OTTAWA — After years of studying Canada-Cuban relations as a graduate student, Freddy Monasterio is going to get a new lesson this week.
The 33-year-old will be one of several people invited to a Canadian-organized reception in old Havana to coincide with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's first official visit to Cuba.
Trudeau is scheduled to arrive in Havana this evening.
He will meet Cuban President Raul Castro and attend a state dinner marking the first visit of a Canadian prime minister since 1998.
The visit, Monasterio says, will put a face and concrete examples to abstract relations that academics talk about.
For Monasterio and others, the visit merges soft diplomacy through cultural and student exchanges with state diplomacy.
"It's in the people-to-people world ... where Canadian-Cuban relationships are the most significant," said Karen Dubinsky, who teaches in a joint Queen's University-University of Havana course that brings Cuban students to Canada and sends Canadian students to Cuba.
"Cuba is good at that, at using soft diplomacy, and I think what I've learned from our experiences working with Cuba is they only want to do more of that."
Statistics Canada says about 1.3 million Canadian tourists visited Cuba in 2015.
Cuba's national statistics office reported last month that of the 2.1 million tourists during the first half of the year, more than 777,000 — just over a third — were from Canada. That put Canada at the top of the visitors' list, with the United States sitting in third with 187,073 travellers.
The Terry Fox Run in Cuba is the largest held outside of Canada.
That soft diplomacy may become even more important in the wake of Donald Trump's election in the United States. The president-elect is demanding Cuba release political dissidents and agree to multi-party elections as requirements before he could agree to continue the thaw in relations that started under Barack Obama.
Canada hosted the secret meetings that led up to the December 2014 announcement that renewed Cuba-U.S. relations for the first time since 1961.
Those relations have now become chilly with Trump's tough talk about rolling back Obama's work and ending the rapprochement. The Cuban military begins five days of exercises on Wednesday, the same day Trudeau is scheduled to speak to students at the University of Havana, where Monasterio studies.
Monasterio says that the excitement of the 2014 announcement of renewed ties with the United States has started to fade. The prime minister's visit could make Canada an alternative for Cuban leery about the style of capitalism the United States wants to export, he says.
"Usually when people talk about different ways for Cuba to get out of a crisis and open up a little bit, people immediately associate the U.S. as the logical, and only alternative," Monasterio says.
"We want to show that there are other alternatives and Canada for me is one of them."
