How Did Cuba and Canada Practise “Development” in the 1970s? cuso and the cujae Project

Abstract

The first foreign non-governmental organization (ngo) to operate in Cuba was the Canadian University Service Overseas (cuso). Between 1971 and 1976, cuso coordinated a program to build Cuban engineering capacity by sending Canadian engineering professors to teach short courses at Ciudad Universitaria José Antonio Echeverría, Havana’s engineering school. Over one hundred Canadian professors participated, teaching 300 Cuban students. Cuban graduate students also came to Canada for research terms, and almost one hundred graduate degrees were ultimately conferred. The success of this exchange should also be measured in the relationships formed and the unique framework built by its participants. It was overseen by a joint Cuban and Canadian board. It was guided by the belief that the two countries would work, according to its founding mission, in a “genuine partnership, as opposed to a dominant or subservient relationship.” How did this First World ngo establish equitable relationships in a country that was waging a revolution against foreign assumptions of superiority? How was “development” – which was itself a product of the Cold War struggle to keep the global South on the capitalist side of the ledger – imagined among and between Cubans and Canadians in this era? This project did not conceptualize development as “solidarity” in the ideological sense and nor did it locate the condescending superiority of “technical expertise” that could be found in many of the other Canadian-global South development assistance programs. Based on cuso’s vast archive and interviews with Cuban and Canadian participants, this article explores how this project operated and also the space it opened for ongoing equitable, affective relations.