In 2001, she and several Yale African-American studies students – most Black like herself – created a refuge in The Black Resistance Reading Group. The next year, the group went to Cuba.

For  a week, the group of nine, armed with video-cameras, left the predominantly White confines of New Haven, Ct., for the island nation that is 62 percent Black and Mulatto. The result is a documentary: “Beautiful Me(s): Finding our Revolutionary Selves in Black Cuba.”  

Hayes, the director and now an assistant professor of ethnic studies and political science at Santa Clara University, will screen the film Feb. 19 at The Community Folks Arts Center in Syracuse, NY. (See the trailer.)

The film mingles interviews of the students with whatever Cuba footage the non-professional videographers could salvage. It’s more about the group’s reaction to Cuba than Cuba itself.

“I think that, from the beginning, our objective was to document our experience,” Hayes said in an interview.

“Being scholars, we’re definitely sensitive to the fact that not having a background in Latin-American studies or Cuban studies and being there a week doesn’t put us in a position of being able to expose Afro-Cuban life. It was, ‘Let’s think about what these kinds of encounters in places that are struggling with issues we are struggling with can teach us.’”

Struggles with race were a central theme.

“We were all in some kind of odd way feeling alienated for similar reasons,” one of the travelers, Dalton Jones, says in the film. He now teaches at Ohio’s Bowling Green University.

Besenia Rodríguez, now an administrator at Pepperdine University, is Dominican-American.

“The one difference about Cuba in terms of issues of race is that people not of obviously African descent could talk about being of African descent because they’re in a mixed-race country,” Rodríguez says in the documentary. “There’s a kind of openness among non-Black people…to talk about race, about Africa…that there isn’t in the United States, that gives me a sense of hope.”