which agency, power, and the possibilities of paradigmatic change are at play. The difficulties of academic and cultural exchange in the first three decades of the Cuban Revolution were often obdurate ones, as have been the challenges and problems marking the 1990s and 2000s. U.S. Cuba policy has aimed to control academic and cultural exchanges, though with little understanding of the relations of education, intellectuals, and knowledge production on their own terms. Using economic transactions as the instrument of control and disciplining historical relations through security narratives, past and present policies have sidestepped the realities of globalization and increasingly transnational dynamics in education, the production of knowledge, and informational technologies that facilitate the rapid circulation of data, ideas, and cultural practices.1 Those engaged in creating and carrying out exchanges-academic professionals, students, intellectuals, performance artists, others and ourselves-have an important place in U.S.–Cuban relations for obvious and less obvious reasons. Locating the cooperation that marks exchange relations within the dynamics of their historical context, this essay uses the well known and the less visible experiences, achievements, and challenges to reread, in particular, academic/intellectual agencies.2
