Interview Part I: Anara Frank on Cuban Travel

A year after traveling to Cuba last April, I've continued to stay in touch with the organizer, Anara Frank. As an American gymnast and dancer with strong familial and friend ties to Cuba, she blended all of her passions and her identity into creating these phenomenal trips. I had the pleasure of interviewing her to get a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes work of putting together not just an ordinary trip or vacation, but an unforgettable experience that stays with you and shapes your life thereafter. Here are her responses to my questions:

Q: How did the MetaMovements trip to Cuba come into being?

A: That's a great question! It kind of appeared organically, but to go back in time, when I was living in Cuba as a teenager, I lived in my sister city where I was a tour guide sometimes and I assisted a little bit. And in 2002, there was a request from members of the sister city that I assist with coordinating travelers between our sister cities. At the time, Cambridge and the city of Cienfuegos were sister cities. My responsibility was to develop meaningful programming from arts to education to local political involvement and learning how people from each country in those cities were able to interact in their daily lives when they were brought together. I was able to support the sister city program for two trips before President Bush cancelled our ability to travel. Because it was kind of floating out in the wilderness that it had happened and people had positive experiences on the trip, the agency that supported the travel for the sister city programs contacted me in 2009 after Obama became president. They asked if I could support people who were in my line of work to be able to travel to Cuba legally in the intersection of arts, education, and public health. This had been the areas that my non-profit organization had touched and delved into during the sister city program. So they were looking for people like myself who had connections with Cuba, had experience there, able to translate, and were in a line of work that allowed professionals to travel, and that gave people a really positive feeling about the opportunities for useful and meaningful exchange between Americans and Cubans in a certain line of work. So specifically, it was under a professional research license that I was able to help everyone from therapists who were using arts as a tool in their practice to school teachers, primarily people who were language teachers, social studies teachers, Caribbean studies teachers, to dancers, musicians and artists. I had that opportunity to be a guide and a link between all these different groups of people. I was asked to be a Contracted Program Consultant. That was the title at the time: to consult on programming for meaningful exchange between professionals from the areas that I focused on.

And when Obama opened "People-to-People" exchanges, it was open for everyone to be able to travel. So for the first few years, it was just for people who fit the "Professional Research" category of the time, and following that it opened for "People-to-People" for anyone who wanted to travel. At that point, MetaMovements qualified for a "People-to-People" license, and we were able to bring people on a fairly regular basis. The cost of getting the license had to be considered: all of the legal costs, all of the administrative costs, and so in order to be able to support that license, we made it a very regular ongoing program as opposed to before we were doing it upon interest of travelers. At that time, we started to do outreach and let people know about the trip so that we would be able to help people go on an ongoing basis. Between 2009 and the changes that Obama made and (I believe it was) 2014, during that period of time only professionals could travel, and so we helped professionals travel a few times a year. It was a great connection to the regular program we did. I did work with a lot of professionals in those fields and it was the type of thing where I could help people who were interested in that type of exchange to participate in a meaningful way and get to know our Cuban counterparts. When we made the change to "People-to-People," the ability to have this license was very much cost prohibitive for almost everyone. For that reason, only some of us decided that we were going to take the plunge and say, "OK, we're going to take a lot of trips to Cuba," because it would be the only way to cover the cost of being able to have that type of legal support and being able to purchase the license. This is what allowed people to regularly travel to Cuba and have the kind of cultural experience that you had!

The important underlying feature is that ever since I lived there, as a young person, and built relationships with friends and family there. I felt that there was always this feeling that there were very few people that had the ability to have a foot, let's say, in each country, who were able to make it possible to go back and forth. I'll never use the word easy. There were many times when it has been very very challenging, but I had the ability to, and I have been thankful for that for my whole life because many people in my family and that I know don't have the ability to, visit back and forth. I was told by many people that I had kind of a responsibility on my shoulders. If I was given this privilege, that I was able to get to know both countries so well, and have positive experiences in both countries, that I had this responsibility to serve as something like a cultural ambassador. Both sides were spreading a lot of stories in a form that we often refer to as propaganda. I don't know if everything was propaganda because sometimes people telling their true version of the story they'll feel like that is the truth, but they might be missing so many other pieces of the story that what comes out to us is an image that might not actually be what we would see if we were there in the other place. I would get asked questions from the Cuban side about what was happening here and from the Americans about what was happening there were so interesting for me because the vision that each had of the other country and the people of the other country was so formed by the media as opposed to personal experience or people talking to them, like family or friends, but not always family or friends who were living a complete or full experience. Most people who had family in the US who were Cuban had family living in a small area, let's say Miami, specifically, or maybe Union City in West New York, but mostly living in very Cuban communities and not having a lot of knowledge of what life in the US was like for non-Cuban immigrants and many American citizens. I did feel the weight of that and always tried my best to share music and dance between the two countries, to share differing opinions between the two countries, to help each country remember that the picture that they have been painted may not contain the full truth, it may contain a part of the truth, and that there might be more that they want to learn. So opening that door to communication has always been really important to me. So whenever the opportunity arose when someone asked for my support to do that, I was ready. Whether it was helping with American travelers or groups of Cubans coming to perform for a cultural exchange in the US, my goal was to always be able to assist with helping people from the different cultures view each other at least with an open mind to get started so that a relationship could be built. I think that one of the challenges is when you hear so many negative things about the other side or exaggerated positive things about the other side, how do you find the truth and decide that for yourself? As a person in the middle, I try to help people see the many versions of the story, and as a person who helped people travel in both directions, I try to help people see as broad a view possible that might not have matched with what they heard previously. That was always my goal. How can I help people see that there might be another part of the story? And I think that's why I always answered that call to support people in either direction trying to organize some type of exchange so that I can see how by being in the middle, I might make it be able to be a little more fruitful, a little more supportive to people having eye-opening experiences getting to know each other.

Q: What obstacles did you face when putting together and maintaining programming for this trip?

A: Almost everything is always clouded by what many call the blockade or the embargo. It's not exactly one thing. It's a whole series of laws that put together affect travel, exchange, sharing of information, to such an extent that everything can be traced back to that. Are there are other obstacles that come up along the way? Sure! But when you peel back the layers, it usually goes back to these specific situations that we find ourselves in based on a series of laws dating back to the 1960s, primarily, that maintained us apart for so many years.

So we may say that the finances are a challenge. But when you peel back the layers, you'll see that the finances are a challenge because they are related to this series of laws. If we could say that flights have been a challenge at many points in time, but when you peel back the layers, the issues of flights are related to this series of laws. So each time that you say what is a challenge you face, when you peel back the layers, you come to that at the bottom. So it's not to say that there aren't a lot of challenges that we are working on solutioning [sic] every day, it's just something that we have to do because this is something that hasn't moved since the 1950s and some pieces of it since the '80s. So we are solutioning around it, but I do feel that the root cause is this and that without the blockade, I believe we would still have had challenges as you have challenges in anything, but they would all be very different challenges. I would have to say that this is the root cause with helping people travel legally to Cuba is that there is an issue with traveling legally to Cuba. All of the ramifications -- the political issues, the financial issues, the freedom of speech issues -- that come into play with this series of laws.

STAY TUNED FOR PARTS II-IV OF THE INTERVIEW.

Edit: Previously, the following errors, which have now been corrected, were made:
- Anara was incorrectly identified as Cuban-American as opposed to American with Cuban connections.
- The request to start the programming was from members of the sister city, not her sister.
- The name of the sister city is not San Fuegos, but Cienfuegos.