From Busboys and Poets:
Cuba: Busboys and Poets “Cuban Culture, Business and Sustainability”
Country: Cuba
Dates: July 1, 2012 – July 7, 2012After much planning and anticipation Busboys and Poets is proud to announce our upcoming trip to Cuba! We’ll be spending 6 days in Havana, Cuba exploring the arts and culture of the city and we hope that you will join us!
The trip’s theme and title is “Cuba Culture, Business, and Sustainability” and will combine opportunities to learn about the art and culture of Cuba by visiting sites and meeting people working in the arts, culture, and business fields. We will also share our business practices in these discussions and explore the intersection of sustainable business, good art, and service to the community.
First, a little background about our restaurant: Busboys and Poets is a community where racial and cultural connections are consciously uplifted…a place to take a deliberate pause and feed your mind, body and soul…a space for art, culture and politics to intentionally collide…we believe that by creating such a space we can inspire social change and begin to transform our community and the world.
The trip will be a first for the Busboys and Poets travel team! We are excited to be kicking off with an exciting and rare trip to experience the arts, culture, business, and people of Cuba!
Program Highlights may include:
• Meetings with Cuban architects and learn how Havana developed and take a tour of the city with various stops to promote lively discussions about urbanization.
• A meeting with UNEAC, Union of Writer and Artists to discuss the literary life and traditions of Cuba. We will be joined by poets and writers
• Visit the studios of local artists
• Evening performances with young classically trained singers, dancers and musicians—traditional Afro-Cuban music and dance, and more!
• Visit to the home studio of Jose Fuster, ceramic artistCost: $2,350.00
More details here.
Really cool! Sounds like a good deal – includes airfare, meals, lodging and transportation.
Is this a legally sanctioned trip? I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba but I need it to be kosher with our government (no sneaking through Mexico City and having the Cubans not stamp my passport).
The U.S. under the Obama administration have eased travel regulations for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba so I don’t know if that answers your question enough. Of course, some congressional members don’t sanction U.S. travelers to Cuba, but that is politics playing itself out.
regulations should be restrictions
There are categories of special licenses one may obtain from OFAC for these sorts of educational/cultural exchanges. However, they are highly, HIGHLY, regulated. One must be in classes/lectures/symposiums/etc. for x number hours of the day, no off reservation sight-seeing, no spending of any kind – all meals and accommodations are “fully-hosted”, on for about a page and half single spaced.
Sounds like a great trip, but it seems really last minute.
+1. They need to fill all the spots by next Friday or the trip is cancelled? Give me a break. Why not announce this a month ago, and let people save their money and, uh, I don’t know…PLAN?
Agreed.
Will it include a visit to prisons where homosexuals and anyone who criticizes the Castro regime are living?
Havana has a thriving gay scene and Raul Casto’s daughter is a gay activiist.
Mariela Castro is the heir of her father and uncle, who by the way threw the gay men into concentration camps called UMAP. Apologies for those brutalities are long overdue, and nobody has heard of them.
Today, she is an “activist” who get visas with 70 goons to come to the USA to spew her propaganda. Of course, she only represents you if you happen to support the dictatorship, otherwise, you are discriminated against if not thrown in jail.
Of course not.
They will only frolic and cavort with the official culture, the communist party, and the enemies of the most basic freedoms.
The irony of the situation is that one goes to jail in Cuba for having an operation like Bus Boys and Poets, for having independent opinions, and for aspiring to change the situation in Cuba and transform the communities. Not to mention that many of the political dissidents are black, and that racism is a way governing in Cuba. I doubt that they believe me, since I don’t repeat the same bullshit that the Cuban (intelligence) officers in Washington DC say. Or what the risible “Cuba experts” of the Think Tanks write so many papers about….
Restricting basic freedoms like being able to travel to whatever country you damn well please?
Ask people in Cuba if they can travel where they well damn want. Now, think if you want to support with your dollars a dictatorship that restrains freedom of movement (even inside the country, since you cannot move from province to province whenever you see fit) freedom of speech, or freedom of expression. Of course, you are free to travel where you want, to speak what you want and to express yourself how you want. But you have no qualms in supporting a system who repress the very same freedoms you hold so dear.
You put gas in your car? You’re supporting a foreign, repressive regime. You buy electronics or clothes? You’re supporting a foreign, repressive regime. Spend any money inside the US? You’re supporting a country that holds people indefinitely without charges or trials. It’s not so cut and dry, is it?
But we DON’T live in Cuba. We live in a free country and should be able to travel where we choose.
So, why not support yet another dictatorship, right? Talking about indefinite detentions without trial, executions without appeal, extrajudicial killings where you are at sea (escaping from the nightmare) and someone decides to spray a few bullets over you, so the shark meal is dead or dying upon arrival, that’s Cuba, too. C’mon are you ok with that? Are you in favor of death penalty? No? Well, in Cuba they have executed people for THINKING against the government. Nice, right?
No one is saying the Casto regime is admirable–in fact they are reprehensible. However, I should be able to view the facts and decide if I want to travel to Cuba without US Federal government restrictions.
logandcguy,
you can go. sign up for the trip!
They’ll probably be taken to the Cuban version of Potemkin villages.
The ban against travel to Cuba is long overdue to be lifted. Why is it I can travel to any country in the world but not Cuba? The Iron Curtain was not brought down by blocking contact and travel.
Any president that proposes fully lifting these sanctions just handed his opponent all of Florida’s electoral votes.
Actually, a large portion, if not the majority of Cubans in FL support more access to travel to visit their family and friends. As it stands Cuban-Americans can only go to Cuba every 2-3 years for family visits. Yes, there is a vocal group of wealthy virulently anti-regime activists in Florida, but I would not say that is the majority stance. I’m born and raised in Tampa, FWIW.
The restrictions on humanitarian visits to family – the general license category – was been libralized in 2009. “OFAC has issued a general license authorizing travel-related transactions for visits to “close relatives” (close relatives include, for example, aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins) who are nationals of Cuba. There is no limit on the frequency or duration such visits to “close relatives.”" And the companies, predominantly owned by Cuban ex-pats, that are santioned to perform travel for these humanitarianvisits make so much money that they are not particularly cheering for the repeal of the embargo.
I wonder if they realize that they are going to a country ruled by not one, but two communist dictators. In cuba the government doesn’t tolerate independent thinking or political dissent.
People who peacefully oppose the government are thrown in jail with little ceremony, corruption and prostitution are rampant (ask the chefs who went to cook -in a country where food is rationed- to the Havana Biennal. One of them got robbed by a prostitute)
In a few words, not a very nice place for anyone that is not a communist apparatchik.
Oh, I forgot, misery photographs so well….
They probably do. I’ve never been to Busboys (and never intend to go there), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had Che posters on their walls.
we have our slave owners from the past that we admire. the communists and ignorant americans, have che.
we all have a selective memory.
i think i just lost my respect for andy shallal http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2009/11/che_and_lenin_posters_trigger.html
bush caused more deaths than lenin and che combined? where do those figures come from?
US citizens can visit Iran, North Korea, China and other countries ruled by despots and/or with known human rights violations. At the height of the cold war our government did not prevent us from traveling to the USSR and behind the Iron Curtain. Shining a bright light on cockroaches makes them scatter.
a- Americans are the vast majority of the travelers to Cuba.
b- other people(s) go to Cuba as well.
c- Nothing has changed in Cuba.
d- do you mean that American visitors who support the tyranny in Cuba with their dollars will change the situation in Cuba?
This seems pointless but yes, the more American tourists the more the Cuban middle class develops. The more the Cuban middle class develops and mixes with those from a free society the more the will demand reforms and poof, Casto is gone!
Because American tourists create vibrant middle classes wherever they go. Like in China and North Korea, Haiti, Burindi….. The way Castro dictatorship supports itself in power is simple: socialized misery. They get all the product of tourism, fresh greenbacks, re-invest the funds in repression…. and voila; let’s take that next busloads of tourists for a ride…. (by the way, American tourists are not the only ones who spend money, I doubt the other tourists can access to anything from cigars to prostitutes for free)
And travels to China, Iran, North Korea, et altri have help very much to change the situation there, right? That’s the same way the situation is going to change in Cuba….
All you need is a few Southwest Airlines $99 roundtrip flights from the Midwest and South to Cuba and the current government would literally collapse under the weight of American tourists.
Since the commentariat will provide (with great abundance and vigor) all of the salient moral context for prospective U.S.-Cuba travel – especially when (hopefully) compared to the beacon of morality exhibited by the United States – I will take the road less traveled and contribute that Havana is (wait for it…): A-W-E-S-O-M-E! The average person, the family connectivity, the food, the culture, the architecture, the history (it is a little know fact that Cuba existed *before* Castro was even born…like, by several years!) is FAR more complicated and fascinating than the garden variety realities perpetrated by the traditional U.S. educational system-espoused ‘everybody on the other side of the Iron Curtain/etc’ is defined by the limitations or failings of their country’s leadership. Yep, the current regime leaves A LOT to be desired (and, yes, I’m referring to Cuba….not the DC government or the U.S. government or the entire VA legislature). But, if you have an opportunity to travel there you’ll be confronted with suggestions of the bad (‘tourists’ don’t get to see a lot of that stuff) but what’s left (see above) will blow your mind!
Sorry for the inadvertent double post!
Since the commentariat will provide (with great abundance and vigor) all of the salient moral context for prospective U.S.-Cuba travel – especially when (hopefully) compared to the beacon of morality exhibited by the United States – I will take the road less traveled and contribute that Havana is (wait for it…): A-W-E-S-O-M-E! The average person, the family connectivity, the food, the culture, the architecture, the history (it is a little know fact that Cuba existed *before* Castro was even born…like, by several years!) is FAR more complicated and fascinating than the garden variety realities perpetrated by the traditional U.S. educational system-espoused ‘everybody on the other side of the Iron Curtain/etc’ is defined by the limitations or failings of their country’s leadership. Yep, the current regime leaves A LOT to be desired (and, yes, I’m referring to Cuba….not the DC government or the U.S. government or the entire VA legislature). But, if you have an opportunity to travel there you’ll be confronted with suggestions of the bad (‘tourists’ don’t get to see a lot of that stuff) but what’s left (see above) will blow your mind!
I agree! Let me decide if I want to go not the US government.
How’s that 50 + year quarantine of Cuba working out for you?
This trip sounds AMAZING. Who wouldn’t want to go?? I’m tired of all the haters!
Then maybe you are tired of the Castros too. The only thing is that you DON’T KNOW IT…… yet….
I would like to go to the next one!