Join us for the first of two webinars this spring that explore silenced memories of the war and the challenges—personal, methodological, and artistic—to unearthing the conflicted legacies of what some have called “Cuba’s Vietnam.”

Late 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Cuba’s military intervention in Angola, a major conflict of the late Cold War. From 1975 until 1991, over 300,000 Cuban troops, backed by the Soviet Union, supported the ruling People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government’s efforts to thwart rival contenders for power backed by the United States and the invading army of apartheid-era South Africa. Thousands of Cuban educators, physicians, and other professionals also completed tours. Yet many of their stories of trauma, dislocation, and hardship remain buried under celebratory narratives of “internationalism” that focus largely on the conflict’s geopolitical outcomes.

In our first event, anthropologist Katrin Hansing, who is writing a book based on long-term ethnographic research and interviews with Cuban veterans of the conflict, will engage in a dialogue with Lisbon-based Cuban author Karla Suárez, whose fiction has explored the impact of Angola on Cuban society in the 1970s and 1980s.

The presentation will be followed by a Q&A with the online audience. This conversation will be conducted in both English and Spanish languages.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Katrin Hansing, Ph.D., is associate professor of anthropology at Baruch College, City University New York. As a social anthropologist, she has spent the last 25 years conducting empirical and policy relevant research in Cuba and Southern Africa. Her main areas of interest and expertise include: migration, race and ethnicity, social inequalities, and memory.

She has published widely on these issues and has received prestigious grants and awards for her work. Katrin is currently writing a book on Cubans’ experiences and memories of the civil war in Angola and curating a photography exhibit on the same topic. She is an advisor to various governments, foundations, and non-governmental organizations and is often quoted in the media. Katrin and Nicola Dracoulis’ photography exhibit “Los Que Quedan: Cubans who Remain on the Island During the Current Exodus” is currently on view at the University of Miami’s Institute for the Advanced Study of the Americas. Learn more »

Karla Suárez is a Havana-born writer whose most recent novel, “Objetos perdidos,” was a finalist for the 2025 Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize. She has published the novel series “Sinfonía habanera,” which includes “El hijo del héroe,” “Habana año cero,” “La viajera,” and “Silencios,” as well as the short-story collections “Carroza para actores” and “Espuma.”

Her work also includes travel chronicles, and she has received distinctions such as the Carbet Prize of the Caribbean, the English PEN Translates Award, the Lengua de Trapo Prize, and the Julio Cortázar Ibero-American Short Story Prize. Her fiction has been translated into a dozen languages. She currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal, where she coordinates the Instituto Cervantes Reading Club and teaches at the Madrid School of Writers. Learn more »