lit a candle 4h agoMy mom called me about this, she'd read Cuba Beyond the Beach for a trip she took years ago and never stopped talking about it. Never heard of the author myself but she sounded genuinely shaken.
Their story
Karen Elaine Dubinsky (15 October 1957 to 4 September 2026) was a Canadian historian whose career at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, spanned more than three decades. She wrote about sexuality and gender in Ontario's past, honeymoon tourism at Niagara Falls, international adoption, and, in her later years, the warm…
Karen Elaine Dubinsky (15 October 1957 to 4 September 2026) was a Canadian historian whose career at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, spanned more than three decades. She wrote about sexuality and gender in Ontario's past, honeymoon tourism at Niagara Falls, international adoption, and, in her later years, the warm and complicated ties between Canadians and Cubans. Colleagues said her signature was telling a good story.
Dubinsky was born in London, Ontario, one of four children of lawyer Wallace V. Dubinsky and teacher Marguerite Wilson. She grew up in Thunder Bay, where her paternal grandparents, Ukrainian immigrants Ksenia and Sam Dubinsky, ran the International Cafe in Fort William. She had a sister, Kelly, and two brothers, David and Dennis. Her interest in women's lives began early: in 1978, while working at the Northern Women's Centre in Thunder Bay, she recorded oral histories with older women, including her own grandmother. Those recordings are now held at the Lakehead University Archives.
She became active in student politics and feminism at university. In 1985 she wrote Lament for a Patriarchy Lost?, a study of anti-feminism and the group R.E.A.L. Women, for the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. She earned a BA in history at Carleton University in 1983 and an MA from its Institute of Canadian Studies in 1985, with a thesis on women and the Knights of Labor in Ontario. She completed her PhD in history at Queen's in 1991. Her dissertation became her first book, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993.
After teaching stints in Women's Studies at Queen's, at the University of Toronto, McMaster University and Brock University, she joined the Queen's history department in 1993, became a full professor in 2002, and took a joint appointment in Global Development Studies in 2010. Her second book, The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (1999), won the Albert B. Corey Prize from the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association. Babies Without Borders (2010) followed children and adoption across the Americas. With Franca Iacovetta she co-edited the University of Toronto Press series Gender and History, which published 39 titles.
Cuba became the great subject of her later life. She first visited in 1978 and lived in Havana on and off from 2004. With Susan Lord she built the course Cuban Culture and Society, a 15-year partnership between Queen's and the University of Havana that took more than 350 students to Cuba and brought more than 20 Cuban scholars, musicians, filmmakers, artists and curators to Kingston. The course won the Queen's Award for International Educational Innovation in 2016 and the Canadian Bureau for International Education's Panorama Award in 2021. She co-edited books on the Havana singer-songwriter Carlos Varela, wrote Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana (2016), and helped secure honorary Queen's doctorates for Carlos Varela and Alex Cuba. Her final book, Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters (2025), told that history through teachers, artists, musicians and activists rather than diplomats, and received the 2026 Wilson Book Prize.
She loved music as much as archives. She co-hosted the 13-episode podcast Cuban Serenade with Freddy Monasterio, hosted Cuban Sounds in Canada on CFRC radio, and produced concerts by Cuban musicians in Kingston venues. Over 32 years she taught thousands of students and supervised 47 master's and 28 doctoral students, earning the Queen's University Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision in 2007. Former students described writing for her not out of fear but out of a wish to do their very best.
Dubinsky met Susan Belyea in 1991, and together they raised their son, Jordi Belyea-Dubinsky, in Kingston. In 2013 the family received anonymous homophobic letters threatening violence and demanding they leave the city. They reported them to police, spoke publicly so that other couples would not be targeted in silence, and said they were staying. Neighbours answered with rallies, flowers and messages of support. According to the family obituary, she and Susan married at home on 17 August 2026, after about 35 years together.
She retired in July 2025 as professor emerita but kept working on a new book, Cuban Roots on Canadian Soil: A History of Cuban Musicians in Canada. Diagnosed with an aggressive lung cancer, she died at home in Kingston on 4 September 2026, aged 68, after a brief illness. Queen's lowered its campus flag to half-mast in her honour on 24 September. The family suggested donations to Small World Music or the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Kingston.
Biography adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Dubinsky.
In their own words
“I go to Cuba to see my friends. And I also go there to listen, because as somebody who teaches about Cuba, sometimes writes about Cuba, I feel that when I'm there, I have a responsibility to listen.”
Interview with Syndemic Magazine, June 2022
“The best thing I will say, and this should be up-front and underlined, is the fact that this small, poor, blockaded country in the Global South was able to come up with its own vaccine.”
On Cuba during Covid-19, Syndemic Magazine, June 2022
“Unless the open minded and open-hearted embrace of a multiplicity of perspectives advocated by the many artists like Carcasses and Perez prevails, this climate of polarization will continue, to everyone's detriment.”
Writing in rabble.ca on Cuba's cultural scene, January 2023
Photos
1Karen Dubinsky
by People Forever
Same, my dad used her Cuba course readings and swore by them.