Merri Ansara

Merri Ansara

Merriam Stearns Ansara is a Cambridge Massachusetts travel business owner. She was a founding member of Committees of Correspondence, long-time advocate for normalizing relations with Cuba, and part-time resident of Havana.

Education

Merri Ansara has a master’s degree in Public Administration and Regional Planning and is a former college Academic Advisor.

First Venceremos Brigade

In 1969 Merriam Stearns Ansara age 25, from Provincetown Massachusetts , was a member of the first Venceremos Brigade to Cuba.

Communist Party reformer

In 1991 Merri Ansara, Massachusetts was one of several hundred Communist Party USA members to sign the a paper "An initiative to Unite and Renew the Party"-most signatories left the Party after the December 1991 conference to found Committees of Correspondence.

Community Planning in Cuba

In the early 2000s Merri Ansara and Mel King were involved in "community planning" in Cuba according to an October 2003 Havana Journal article by Marie Kennedy, Lorna Rivera and Chris Tilly;

Every socialist country has had to manage a set of tensions surrounding popular participation: How to balance local initiative with a set of national priorities? How to reconcile goals of equality with opportunities for communities to shape their own development? How to facilitate widespread participation without opening the door for internal and external foes of the revolution? Cuba, along with the other countries of the former Soviet bloc, resolved these tensions by leaning toward centralization and top-down planning. But over time, Cuba has incorporated more decentralization, consultation with ever larger numbers of people and channels for bottom-up influence...

Mass organizations such as the network of neighborhood-based Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) and the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) also operate in a top-down manner, primarily mobilizing people for campaigns in order to carry out centrally determined objectives. Rarely have these organizations employed methods to empower their membership to craft the program of action...

At the beginning of the “Special Period” (as the period of economic crisis from 1989 through the 1990s was termed), Popular Power was augmented by the establishment of neighborhood-based and elected Popular Councils. These councils are made up of volunteer delegates elected in each neighborhood and representatives of the main economic, social and service institutions, such as the CDRs and the FMC. These neighborhood-based councils support the work of their delegate to the Municipal Council, working closely with residents to identify and advocate for local issues. In 1992, constitutional reforms also established a more direct electoral system for the National Assembly, although candidates for the Assembly are still nominated through a process largely controlled by the Cuban Communist Party.

A major campaign to develop effective participatory community planning methods was launched. Marie, along with planner/activists Merri Ansara and Mel King, facilitated an early two-week seminar with about forty staff members from the twelve workshops operating in 1993. They found that the main barriers to participatory planning were essentially two sides of the same coin: residents expected to have their needs met on the basis of decisions made by experts and professionals who were educated to fix problems for people...

Because of the basic values of Cuba’s socialist political culture (social justice, equality, freedom), many of the workshops (of which there are now twenty) have far outstripped similar efforts in the U.S. to put decision-making power in the hands of those most affected by the problems being addressed. For example, the work with women and youth in Atares could provide a model for even the most progressive of U.S. community-based organizations.

Cuba travel company

Merri Ansara is director and founder of Common Ground Education & Travel Services. She traveled and worked in Cuba beginning in 1969 as a journalist, translator, urban planner and teacher. Merri is responsible for program development and planning at Common Ground.

Common Ground Education & Travel Services in Cambridge Massaachusetts, is an agency that helps organize trips to Cuba.

Ansara, who identifies herself as Lebanese-American, has credentials that allow her to bypass U.S. travel restrictions, which require a special license for American citizens going to Cuba. Among other categories, only people visiting an immediate relative -- cousins, for instance, don't count -- may obtain a license, and only once every three years for a maximum of 14 days each trip.

Ansara's agency helps Cuban-Americans acquire the necessary documentation for travel. She said she's visited the island nation ``multiple times per year since 1969" and has hundreds of Cuban friends.