Higher Education (HE) reforms and practices have not been studied ethnographically in the Cuban context.  How do Cuba’s centralised policies try to reform higher education and how are they translated into practices on the ground? How do university actors enact higher education policies and are there local practices that contest those policies? Such questions help drive CHERPE forward as a Marie Curie postdoctoral-funded project (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01 / GA ID: 101109918).

Higher education is one of the flagships of the Cuban Revolution. Research on Cuban higher education policies focuses on the desired outcomes within policy documents. 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. However, since 2001 Cuban higher education has undergone reforms that universalised access (2001-2010) after a period of elitism (1990-2001), then implemented new access restrictions to align with the country's latest economic policies. Between 2012 and 2016, was implemented in Cuba the major organisational reconfiguration called university integration through which various institutions were merged into a single university at the provincial level. Finally, over the last few years, universities have faced the societal effects of the prolonged country economic crisis and the migration wave that have changed the priorities of young people between studying, working, and leaving the country and led to the university staff (including teachers) to take up a second job. Therefore, by taking the University of Holguin as a case study, it is timely to describe how university actors translate the Cuban higher education policy documents on the ground into relationships, new forms of power, actions, organisational structures, individual or collective strategies and new identities. 

This study takes an anthropology of policy perspective and uses interdisciplinary research methods to approach Cuban higher education. It includes ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba to describe policies from a grounded view.  Furthermore, it is an opportunity to extend The Centre for Higher Education Future’s (CHEF’s) networks into Latin America.