“Now you put the soul and the design into it,” said Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, First Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and President of the Republic, as he forecasted that the higher learning center would become both beautiful and functional. He made the remark Thursday morning to Dr. Sergio Luis Peña Martínez, dean of the institute, while entering the facility where, as the professor explained, they have undertaken “a colossal effort” to secure a proper school for Cuba’s future designers.

While touring the Art Deco-style building in the Havana municipality of Playa, near the seafront, the president also suggested that it would be beneficial to involve recent ISDi graduates in adding cultural and finishing touches to the space, which, starting this new academic term, will become the cradle for new generations of designers.

“I am very pleased,” Díaz-Canel said at the end of the visit, during which he was accompanied by Vice Prime Minister Eduardo Martínez Díaz and University of Havana Rector Miriam Nicado García, among other officials. The strong embrace the Cuban president gave Dean Peña upon departure conveyed the optimism born from what had been seen: light, architectural solidity, open spaces, multi-use areas where design enthusiasts will realize many projects.

After the visit, Dean Peña spoke with the Presidency’s press team. He told reporters: “The University of Design is going to have a new home, a completely rejuvenated, renewed space. In this difficult period, resources, efforts, and willpower have appeared so that the School of Design finally has its own space.”

The professor expressed his view that the facility “gains in coherence, quality, and design,” and emphasized that “it is a project we are truly pushing forward with great affection and great intention.” He also shared a thought-provoking truth: “One cannot learn to make beautiful and useful things in a space that is not beautiful, that does not have as its philosophy, as its approach, the conception of being a well-conceived space.”

The dean made explicit the motivation behind the hard work on the building: “What we are trying to do here is so that design students—and all of Cuba—have a School of Design as they deserve, as design deserves.” The work, he explained, has been carried out by various contractor groups, primarily managed by a Ministry of Construction enterprise that has coordinated different brigades.

Although the construction—particularly the finishing—has not yet reached its goal, the dean told reporters: “We think that by the start of the academic year we will already have a level of in-person attendance here.” He noted that some classrooms could open in September, with capacities gradually expanding to include “laboratories, theaters, and the rest of the areas that complement the space’s functions.”

Peña is convinced that “what gives life to a university is its students.” He therefore spoke of involving those young people so that “they participate in the recovery, in the construction, and in making this what a School of Design should be.” He also affirmed that the institution’s faculty—which will serve some 500 students across four academic years—faces a significant task ahead.

The Challenge of Reinvention and Competitiveness

“Now you must take advantage of all the faculties granted to enterprises,” President Díaz-Canel urged the executives and creators of CETA S.A. (the Science and Technology Interface Society of the José Antonio Echeverría Technological University of Havana), the second stop on his Thursday morning tour in the Playa municipality.

The enterprise’s president, Danae Pigueiras Otero, detailed its many potentials to the head of state, who—accompanied by Vice Prime Minister Martínez Díaz and other leaders—exchanged reflections on the company, whose raison d’être is to serve as a bridge between the productive and services sectors and the world of knowledge.

In conversation with journalists, Pigueiras specified that this connection seeks “to transfer the results of science and innovation generated in the country’s universities to the productive and service sectors,” and to achieve “contribution to the country’s economic and social development, while also transferring back to the University all the needs that the productive sector currently has.”

CETA S.A. was established on August 5, 2020. “I believe that at this moment,” its president assessed, “the company has achieved significant consolidation and has obtained results both in engineering and architecture, and in internationalization and exports.”

“And today we are immersed in this process related to all the economic transformations taking place throughout Cuba, in which we must also participate—not only as objects of the transformations, because we are an enterprise, but also through the contribution that universities and this type of enterprise can make to the rest of the productive sector in applying those transformations, so that they can be effective, so that they can truly benefit an enterprise.”

Among CETA S.A.’s work priorities, Pigueiras mentioned export activity: “That is something we have as one of the fundamental elements of our company. I believe it is one of the things the country most needs, and we are working very intentionally on that.”

During the president’s visit, Pigueiras spoke about alliances. Later, with reporters, she returned to that premise: “Almost all provinces and universities already have their interface societies. So that is our first alliance network. We have the Chamber of Commerce of the Republic of Cuba, which for enterprises naturally plays a fundamental role. And we have the universities. Universities are our reason for being.”

In another moment of the press dialogue, the executive emphasized another definition: “We have our own capabilities and have developed them through management.” In her view, the main values lie in “managing efficiently” and in “articulating science in solving enterprises’ problems.”

Referring to the horizon of opportunities arising from Cuba’s proposed economic and social transformations, the executive shared her perception that, among other advantages, it is important to distinguish within those changes the opportunity to “bring those transformations to the productive and service sectors, and for those sectors to see us as an ally in applying those changes.”