In January 2006, I was the first U.S. artist to participate in the annual small format theatre festival sponsored by the Cuban government at El Mejunje in Sta. Clara Cuba. The set-up for the performance was that Miss-Translation was the only contestant in the 2006 Miss-Representations of the USA Beauty Pageant, held in Cuba. She participated in three categories: the swimsuit competition (her one-piece vintage leopard swimsuit ironizing the extended U.S.

For the last couple of years I have conducted research in Cuba on a range of contemporary performance forms. This work has emerged from a related project that unpacks the meanings that Cuba and Haiti have acquired in the US national imaginary: from their strategic position as the first sites of US imperialism in the Caribbean, and their crucial role in the imaginative restructuring of race and national identity in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, to their marked vilification and erasure today through contemporary US political strategy and foreign policy.