Cuban Higher Education Reform: a Policy Ethnography

Higher education (HE) is one of the flagships of the Cuban Revolution. Research on Cuban HE policies focuses on the desired outcomes within policy documents.

Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies analysing how stakeholders implement those policies on the ground by translating policy documents into practices and relationships; or how policy documents shape universities, organisational cultures, people's identities and power relationships.

Therefore, it is timely to describe how Cuba’s centralised HE policy documents are translated on the ground at the University of Holguin from 2000 onwards.

Just in 2000, the so-called Third Educational Revolution began in Cuba, bringing far-reaching transformations within higher education to date. It is a large-scale process of changes ethnographically unexplored.

By undertaking both the anthropology of policy and anthropology of education approaches, CHERPE draws the following objective: to describe how university actors translate the Cuban HE policy documents on the ground into relationships, powers, actions, new organisational structures, individual or collective strategies and new identities.

The University of Holguin in Cuba will be a case study.

Coming from the anthropology of policy approach, ‘studying through’ is a sound strategy to study processes of political transformations through space and time in which I will combine documentary analysis, interview, focus group and participant observation.

By using these interdisciplinary methods, I will bring a pioneering ethnographic methodology to the Cuban context that will advance both the fields of policy studies and anthropology.

The fellowship will furnish me with expertise in policy and HE studies and will drive my publication record, allowing me to apply for a better academic position. I will further the Cuban HE policy field and the anthropological approaches that CHERPE addressed.