"It was pure serendipity," Bowman says. "We didn’t know until the last minute that he would be there."

Carter, who attended Tech during the 1942-43 school year before transferring to the Naval Academy, became the first American president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.

While Carter followed a diplomatic agenda, Bowman and his students followed an academic agenda.

A Latin American studies specialist in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Bowman says the trip was designed to give students a chance to study and form opinions about the island nation and its communist society.

"We look at the history of Cuba all the way back to Jose Marti’s victory over colonial Spain, but we primarily study contemporary economic, social and political dynamics," he says. "There’s a lot of change going on in Cuba, especially the way technology is impacting the island through e-mail and the Internet. They are indicators of openings in the society."

Bowman’s students visited dance halls to learn the salsa, son and rumba. They observed the rites of Santeria, Cuba’s quasi-official religion, and attended a "beisbol" game.

"I wanted students to understand Cuban civil society," Bowman says. "Civil society is considered a bourgeois practice and has become almost nonexistent."

Bowman says although his group never crossed paths with Carter, his presence and especially his televised speech led to frank and passionate discussions with ordinary Cubans.

"We don’t understand in the United States how historic Carter’s speech was," Bowman says. "But for someone who has lived in Cuba 40 or 50 years and has never heard someone on television criticizing the regime, it was a remarkable experience."

The Tech students watched the speech in a hotel in the small town of Trinidad. Afterward they discussed the speech with the hotel staff who had also stopped to watch.

"These folks were very committed, fervent supporters of the revolution," he says. "Sometimes we forget that while there are certainly dissidents, there is a very strong core of support for the Castro regime that comes about through all sorts of propaganda and socialization, and some real benefits that have accrued, particularly to the minorities and the poorer sector of society whose life is marginally better than before the revolution. That’s true especially in health care, housing and education. They are fervent supporters."

Bowman says the more the students "peeled back the layers of the onion," the more surprised they were.