“In the streets of Havana, I was able to feel that something was changing so rapidly,” says composer Hiroya Miura, who was a featured guest at a music festival in Cuba in November.

Against the long-advertised backdrop of totalitarian rule, cultural suppression, and economic deprivation, Miura also found a lively arts scene, a musical community hungry for fresh ideas — and, he says, a surprising optimism. The Cubans he met, he says, “seem so positive. They always have a way of spinning everything in a positive light.”

Hiroya Miura, associate professor of music st ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, is shown in his Olin Arts Center office shortly before he attended a contemporary-music festival in Cuba. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

It was a momentous time to visit the island. Miura flew to Havana just five days after the November elections that cast doubt upon, among other things, the thaw in U.S.–Cuban relations that President Barack Obama helped bring about.

“Then six days after I came back,” Miura says, “Fidel Castro died.”

The occasion for Miura’s visit was the 29th annual Festival de Música Contemporánea de La Habana (Havana Contemporary Music Festival). He was one of four U.S.-based composers invited to the nine-day event as part of an artist delegation representing the American Composers Forum, an advocacy organization. It was just the second year that the ACF participated.

Also in the delegation was the New York City quintet Third Sound, which performed a concert of music by the four composers — Lembit Beecher, Pierre Lambert, and Wang Lu, in addition to Miura, who is an associate professor of music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and conductor of the college orchestra.

A street vendor in Havana. (Hiroya Miura)

The festival was a performance tour de force, with dozens of musicians offering two, sometimes three, concerts a day. Also on the program were panels, including one in which the ACF composers and two other musical groups from the U.S. advised young Cuban musicians on making things happen.

“Castro had very strict cultural policies, and for Cubans, contemporary music kind of stops around 1960–65,” Miura says. “So they are very eager to learn.

“I brought my CDs and scores, and you could really see their eyes light up, seeing these new pieces by living composers from here. During one of the workshops, we heard a demonstration by a new improvisation ensemble of young Cuban composers, and their sincerity for the exploration of new sound was quite moving.â€�

Hiroya Miura consults with Third Sound pianist Orion Weiss as four members of the ensemble rehearse Miura’s “Open Passage” in Havana. Also shown are flutist Sooyun Kim and cellist Michael Nicolas; out of the frame is violinist Adda Kridler. (Courtesy of Hiroya Miura)

The Miura work that Third Sound played at the festival’s Nov. 18 ACF concert was “ — In memoriam Andrew Svoboda.” Written in 2005 for alto flute, violin, cello, and piano, the piece is a tribute to a lost friend.

“He was a very young talented composer, and he just died all of a sudden of cardiac arrest at the age of 26,” says Miura. “It was a very emotional piece for me.

“Considering that writing and hearing the piece was a way of remembering my friend, and his father was a political dissident from communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, hearing the piece 10 years later in Havana felt strangely fitting.”

Miura adds, “My friend’s last name, Svoboda, means ‘freedom’ in Czech.â€�

From left: Patrick Castillo, composer and director of Third Sound; composers Wang Lu, Pierre Jalbert, Hiroya Miura, Tania León, and Lembit Beecher; International Contemporary Ensemble representatives Alice Teyssier and Ryan Muncy. León performed in her native Cuba for the first time in nearly 50 years at the festival. (Courtesy of Hiroya Miura)

A high point of Miura’s visit was the Fábrica de Arte Cubano — the Cuban Art Factory. Installed in a former power plant and olive oil factory, the F.A.C. is a sort of one-stop shop for hip-and-cool culture — music, dance, art, and more.

“It’s extremely vibrant, there are lots of young people, they stay open until like 3 in the morning, and they have live music playing throughout the night,” he explains.

“On multiple levels of galleries, dance floors, and bars, I was amazed by the people’s energy and free-spiritedness. These alternative and independent art and music scenes seemed to be starting as a hybrid between a state-run facility and private business in Havana — which is an incredible development considering the strict policies the government used to have.”

President Obama is prominent in a display of posters for sale. (Hiroya Miura)

For Miura, some of the visual art that he saw offers an analogy for his admittedly brief exposure to social and cultural Havana. “You have a kind of 1920s communist futuristic design, on top of ’60s–’70s pop art, on top of Takashi Murakami,” the contemporary artist known for bringing Japanese “low culture” into high art.

“Everything is happening at the same time because the country has just opened up,” says the composer. New layers of cultural influence are accreting over the old ones fast, as if making up for lost time.

“It’s almost like an onion: You peel one layer and then there is something surprising that comes up. It’s not just a time capsule, but it’s like weird twists of time and space.”

Barack Obama’s outreach to the island after decades of political stalemate is still reverberating in the streets of Havana. “People are definitely excited about this,” says Miura (who was repeatedly asked by residents whether he voted for Donald Trump. But, living in the U.S. on a green card, this Japanese citizen can’t vote here.)

“It was clear that Obama was so loved by Cubans for opening up the relationship.”

He adds, “One thing that’s for sure, when I spoke with some Cubans there, is that they don’t know what kind of change is coming” post-Fidel. While the current leader, Raul Castro, is more open to a market economy, what that will look like going forward — “nobody seems to really know.”

“I’m really curious to see how Cuba is going to go culturally and politically,” Miura says. Hopefully accompanied by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students, he adds, “I would love to go back to witness that change.”

An analyst from the National Security Archive and scholars from Duke and New York universities take part in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College symposium Latin American Revolutions in afternoon and evening sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, March 9 and 10.

Hosted by the Latin American studies faculty, with support from the Mellon Innovation Fund, the symposium is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Sibylle Fischer, associate professor and chair of the Spanish and Portuguese department at New York University, offers the lecture Haiti and the Revolutions in Spanish America at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Room 204, Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

At 7:30 p.m. that day, Jocelyn Olcott, associate professor of history at Duke University, gives a talk titled Soldiers, Suffragists and Sex Radicals: Women, Gender and the Mexican Revolution, also in Carnegie 204.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive who directs the archive’s Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects, presents the lecture The Cuban Revolution: 50 Years of Bedeviling U.S. Foreign Policy at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, March 10, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Concluding the symposium is a roundtable discussion with the three guest speakers on the theme Latin America’s Many Revolutions at 7:30 p.m. that day, also in the Keck Classroom.

Fischer’s scholarship covers, among other areas, Caribbean and Latin American literatures in Spanish, Portuguese and French; 19th-century culture and politics; the intersections of literature, dictatorship and philosophy; and the Black Atlantic.

Olcott researches the feminist history of modern Mexico. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Duke University Press, 2005) explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. She is also a co-editor of “Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico” (Duke University Press, 2006).

Olcott is working on two book-length projects: a history of the 1975 UN International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, under contract with Oxford University Press; and a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel. She is also developing a long-term project on the labor, political and conceptual history of motherhood in 20th-century Mexico.

The National Security Archive is an independent, nongovernmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University. Kornbluh was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project and director of the archive’s project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. Through the 1990s, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs.

He is the author, editor or co-editor of several National Security Archive books, including Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (The New Press, 1998) and The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New Press, 2004), which the Los Angeles Times selected as a “best book of the year.”

Kornbluh’s articles have been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many other journals and newspapers. He has appeared on national broadcasts including 60 Minutes, The Charlie Rose Show, Nightline, All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has also worked on and appeared in numerous documentary films, including the Oscar-winning Panama Deception.

Among other topics, Gomez’s talk will focus on Cuba’s place in the consciousness of Latin America and the effect of the U.S. embargo on Cubans’ daily lives.

At the age of 13, Gomez emigrated with his family from Cuba in 1960, one year after the victory of the revolution. Since then he has lived in Miami, returning many times to Cuba and traveling often throughout Latin America. Prominent in the movement for open discussion in the Cuban-American community, Gomez has often contested prevailing views in the Florida Cuban-American community. He has played a significant role in helping to shift opinion within that community on U.S. policy toward Cuba. For many years he edited the journal Arieto.

For more information, contact 207-786-6131 or 207-743-2183.

“Rié Payaso” (“Laughing Clown”), a 1994 acrylic painting on canvas by Manuel López Oliva.

The opening reception for Manuel López Oliva: Cuba and the Theatre of Desire, the first solo U.S. exhibition by one of Cuba’s most famous and accomplished artists, takes place from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5, at the Museum of Art, located in the college’s Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

The reception includes a lecture by exhibition organizer Lillian Guerra, assistant professor of history at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Her talk is titled Manuel López Oliva and the Special Period in Cuba — referring to Cuba’s tumultuous times during the so-called “Special Period,” the era since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the island nation’s protector and economic mainstay. Guerra also gives gallery talks at 1 p.m. Sept. 6, and 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Sept. 20.

Marilyn Zeitlin, director and chief curator of the Arizona State University Art Museum, gives a lecture titled News from the Tropical Paradise: Cuban Art Now at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 19. The exhibit runs through Oct. 5. The public is invited free of charge to visit the museum.

Dreamlike, even whimsical, López Oliva’s paintings create a world of settings taken from history and literature and peopled by masked, theatrical figures. “The relationship between theater and the act of living is very direct,” the artist told Guerra in 2002.

“Aside from being actors who take on different characters, sometimes merely for effect, sometimes out of desire — the desire for self-expression, for power, for love, for truth — we are also actors in the circumstances of history,” he said.

Paintings by López Oliva are in the permanent collections of museums in Paris, Madrid, Venice and other major cities. Born in 1947 in the port city of Manzanillo and raised amidst an intellectual circle sympathetic to Castro’s revolution, he is not only an artist but a principled writer, critic and champion of the arts with sufficient stature to take stands that sometimes conflict with official policy.

López Oliva is distinguished among Cuban artists particularly by his use of literary and classical allusions, and the mask motif in his paintings is likewise distinctive. At the same time, though, the masks tie him to a movement to fuse visual and theatrical arts that has arisen in response to the dislocations of the Special Period.

At home, Guerra notes, his work is seen as reflecting the reality of Cuban life today — fantastic, self-contradictory, multilayered. “There’s a surreal quality to life in Cuba” since the early 1990s, she says, during which time this avowed atheist, communist state has welcomed the Pope and embraced capitalist economic practices.

“All of a sudden, these things that nobody ever thought were possible have become possible, and it is almost as if you’re living Carnival all of the time,” she says, referring to the Latin American style of celebrating that pre-Lenten holiday with wild festivity, costumes and masks, and exploding “prizes” that can be very nice or quite unpleasant. “You never know what’s going to happen. You never know what’s real.”

Moreover, López Oliva uses the masks as “a symbol of our own conviction that we know who we are, and we are projecting that all the time,” says Guerra. “Behind our projection is something else.”

Guerra, who has known the artist since 1996, worked with the Museum of Art to bring the show to Maine in part because of its value to her course exploring revolution in the Caribbean and Central America. Yet his work, she says, transcends politics or purely Cuban concerns to speak of myth, morality, the charged connections between sex and power, and the search for truth.

“So much of this work is like a window into the soul,” Guerra says. “It’s not just his soul, but it’s the soul of Cubans, and it’s the soul of Americans, and it’s the soul of whoever really takes the time to look.”

One of seven institutions on the , the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art has significant holdings of work by major artists from Maine and elsewhere and is particularly noted for its collection of pieces by Lewiston native Marsden Hartley. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sundays. School groups and other tours are welcome. To schedule, please call 207-786-8302; for information, please call 207-786-6158.

Vocalist Bellita will join Miranda and Alexánder Nápoles for jazz stylings on the piano, bass and conga.

Boza and her parents left Cuba for Miami in 1960, when she was 8 years old, after the Havana newspaper where her father was a senior editor was closed by the Castro government. Scattering the Ashes, (Bilingual Press, Arizona State University, 1998) the product of what Boza calls her quest to understand the reasons for her father’s suicide, is a book about Cuba and the power of history and politics over Cubans’ daily lives.

He “loved Cuba above all other things, animate or inanimate, real or imagined, remembered or forgotten,” wrote Boza of her father, Ramiro Boza, an ardent anti-Communist, who, discouraged, ill and depressed, shot himself in 1989.

As Boza watched aging, misunderstood Cuban exiles parade past the coffin at her father’s Miami wake, she became committed to exploring the reasons behind their single-minded devotion to Cuba, their restlessness even in a comfortable land of safety and their bitterness about their fate at the hands of both Castro’s government and U.S. administrations.

“This father-haunted Cuban memoir is absolutely mesmerizing,” wrote Howard Norman, author of the acclaimed novels The Bird Artist and The Museum Guard. “Scattering the Ashes immediately enters the most rarified, intimate room of posterity. Boza’s writing has unmitigated integrity, beauty, courage and passion.”

A Lewiston resident, Boza co-edited the anthology Nosotras: Latina Literature Today and wrote Questions from a Foreigner, which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Boza, a tutor in the Writing Workshop at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Barnard College and received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is a member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

Boza’s talk is part of the semester-long Readings with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Authors series.

The Havana-based MEZCLA has played for audiences worldwide, fusing Cuba’s diverse African, Spanish and Carribean origins. The ensemble’s sound features a hybrid of Afro-Cuban rhythms mixed with jazz and reggae.

The performance is presented by Solidaridad Latina at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.