Arts & Culture
When Cambridge was a ‘tiny Cuba’

Cuban educators photographed in front of Memorial Hall.

Courtesy of Harvard University Archives

Christy DeSmith

Harvard Staff Writer

January 5, 2026 5 min read

125 years ago, a Harvard expedition drew 1,200 Cuban educators to class

In the summer of 1900, the rhythms of campus were transformed as more than 1,200 Cuban educators arrived for a six-week summer school.

“Everywhere there were scores of strange faces — men chatting in groups and smoking black, tobacco-covered cigarettes; women walking to and fro from their recitations, conversing rapidly in Spanish, and innumerable Cubans drinking at the college pump,” recalled a College alumnus who signed on as an English instructor that summer.

“So many were here,” he continued in his essay for a campus publication, “that one of the teachers themselves said: ‘Cambridge es Cuba chiquita.’ Cambridge is a tiny Cuba.”

An exhibition at Pusey Library, on view through Jan. 15, revisits this remarkable convergence with photos, letters, and other rich materials. At a recent panel discussion, hosted by the Harvard University Archives, historians detailed how the Cuban Teachers’ Expedition challenged orthodoxy on both sides of the exchange regarding matters of race, gender, and national pride.

The teachers, men and women ages 16 to 60, traveled to Massachusetts via U.S. Army warship and mugged for a group photo before Memorial Hall. Organized by Harvard in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War as the devastated island was occupied by U.S. forces, the expedition was meant to introduce Cuban teachers to the emerging superpower’s educational practices and cultural values.

“Today we could call this a soft-power initiative — a term that didn’t exist back then,” said moderator Erin Goodman, executive director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, co-sponsor of the panel.

Lillian Guerra, a professor of Cuban and Caribbean History at the University of Florida, fleshed out the expedition’s backstory and central characters, the subject of a 2017 documentary film. At the heart of her presentation was 1890 Harvard Law School graduate Alexis Everett Frye, installed by the island’s U.S. military governor as superintendent of Cuban public schools.

The teachers kicked off their visit with a Fourth of July celebration on Cambridge Common. A Cuban flag was hoisted alongside the Stars and Stripes.

Courtesy of Harvard University Archives

Frye, who had also earned a Harvard master’s degree in 1897, planned the summer school in partnership with University President Charles W. Eliot. In the summer of 1900, Frye was well on his way to revolutionizing the island’s educational system. By the time his teachers arrived in Cambridge, Cuban parents were enrolling their school-age children at a pace of 2,000 per day.

“Those people were simply thirsty for education and to afford their children this advantage,” Frye told the Boston Herald. “The Cuban parents are making sacrifices that would put some of us Americans to shame.”

As for the teachers, Guerra said, they seized upon the trip as a public relations opportunity. United in their opposition to annexation of their island by the U.S., the teachers kicked off their visit with a Fourth of July celebration on Cambridge Common. A Cuban flag was hoisted alongside the Stars and Stripes. According to news reports, passersby picked up the strains of a patriotic Cuban song.

“The fact that singing the Cuban national anthem and displaying the Cuban flag were illegal under the U.S. occupation of Cuba was not lost on readers of the Cuban press, which received and then proudly recorded all of these participants’ letters to editors and gave multiple live-action photographs,” Guerra said.

The multiracial delegation, representing Frye’s integrated schools, was hosted and welcomed by the Harvard community at a time when prominent U.S. scientists embraced racist claims of Black inferiority, explained Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics.

Alejandro de la Fuente.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Cuba, in particular, was pathologized due to its mixed-race population. Meanwhile, de la Fuente continued, a white supremacist political order was forming on the island.

“If you keep that context in mind, this moment becomes even more surprising, even more interesting,” offered de la Fuente, who is also a professor of African and African American Studies and of History. “It’s not only that these 1,200 people came from Cuba … It is also that many of them were visibly of African descent.”

In 1900, Massachusetts was a center of feminist activism, noted Cuban historian Marial Iglesias Utset, a visiting scholar at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, another panel co-sponsor. (The event also received support from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.)

Not only did the Cubans rub elbows with several Radcliffe College graduates that summer, the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs organized a meeting with the delegation’s 675 female teachers.

“The whole idea is that they should get familiar with the idea of a women’s club,” Iglesias Utset said.

For the next several decades, a constellation of teachers who participated in the summer school, including the U.S.-educated Julia Martínez — known as the “Jane Addams of Cuba”— remained active in what Iglesias Utset called “a pan-American network of women’s associations.”

In 1909, they co-founded a women’s club in Havana, the first in Cuba. They kept up correspondence with Alice Paul and other prominent suffragists in the states. Martínez even traveled to Chicago to represent the local club at an international convention.

She lived long enough, Iglesias Utset noted, to see Cuban women win the right to vote in 1934.