By Vanessa K. Harper

Inspired by the Colorado Museum of Memory’s community-led history project “Voices of Centro Humanitario: Labor, Barrier and Hope in Covid-19 Times,” Vanessa K. Harper shares the approaches, challenges, and processes that resonate with her seventeen year, multi-media oral history work in Cuba.

History Colorado is an historical society established in 1879. As a nonprofit organization and agency of the State of Colorado, they prioritize activities and programming that supports historic preservation, tourism, and education. Most notably, the historical society offers opportunities to interact with Colorado history through a network of museums, one of which is the Museum of Memory. 

The Museum of Memory initiative is an impressive and aspiring effort to “collaboratively reanimate, center and amplify the histories that have long existed only in the margins and create opportunity for the community to decide how to remember its collective past.” Maria Islas-Lopez, a cultural sociologist and researcher who serves as the Museum’s Manager, shared some of her team’s work with our OHMA cohort in the Fall of 2021. She, along with colleagues from History Colorado and Centro Humanitario Para Lo Trabajadores (El Centro), discussed their community-led history project – Voices of Centro Humanitario: Labor, Barriers and Hope in Covid-19 Times – whose aim is to amplify the voices of low-wage Latino immigrant workers during the Covid-19 pandemic in Denver, Colorado.  

In addition to the Museum’s core mission, Maria and her team’s presentations touched on a numbers of approaches, challenges, and processes that strongly resonate with my own oral history work in Cuba – magnifying histories that have existed on the fringe, utilizing storytelling that blends writing with audio and visual elements, embracing translation and multimedia approaches as a way to reach a broader audience, and contemplating the relationship between embodied experience and collective memory.

Since 2005, I’ve been collaboratively documenting a family of subsistence farmers in a rural community of western Cuba. This work – currently titled Honoring El Moro: A Cuban Collective Memory – has changed shape over the years, but today forms the beginnings of a family archive that will one day serve as a model to build a broader public archive within the Sierra del Rosario mountain community. This project is currently in collaboration with Alejandro Berroa (my husband, linguist, and Cuban native), someone equally passionate about conducting long-form oral history work in Cuba, and the narrators with whom we work.

Like Voices of Centro Humanitario, our layered endeavor is essentially a Memory Project that blends writing with audio and visual elements. Sarahy Plazola, Centro Humanitario’s visual artist, asserts that visual imagery can bring voices to life and help to give an identity to a narrator. I couldn’t agree more. Rooted in collaboration, reciprocity, and shared authority, our work shares the stories and memories of the Bocourts, a rural-Cuban coffee-farmer family through curated oral histories that integrate interview transcripts and audio recordings, documentary photography, video, scanned archival imagery, collaboratively-constructed family genealogies, illustrations, and more, within the historical and cultural context of Cuba.

To date, more than 50 Bocourt family members, across three generations, invite us to visit their homes, farms, and sacred spaces to share their lives and memories of the family’s patriarch – El Moro – father, grandfather, uncle, friend. Born in Los Tumbos, Cuba in 1930, José Bocourt Errasti (El Moro) married Juana Bocourt Echeverría when he was just 16 years old. Together they had eight children: Tomasa, Carlito, Lorenzo, Aurora, Catalina, Perfecto, Juanito, and Beni. 

El Moro passed away in 2018 following a long battle with dementia. The descendants of El Moro, and their families, are the narrators of this ongoing project. Sometimes their memories align. Sometimes they don’t. But, collectively, what they remember distills down to the essence of El Moro – a strong-willed man – steadfast, hell-bent on discipline, a pillar of family unity, and lover of rum, tobacco and coffee. A man committed to his land. A man committed to his country.

Oral history libraries and academic programs outside of Cuba have broadly recorded the experiences of those who left Cuba after the 1959 Cuban revolution and those of Cuban ancestry who were born in exile. But fewer scholars and documentarians are recording the lives of Cubans actually living in Cuba. I believe it is imperative to document and preserve the stories, experiences, and environments of this generation before it is too late, and equally important to garner the stories of the generations that succeed them. 

Broadly, by coupling these stories collected in Cuba with those oral histories recorded outside of Cuba, we can begin to understand a bigger historical context of the Cuban people and its diaspora, who continue to live on the fringe, with emphasis on the socio-political and economic circumstances that have shaped and defined their lives. I further hope it can generate a narrative that bridges a gap and helps draw the many isolated communities that identify as Cuban together to engage in a more meaningful way. This work is one small beginning of that effort.

As part of our curating oral histories practice, in preparation for my upcoming OHMA thesis work, we chose to share the multi-media oral histories of this project as part of a 360° experience. Through this portal, we share the world of the Bocourts – past and present – as they paint a picture of life in Cuba, family stories, and their vital connection to land, place, and home. You can listen to them talk about coffee – the foundation of their livelihood – the impact of Covid-19, and how it compares to the most trying times of the Special Period.  They laugh. They cry. They sing and shout. They invite us into their world – a true Cuban welcoming – complete with coffee and rum, a roasted pig, stories of the past, and hopes for the future.

One of the most challenging aspects of this work, aside from the inherent difficulties that come along with working in Cuba was our need to curate this work for a broader audience. Long-format oral history work is characteristically time- and cost-intensive. The added layer of translation on top of indexing and transcription was laborious and costly, yet worth it, because it not only allows for narrators’ stories to be more accessible to a broader population, but also preserves the integrity of the voices of the narrators. One of the primary ways we achieved this was through video. Video allowed us to utilize images and/or simple waveforms, coupled with subtitles, to reach both Spanish and English speakers. Like the work of History Colorado and Centro Humanitario, our work in Cuba was only possible because of collaboration – a shared authority with narrators, partners, and local institutions.

Maria’s presentation and the work of Centro Humanitario evoked a series of questions and affirmations that continue to influence our work. Even though our roots in the Sierra del Rosario mountains run deep, we must always remember to ask: “how can we listen in a new way?” Although there is a familial trust with the narrators of this project that spans almost two decades, we must always interrogate the silences between the conversation to hear differently what the community’s needs and interests might be. How can we better understand their embodied experiences and how those experiences contribute to the family’s collective memory? And we should never forget that we can always scrutinize our interviewer-narrator relationality as a means of investigating more meaningful opportunities for reciprocal connection. 

Like Centro Humanitario’s mission, the work we are doing in Cuba doesn’t end here. Our intention is to continue building out this project in the hopes of generating a larger community archive one day. There are endless stories to be told, memories to be shared, and many ways we learn from and inspire one another – across borders, despite political boundaries – history in the making.

Vanessa K. Harper (she/her) has lived and worked in Cuba as a researcher, film producer, documentary photographer, and facilitator of collaborative agreements between U.S. and Cuban institutions since 2005. She is the founder of Support the Cuban People, a charitable organization whose activities directly support Cubans living in Cuba through programming that spans humanitarian need, art and culture, and scholarship funds for established and emerging entrepreneurs. She is a graduate student from the 2021 OHMA cohort focused on incorporating the oral history practice into her long-form documentary work on the island.