Bringing Home Havana
Cal State East Bay students travel to Cuba, capture stories of communist life
It took Cal State East Bay senior Camille Sparkman no further than the walk from the arrival gate to an airport restroom at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport for the reality of life in a communist country to set in.
“There was an attendant in the restroom giving each person [toilet] tissue,” she says. “It was just such an odd, unexpected moment. I had heard about rations, but I never realized the restrictions in Cuba extended to having control over the tissue in the stall.”
Sparkman, who had never been abroad before traveling to Cuba this summer, is one of 25 students who journeyed from Cal State East Bay to the embargoed republic as part of an immersive cultural trip called “Visions of Cuba.” The experience was led by Associate Professor and Department of Communications Chair Mary Cardaras, who collaborated with professional filmmaker and Lecturer Casey Beck on a 17-day expedition that tasked the students with observing and creating multimedia projects about modern-day Cubans. They prepped for the experience by studying the culture and making tentative plans for which aspects of daily life, society, politics or other niche issues they wanted to focus on.