Encountering Cuban radical hospitality
By Erin Bell
While nostalgic views of the 1980s often present a halcyon era of mix tapes and mall culture, growing up during this era was also frightening.
Cold War discourse permeated much of the content created in the United States. Films like Red Dawn (1984) and War Games (1983) reinscribed tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. Many Americans still recall the terror they felt about what seemed to be an imminent nuclear attack.
My knowledge of Cuban history was framed by such discourse and made worse by the limited amount of information regarding Cuba in my K-12 curriculum. As such, when I began working at University of Detroit Mercy in 2022, I decided to participate in the University’s Travel to Cuba program which, since 2012, has granted the means for Detroit Mercy students, faculty, and administrators to travel to the country for educational purposes.
While I have traveled internationally for other academic purposes, I have never as fully immersed myself in a country’s history before travel as we did. Groundwork for the trip included enrollment in the Advanced Spanish/Latin American Culture course to pave the way for meaningful engagement with the community members and experiential learning.
While our journey was significant to my development in numerous ways, I want to focus on how I encountered radical hospitality in Cuba which served as a reminder for each of us to reflect upon how we, too, can be radically hospitable.
In general, hospitality is viewed as the virtuous practice of welcoming strangers or guests. Scriptures in both testaments call attention to the significance of this practice, with Hebrews 13:2 telling us: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” In her 2001 paper on the subject, scholar Amy Oden notes that in the early Christian tradition, hospitality focused on “receiving the alien and extending one’s resources to them.”
Perspectives on radical hospitality also focus on the acknowledgment of difference; suggesting the act entails mutual ministry. Writing in the journal Religions, theologian Kate Ward notes radical hospitality can be precarious “to both guest and host.” For Ward, the act
places host and guest in touch with their own status of marginality, and forces hosts to confront the limits of their own ability to pursue virtue and do the right thing…it forces host and guest to acknowledge and embrace their own differences rather than attempting to erase them.
In Cuba, we were welcomed into learning centers, places of worship, and even homes, granting us the means to simultaneously comprehend our differences while bringing us to a deeper understanding of the country’s past and present.
Acts of radical hospitality were seen in various ways by our Cuban hosts during our trip. At the Palmira Local Museum, our host discussed the African slave trade and its connection to the Cuban sugar cane industry before inviting us to a service at El Roque.
In this community-based house of worship, participants engage in Santeria and other syncretic traditions — religious practices brought to North and South America and the Caribbean by West Africans who were enslaved between the 16th and 19th Centuries. At times, openly practicing Syncretism in Cuba has been forbidden, so our hosts were engaging in a radical act by inviting us into the services.
Later, we visited the Casa del Campesino art collective to participate in a Play Back Theatre performance. Inspired in part by the work of Paulo Freire, the theatre troupe consists of actors, musicians, and a “conductor” who leads the performance. The conductor asks audience members to share life experiences. After an audience member narrates an experience, the Playback group “plays back” the shared narratives through improvisational music and acting. Longer stories from the audience are told from the teller’s chair where participants narrate their story and then observe it come to life through the actors.
The peak of this performance occurred when my husband shared a moment from his past. The young actor who played back this memory embodied the fear and pain my husband experienced as a teenage runaway on a quest to reconnect with his birth mother, resulting in a reciprocal process of sharing and healing.
We also encountered radical welcoming in unscheduled moments. During most of our trip, we lodged at the Convento de Santa Brigida in Old Havana with sisters of the Order of the Blessed Savior. The Order’s ecumenical, spiritual, and missionary callings include the ministry of hospitality — a calling embodied in the small acts of kindness by Hermana Maria. Early each morning, Hermana Maria greeted us with warmth and grace. She was learning English while many of us spoke limited Spanish. Hermana Maria was patient as we cobbled together our morning conversations, speaking slowly and deliberately, and I found I could understand her in a beautiful act of reciprocal communication.
Another small but significant moment of hospitality occurred as we walked through the streets of Havana. Our guide pointed out the façade of an apartment as an exemplar of building renovations being completed across the region. One of its residents openly welcomed us into her building, which was home to several dozen families. While the facade of the building appeared intact, the inside was crowded with wires and makeshift scaffolding. Due to the trade embargo, building supplies were difficult to obtain, so the residents were proud to show us how they had ingeniously solved their building problems.
Our journey to Cuba proved to be a transformative experience, revealing the power of radical hospitality in fostering understanding across cultural boundaries. The echoes of Cold War fears that shaped my early perceptions of Cuba were replaced by the warmth of the Cuban people.
Such acts can inspire all of us to continue to integrate the spirit of hospitality into our learning environments as we continue to seek understanding and dialogue, welcoming others into our communities and standing in opposition to the silos and barriers we may face.
Erin Bell is the assistant director for Educational Development at the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning at University of Detroit Mercy.
