Travel Cuba With Us
CO-Founder & Tour Leader
RYT 200
Vanessa K. Harper
Vanessa K. Harper has lived and worked in Cuba as a researcher, tour guide, documentarian, and facilitator of collaborative agreements between the U.S. and Cuba since 2005. She is founder of Support the Cuban People, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization whose activities directly support individuals residing in Cuba through programming that spans humanitarian need, art and culture, and grant funds for established and emerging entrepreneurs.
She currently owns and operates Travel Cuba With Us in partnership with her husband Alejandro Berroa. Their company provides personalized cultural immersion experiences that directly support the Cuban people. They design custom itineraries for solo travelers and guide group trips that specialize in history & culture, artist’s studio visits, photography workshops, rural farm adventures, and their signature Cuba Yoga Retreats program – an immersion experience that physically, spiritually, and culturally engages guests both on and off the mat.
She is former Executive Producer at TigerLily, a film production company, and previously served three years as Cuba Scholar in Residence at Jacksonville University, where she co-created The Cuba Project and facilitated a collaborative agreement between the university and the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation in Havana, Cuba. Prior to that, she was Strategist at Brunet-Garcia Advertising following her role as Director of Education and Community Outreach at the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville, an organization part of a broader effort to promote an understanding of world affairs by sponsoring public programs, fostering discussion of international issues, and providing a venue to meet others with similar interests.
As a documentary photographer and film producer, Vanessa is the creator of Honoring El Moro: A Cuban Collective Memory, a nineteen-year, multimedia body of work that documents the lives of subsistence farmers in the western mountains of rural Cuba, and their stories, over time, using photography, film, genealogies, oral history interviews, and archival material.
Vanessa has been a practitioner of yoga since 1997, became a RYT 200-hour certified yoga teacher in 2013, and regularly practices a variety of styles of yoga, including Bikram, Ashtanga, Baptiste, Kundalini, and Mixed-Level Power Vinyasa. She is former inaugural Board Chair and current Advisory Board Member for Florida-based Yoga 4 Change, a nonprofit organization that achieves lasting, demonstrative change for veterans, individuals experiencing incarceration, youth, and those living with mental health conditions through an evidence-based, purpose-driven yoga curriculum.
A proud native of North Carolina, she received a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies (2000) from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and a Master of Science in Interdisciplinary Ecology (2006) from the University of Florida, where her research focused on rural subsistence farmer households in the Sierra del Rosario mountains of western Cuba. She recently earned a Master of Arts in Oral History (2021) from Columbia University’s OHMA program following completion of her thesis:
Trust, Love, and Collaboration: On Doing Oral History in Cuba.
