January 31, 2002
Reaching out: UW delegates talk with Castro during Cuban visit
As the United States began sending its Al Qaeda captives to Cuba last month, the UW sent a delegation of 41 women.
Both groups got Fidel Castro’s attention.
The Cuban president met for three hours with the UW delegates on Jan. 16 — interrupted only by a phone call from the UN secretary general — and proclaimed the UW meeting a harbinger of warming between the peoples of two longtime adversarial nations.
“The president of Cuba’s National Assembly told us he had never seen Castro so moved by a visit,” said UW delegate Susan Jeffords, the divisional Arts and Sciences dean for the social sciences.
The women had come with the UW’s Center for Women & Democracy, a 2-year-old program housed in Cunningham Hall that — with the help of intense community funding and involvement — fosters female participation in local and global affairs through political-leadership workshops, academic research and these international missions.
The meeting with Castro was a surprise twist in the center’s eight-day mission to Havana, which already was crammed with visits to high-ranking women in Cuban politics, health, trade and education — even some critics of the regime. Castro’s invitation came while the UW group attended a Havana baseball game the night before.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who was part of the UW group for three days, led the delegation into the Presidential Palace, where the senator presented the Cuban leader with a bottle of Washington sparkling wine and an All-Star baseball signed by Mariners’ slugger Edgar Martinez. Castro chatted with each of the visitors, several of them prominent in business, agriculture, health care, education and the environment.
“He seemed genuinely curious and engaged by what each of us had to say,” said Christine Di Stefano, director of the Center for Women & Democracy and associate professor of political science.
Castro, according to notes taken by delegate Darlene Madenwald, bemoaned the U.S. economic embargo, especially for the way it interferes with Cubans’ access to information and technology.
“The worst thing about the blockade is that it deprives Cuba of knowledge,” Castro told the group.
The UW visit came during a period of heightened Cuban-American contacts, featuring a flurry of recent visits by American politicians, tourists and even pop stars. (The UW is one of the limited number of U.S. schools to hold a federal license that permits educational missions to Cuba; a team from the UW College of Architecture and Urban Planning helped build a community gardening center in Havana last year).
Reacting to the current U.S. imprisonment of captives from Afghanistan at its Guantanemo Bay base on the island, Castro told the UW delegation that he intends to cooperate in the battle against global terrorism. But many ordinary Cubans told the UW visitors during the week that they considered it an insult for the United States to use their island to hold such prisoners, Jeffords said.
The UW delegates also were told in several places that the barriers between the two nations don’t harm Cubans solely. The group visited a research institute that produces advanced vaccines for maladies — such as one strain of meningitis — that also plague the United States, Di Stefano said. And Cantwell is attempting to give Washington apples, wheat, lentils and other crops an eventual market in Cuba.
As to the benefits of the trip to the UW, Jeffords said it helped set the stage for future faculty and student exchanges, in fields ranging from Latin American Studies to biotechnology.
In addition, she said, it helped many of the delegates gain a firmer connection to the University. Several who made the trip already serve on the Center for Women & Democracy’s 28-member board, a board that Jeffords characterized as among the most active and engaged at the University.
Only time will tell what happens to U.S.-Cuban relations. The fact that this delegation was made up of women, Di Stefano said, made it perhaps more approachable and less threatening to the Cuban hosts.
There was, to be sure, one man along on the trip: Cantwell aide Travis Sullivan. At the end of the meeting with Castro, the women visitors were given flowers. Sullivan got a box of cigars.
