President Obama’s visit to Cuba last month was historic for that country, and for relations between Cuba and the U.S. For many Cuban Americans living in the U.S., this trip, and the warming relationship between the countries, doesn’t wipe away those barriers of pain and separation.
But it does point to something different: as young people on the island grow up in a Cuba that’s increasingly looking toward the West, and Americans clamor to get a peek inside a culture that has, in many ways, been frozen in time. Many Connecticut residents have just returned from time in Cuba.
This hour, we get the latest on Cuban-American relations. We talk to a UConn Cuba scholar who's writing a book on Afro-Cubans and racial and economic inequalities in her home country, and talk to former Red Sox pitcher Bill "The Spaceman" Lee, who just returned from a visit to the country with a group of West Hartford students doing "baseball diplomacy."
GUESTS:
- Odette Casamayor-Cisneros - Associate Professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Literatures and Cultures at UConn
- Megan Torrey - Executive Director of the World Affairs Council of Connecticut
- Bill Lee - Former major league baseball pitcher who played for the Boston Red Sox and the Montreal Expos.
- Jack Brennan - Eighth grade student at Sedgwick Middle School; baseball diplomat and shortstop/pitcher
- Tim Brennan - Founder of Teen Cultures Connect
