November 29, 2009, 10:46 AM ET

Quick Trip to Havana

I made a quick trip to Havana last week, just before Thanksgiving. I had two objectives. The first was to complete arrangements for the Woodrow Wilson School undergraduate seminar that will be held at the University of Havana this spring. Each of our WWS juniors must take what we call a Policy Task Force each term, in order to learn the techniques of public-policy analysis. We offer several of these PTF's abroad, with our students enrolling in other host university courses for the remainder of their program. Some, but not all, of these PTF's are taught in local languages, and the one in Havana will be in Spanish. It will be organized by the Cuban Center for Demography (CEDEM), and will focus on a variety of Cuban human migration problems. We have nine students signed up, and I think they are going to have a very good experience at the University. Several other U.S. universities are running programs at the University of Havana, and I was impressed by their quality when I visited them last spring.

My second purpose was to assist the Ford Foundation in expanding its programming in Cuba. I chair the Working Group on Cuba for ACLS-SSRC. This is a group Ken Prewitt and I established when we were the presidents of the two organizations in 1997, hoping to encourage better academic contact between the two countries. The Working Group was initially quite active, but as political relations between the two countries deteriorated in the late 1990s, we have found it more and more difficult to mount programs that comply with the legal requirements of both countries, though in recent years we have emphasized cultural heritage preservation work in Cuban libraries and archives with some success. I keep hoping for improvement in political relations between the U.S. and Cuba, but so far there has been little change under the Obama administration. Still, we are committed to keep trying to do something useful, and I was gratified to find that the new president of the Ford Foundation was interested in expanding its work in Cuba. Mario Bronfman, the Ford rep in Mexico City (himself a distinguished medical sociologist), has responsibility for Ford’s Cuba funding, and wants to increase his Cuban programming.

So on this trip, Sarah Doty, the incredibly able SSRC staffer for the Working Group, and I arranged to meet Bronfman in Havana to investigate possible convergences between the Foundation’s interests and those of the Cuban academic community. We had a series of interesting meetings. Sunday night we had dinner with the Cuban representative to the U.N. Population Fund (and a former graduate student of Bronfman’s in Mexico). Monday we spent at a fascinating German arts organization, the Fundacion Ludwig, and later had dinner with the Foreign Secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences (the formal SSRC partner organization in Cuba). Tuesday we visited the University of Havana both to discuss the WWS program this spring and to explore possible U.S, research collaboration on problems of human migration. Then we visited a new university institute on human sexuality directed by Mariela Castro (Raul Castro’s daughter). At that point I had to leave for the airport, while Sarah and Mario went on to the well-known and highly-regard Pedro Kouri Institute, Cuba’s leading tropical public health research institute. We’ll have to wait to see what develops from these contacts, but they are promising.

My trip began last Sunday when my taxi driver overslept and did not turn up at 5:15 a.m. to take me to Newark airport (I jumped into my car and just made the flight). It ended when I discovered at Jose Marti airport in Havana that I had lost my exit visa. My first thought was that I was going to have a much longer stay in Cuba than I had intended. But my next thought, that the Cubans wouldn’t know what to do with me if they kept me, proved correct. So I arrived back in Princeton at 1 a.m. last Wednesday, ready to help prepare for our eight Thanksgiving guests!

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Comments

1. 11159995 - November 30, 2009 at 10:25 am

Relevant to both your WWS and SSRC initiatives, Stan, is this forthcoming book on Cuban migration, by another faculty member at Princeton, as it happens: http://www.psupress.psu.edu/books/titles/978-0-271-03538-3.html.

2. lauren1 - November 30, 2009 at 11:10 am

Thanks for this fascinating report. We hear so little about higher education in Cuba that it is particularly helpful.
Congratulations on all you have achieved and on your tone of respect for the Cuban academics. That tone has been absent any pronouncements from other American sources and would do much to repair relations.