Unlike most tourists to El Morro fortress overlooking Havana harbor, our class did not confine our exploration of its history to the Spanish colonial era when it was a built. Instead, we discussed how its walls had been witnesses to multiple regimes of violence and terror, not only that of slavery, but the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925-1933). During the final years of Machado’s rule, his security agents famously threw the bodies of beaten and tortured activists and critics from the tower of El Morro to be eaten by sharks in the waters below. To the dismay of local guides, our group also set out on its own, vainly searching at the adjacent La Cabaña complex for markers of the hundreds of Cubans jailed and executed, especially between 1961 and 1965 when the repression of opponents, conspirators and armed opponents of Fidel Castro’s authoritarian (and eventually Communist) regime reached its height. Not surprisingly, once Cuba itself became our classroom, much of the knowledge we had gained prior to our arrival acquired new weight and far deeper meaning. The photographs we took together told only a tiny fraction of our story. Havana, 2014
