Karen Dubinsky: I'm fine. Thanks.

Karen Dubinsky: Remind me, were you in Cuba? Was it in February? Was I was, yeah. I just got back a couple of weeks ago, so I was there for I saw the I, you know, things have been bad there for a really long time. I saw normal bad. And then I saw like, you know, ramped up bad with the when the oil blockade started and that the effects it was actually amazing. The effects were almost immediate. You could see, you know, all of a sudden there's no buses on the street. All of a sudden school kids are on the street, not at school, things like that. I didn't see yet the, you know, the the grocery shelves dwindling, but that must be happening now.

Interviewer: All right. Well, let's talk about it. Soft power is described as diplomacy without diplomats. How has Canada exercised soft power in Cuba?

Karen Dubinsky: Canada has been actually doing that for really quite a long time. My book studies the the period from the Cuban Revolution on. So that's 1959 on. That was a bit of an arbitrary decision. It's not like soft power was invented in 1959, but Canada and Cuba, famously and uniquely, it was only Canada and Mexico that maintained unbroken diplomatic ties with Cuba after the revolution. And in Canada's case, at least, Canada got involved in aid projects, development aid projects. There's been a long history of education exchange projects of which which is where I which drew me into this story personally. I used to help to coordinate a, a an exchange between my university, Queen's University and the University of Havana that brought Canadian students to Cuba for almost almost 20 years. And my other interest and the interest of many people in Canada is Cuban culture. And there's been ties, musical ties between the two countries for for decades. And in fact, many Cuban musicians, excellent Cuban musicians, make their home in Canada. Now.

Interviewer: I want to talk about education as a soft power. In your book, strangely, Friends A History of Canadian Cuban Encounters, you write the goal of the Ciudad Universitaria Jose Antonio Echevarria Project, also known as the Kuh, was straightforward to establish a graduate program in engineering, staffed by Cubans, but with strong professional and fraternal links with Canadian universities. The pilot project began in February 1972. 25 Canadian engineering professors gave three week summer courses to graduate students of QJ, as well as engineers working in industry the University of Toronto, Waterloo, British Columbia and Saskatchewan participated, presided over by an Academic Advisory Board chaired by Canadian University Service Overseas. How much of Cuba's technical and cultural development has been a result of Canada exercising those soft powers?

Karen Dubinsky: Yeah, that's a that's a really that that project was was fascinating. I teach in a global I taught for many years in a global development studies program. And so one of the things that's fascinating about the the the acronym goes by or the title goes by the acronym Kuai. The Kuai project worked because it did what it planned to do. And its goals were in some ways modest. I mean, it's a big project. Healthy university, develop an engineering program, a graduate level engineering program so that those people that were in the program could then go on and teach themselves. Right. So it worked in that sense, because it had the modest goal not of saving Cuba, not of creating a kind of dependent relationship on Canadian superior technology, superior education, but rather a one time, several years, excuse me, multi-year project that taught Cubans in order for them to continue teaching themselves. And and that was that was Cuba's or sorry, that was the the Organization, the Canadian Organization that that developed it, that was their philosophy in those years. And that tied meshed perfectly with what Cuban authorities wanted in those years as well.

Interviewer: All right. I want to talk a little bit about the Canadian students that you have taken on to the exchanges that you had talked about. What did they learn outside of the classroom?

Karen Dubinsky: Oh my goodness. Well, one of the there's were so many fascinating things to observe as a professor, Cuba, Havana, in those years that it took place, the whole course took place in the city of Havana. I could barely imagine taking 20 to 30 young, 20 year old, mostly Unilingual, or at least certainly not Spanish speaking students with me to a big global South city or a big, let's even just say Latin American city and basically letting them, you know, letting them go where they wanted to go. It it is it was that's changing, but it was an incredibly safe place for students to be. So they could go off on their own and, and, you know, and talk to people and all kinds of people. You know, Havana is, of course, on the tourist route, but less so than some of the resorts. So the site of Canadian students often, you know, congregating in large numbers on the seawall or at a restaurant or at any, you know, any kind of downtown location, certainly around the university. That was a site that was a site that was not a usual site. And so they struck up all kinds of friendships and had all kinds of conversations, which was also great because they heard things from Cubans on the street that didn't always correspond to what they were hearing from their professors, their Cuban professors in the classroom. And so that made for especially around things like racism, actually. Well, yeah.

Interviewer: What were they.

Karen Dubinsky: Saying really? Oh, we well, I'll stick with the example of racism. They were sometimes heard a rosy picture from their predominantly white, not exclusively by any means, but from their predominantly white Cuban instructors about how the revolution had solved the problems of racism. Because, you know, because there was no racial discrimination in, in the law and in that, you know, in the legal sense, that was completely true as it as it is and was in Canada, people on the street would approach our, again, predominantly white students and but sometimes with, you know, sometimes with a racial mix among the Canadian students. And that that led to conversations about racism in Canada compared to racism in Cuba. And they would hear stories, they would definitely hear stories about racism in Cuba from the street level that they weren't getting at, at the, you know, at the at the heights of the, the university classroom. So things like that were always and so the students would sometimes wonder who you know who to believe, which helped us to encourage them to think that lots of things can be true at the same time. Right? That there wasn't a a who to believe. There was a, you know, people speak from their experience. You have to take all of those experiences into account.

Interviewer: Well, let's take those experiences and talk a little bit about influence. In what ways does soft power influence, you know, official policy at higher levels of government?

Karen Dubinsky: Yeah, that's always the that's I think that's always the question when you're talking about things like popular or cultural diplomacy, it's really clear. And, you know, it was clear to me from my experience teaching there. And then later on from the research that I did that, you know, I picked development aid and education and music, but I could have also studied sport, and I could have also certainly studied tourism to look at the the ways in which the many ways in which ties between people at the, you know, at the ground level, at the popular level, are, are are profound, profound. And in the case of Canada, Cuba multiple and have been going on for decades. What does that have to do with Canadian Cuban relations at the at the more elite level, at the level of, of external affairs ministers and and prime ministers? I think Canadian, you know, speaking on the Canadian side, Canadian government policy is obviously informed by what is perceived to be the mood of the country at any one place and at any one time or on any on any one issue. And the fact we've just seen it recently when the Canadian government made the Or excuse me, it wasn't the government when the Canadian travel industry, airline industry made the decision very quickly to stop flying to Cuba in the in the midst of this oil crisis that they're having, there was a huge reaction and not, you know, sometimes from thwarted vacationers in the middle of February, looking forward to going to a beach. That's that's understandable. But also what that really showed, I think, was that Canadian tourists have many Canadian tourists, have long standing ties with the Cuban, with Cuba, with visiting, with people who they meet in their travels, with people who they stay with. And those ties continue, maybe beyond the initial kind of business relationship and continue into friendships. And so when you know, when dramatic things happen, like, like has happening now, you see a kind of an outpouring of concern that isn't that isn't abstract, that isn't philosophical, but it's actually based on concern about people.

Interviewer: Well.

Karen Dubinsky: It's about people's friendships.

Interviewer: Well, let's move that concern into action. If the Canadian government chooses to, how could it use soft power to help Cubans right now?

Karen Dubinsky: Well, I mean, we don't live in much of a we don't soft power is is less of less of a practice, let's say, these days, thanks to the largely I think thanks to the government, at least from our, you know, from our Canadian perspective, from the government of Donald Trump is using, you know, soft power is not strangling a country by refusing anybody to sell them oil. And soft power is certainly not bombing other countries, as we've seen as as is going on now in Iran. How do you know, how do the the sharp edges of, of hard power, how do those how do those function with the soft edge, the softer edges of soft power is a really good question. And I guess I would go back to what I was saying when when you have a, when you have a whole a long history, decades long, let's say in, in the case of Cuba, when you have a long history of relations between people, whether they be sports teams or tourists or Canadian Canadian students and Cuban instructors, it's harder to demonise a country. It's harder to talk about a country as an enemy when people have their actual own experience of, of, of of relations. So maybe that's the best. Maybe that's the best example that I can come up with, that when a country that with whom you have had relations is in trouble and asks for help, maybe it becomes less of an official abstract request and more helping a friend.

Interviewer: Karen, we are going to leave it there. Really appreciate your insights on this. Thank you so much.

Karen Dubinsky: Thank you.