Jose Roca-Leon MBA ’25 didn’t spend his winter break on the beach, on campus, or in his home country of Guatemala. He was in Cuba with other USC Marshall students, as a member of USC Marshall’s ExCEL program (International Experiential Corporate Learning).
Roca-Leon and 36 classmates traveled to the island country, accompanied by Carl Voigt, academic director for international business education and research, and Sean O’Connell, director of undergraduate international programs.
ExCEL is an immersive 10-day program, in which participants meet with national leaders and industry insiders while developing an appreciation and understanding for the economic realities and cultural differences of the country. In the past, ExCEL has journeyed to Barcelona, Spain, Milan and Florence, Italy, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Cuba only opened to American tourists in 2016, but since 2001, USC Marshall programs have been able to take students to the country for academic excursions. Voigt asserts that this Cuba trip represented a special opportunity for students to experience the country’s unique cultural and economic state.
“The extreme contrasts in political and economic models in Cuba make it a great learning laboratory for students to ‘test’ the assumptions about how economies and political systems should and do work,” Voigt said. “It brings about natural discussions that never happen, or rarely happen, among our business students about the good and the bad of our own economic and political model.”
Roca-Leon was raised in Guatemala until he was seven years old and has traveled to Latin America numerous times. Yet, Roca-Leon, who works as an Ernst and Young consultant, emphasized that the ExCEL trip extended far beyond tourism. The group’s hands-on learning at Cuban companies provided an invaluable examination of the island’s businesses and day-to-day life.
“What I really wanted to experience — as opposed to just taking a tourism trip — was to understand how things are done and why things are done differently, and getting access to people that have a wildly different viewpoint on life,” Roca-Leon said.
For Roca-Leon, the ten-day journey was a once-in-a-lifetime immersive opportunity he wasn’t going to miss. It allowed him and his classmates to experience Cuba like few ever have.
“I probably won’t have a chance to do this ever again,” Roca-Leon said. “This is an opportunity that’s not afforded to everybody, not even everybody in every MBA program. Other MBAs that I spoke to from other institutions said they’ve never had the opportunity to do that.”
Upon arrival, students explored the island’s economic infrastructure. They toured multiple Cuban companies, including a clothing store for dignitaries, a national tobacco distributor, and a sugar mill that doubles as a power plant by generating heat that is then recaptured to generate electricity.
While visiting the mill, a reporter from the nationally owned television network Cubavision interviewed Roca-Leon and a classmate about their impression of the plant. Roca-Leon was astonished at the plant’s upkeep, which still used machinery dating back from the Soviet era, with some machines nearly a century old.
