Roberto Véguez was 18 when he came to the United States from Cuba, a young university student fleeing the revolución and Castro conscription orders in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.  His arrival in New York led to a job cataloguing books in the library of the Columbia University Medical Center; soon he was taking night courses at Columbia’s School of General Studies, where he met his future wife, Susan, and earned a degree in 1968.  A Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin followed, and then in 1972, Susan and Roberto came to Middlebury.

Now, on the eve of his retirement, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Spanish reflects on the journey—past, present, and future.

When I was very young I always thought I was going to be a teacher. But I had never envisioned being a university teacher. It wasn’t until I came to the U.S. that I thought it possible.

Either trouble followed us or we followed trouble. We were [at Columbia] when all hell broke loose during the student riots . . . Students for a Democratic Society . . . that was my final semester. Then we went to Wisconsin, and there were protests and bombings and tear gas. Interesting times. We followed trouble.

Fear of the draft had pushed quite a lot of people into education, so jobs were scarce in 1972. Susan was from Massachusetts, so we had decided to focus on the Northeast, but that’s as particular as we got. I blanketed schools in the area with requests for interviews at the Modern Language Association [conference], and Middlebury answered. “Sure,” they said. “Come for an interview.”

Now, I was coming from a cold place—Madison, Wisconsin—but we came here and it was so cold, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. We came to the Middlebury Inn, and there was no one there to receive us. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. And then we realized that it was Super Bowl Sunday. Everybody was watching the football game.

Middlebury was the smallest place I had ever lived. I lived in what was then the second largest city in Cuba (Santiago de Cuba), New York, and Madison, which was less crowded, but still a city, very lively. It took some getting used to here.

My first advanced course at Middlebury, I made the classic mistake that every professor made back then: I turned it into a graduate course, just like the ones that I had just finished at Wisconsin. It was just a disaster. I was assigning them huge amounts of reading . . . after about three weeks, I knew it couldn’t go on. It was awful. I was lost. I had to recalibrate. Like a GPS.

We lived on the second floor of 105 South Main. When we arrived, we knocked on the door of the first floor apartment. This woman opened the door, and I said, “My god, it’s you.” It was my French teacher from Columbia, Ann Stern. So we had an open house. It was almost like not leaving graduate housing.

I’ve always had very good students, but now, they’re getting so good. The faculty should be paying admission to be allowed to teach them. The students we get here are a luxury. I’m very close to my students from the Class of 1980. That was the year I got tenure; Susan and I went abroad with them as juniors when I was the director of the School in Madrid; and the next year, we had a very intense bonding experience over a play that the entire Spanish department produced.

Okay, in English the play was called In Burning Darkness. One of our majors, Robert Ackerman ’80, was directing and producing it (he was a double major, Spanish and theatre), and he cast all of us in it. Every character in the play was blind, and I played the blind director of a school for the blind. I was playing myself, except blind. It was art imitating life.

At some point, I had five children of former students here at Middlebury at the same time. It’s part of the Woody Allen formula: success is just being there. I’ve been here for so long, some of these things are bound to happen.

The head of our department, Miguel Fernández ’85 (and MA Spanish ’89), is one of my former students.

The rewards of teaching? You see the results. That’s why I think everyone should teach a first-year course, because you see even more results, faster.

I think I’m most closely associated with my Quixote course. Quixote teaches the importance of considering someone else’s point of view. It can be seen as a philosophy of life. It’s the entire range of society contained in 1,000 pages.

The Spanish School has a special place here. One of these days I’m going to finish the history of what I call “The Golden Years of the Spanish School.”

In 1937, the first of the exiles from the Spanish Civil War came to teach here. This place became the summer place to meet for everyone who was exiled to the eastern seaboard and beyond. Federico García Lorca’s entire family came here; the poet Pedro Salinas. People have been saying, “Someone has to write that history,” so I thought I’d give it a try. That’s what I’ll do in my retirement.

Teaching can be a lot like being a doctor—do no harm. Just point the way and get out. Let [the students] do it, and they will.