Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Autumn 2013 | Page 17

Americans: an island of salsa, cigars, and palm trees—so close, yet
effectively forbidden to most due to the U.S. Treasury’s more than
50-year-old trade embargo.
For some, the mention of Cuba evokes images of Havana’s famed
Malecón seaside esplanade with 1950s classic cars roaring past.
For others, however, the country’s Communist regime still stirs
memories of fear associated with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the
near threat of nuclear attack.
To learn more about this Caribbean isle, 12 Wheaton students
traveled to Cuba with their professors for nine days this spring.
They will tell you that the highlight of the trip was not meeting with
leading Cuban economists and church leaders, or seeing Ernest
Hemingway’s house outside the capital city’s elegant Spanish quarter.
Instead, it was visiting a small, impoverished village about 45
minutes outside of Havana that was hardly accustomed to seeing
Americans.
This was true for Sara Hogan ’13, a self-described introvert
plagued by “debilitating homesickness and anxiety” during her
early years at Wheaton. In Cuba, this Spanish and business/
economics double major found herself conga dancing down the
aisle of a small Methodist church overflowing with worshipers.
Earlier that Sunday, she rode in a horse-drawn cart in order to
spend time discussing life and faith with a poor Cuban family.
Sara’s host was Leta, a 40-year-old single mother raising her
5-year-old daughter in a peat hut with a tin roof. Her teenage
daughter lives elsewhere because Leta can’t afford to raise two
children. “She was teary but smiling the whole time,” says
Sara. “She said life was hard, but God provides and is faithful.”
Sara often served as the group’s translator but found herself
speechless when asked by Leta to share about her own spiritual
life. This loss for words came after observing Leta’s “inexplicable
joy,” where Sara expected to find clinical depression due to
her host’s material poverty. Purposely outside her comfort zone
on the trip, Sara says she repeatedly felt God’s love, care, and power
through spiritual family. And this was a perfect example of why
Wheaton emphasizes global and experiential learning.
“The great lessons often come in unexpected ways,” says political
science professor Dr. Mark Amstutz, who co-led the trip. “You
will get one or two experiences that entirely illuminate. But if
you’re not properly prepared, you’ll miss it.”

politiCal Changes
Dr. Amstutz had taken Wheaton students to Cuba twice before
(in 2002 and 2004) but had to halt the trips due to U.S. policy
changes that reversed two years ago. Having taught international

Photos lef t anD below: anne Justine houser ’15

Cuba oCCupies an exotiC niChe in the minds of many

Photo: Dr. Gene Green

(pictured above) The Cuban flag; El Capitolio, the Cuban
national Capitol; and Havana’s harbor viewed from the
Castillo del Morro. (page 14, left) Che Guevara, a Marxist
revolutionary, depicted on the government’s state
security building facing Revolution Square.

affairs ever since the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile
Crisis, Dr. Amstutz had long been curious about Cuba. “Cuba is like
another world,” he says. “It really is a quasi-totalitarian society, but
they camouflage the power of the state very well.”
The United States broke off diplomatic relations in response to Fidel
Castro’s 1959 revolution, which established single-party government
control of the economy and life in a bid to bring equality to Cuba’s
people after the reign of dictator Fulgencio Batista. But today the U.S.
is Cuba’s second-largest source of food imports, and Cuban-Americans
send more than $1 billion in remittances back to family and friends
on the island.
Today Cuba is changing—albeit slowly—as the leadership
transition from an ailing Fidel to his younger brother Raúl has been
accompanied by the gradual expansion of private property rights such
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