Dispatches from Cuba: Exploring Havana

Physics Today’s Toni Feder is traveling to Cuba to learn about the country’s physics community and how it has been affected by the recent thaw in US–Cuba relations. She’ll be blogging about her experiences through mid-December. You can read Toni’s previous post here .

Sunday, 4 December 2016 (reporting from Havana)

Today I flew to Havana via Miami. At the gate in Miami, passengers are required to go to the “Cuba ready” station and have their boarding passes stamped. I was asked if I wanted to pay cash for my visa. I told the attendant that I had a visa. She looked at it quizzically and asked if it was the original. She let me through—it would be my problem in Havana if the visa was not accepted.

Landing at the Havana airport was a sweaty adventure. I got through customs quickly, only to join a pushy crowd waiting to go through the kind of security one typically encounters before boarding a flight. Finally I was free to collect my luggage. The bags came out slowly, most of them wrapped in colorful plastic. The Cubans joked that there was only one baggage handler for the four flights that had just arrived. More than an hour after landing, I got my suitcase and headed for the exit. I quickly spotted someone holding a sign with my name on it. So nice that Ernesto Altshuler, a physicist at the University of Havana, had come to meet me! We got in line for me to exchange money, and then we headed into town.

As we chatted in the car, I looked out the window and got some first impressions:

• The roads are filled with vintage American cars.
• Lovely palm trees and coconut trees abound.
• Houses are painted in bright colors.
• Much is dilapidated.
• There were many signs of mourning for and celebration of Fidel Castro, who died a week ago.

Ernesto dropped me at the casa particular that will be my home for the coming days. It’s large, with a bedroom, bathroom, living area, and kitchen. The ceilings are nearly 20 feet high.

Some Cubans supplement their incomes by renting out apartments in the buildings they live in. My host, Yoli, is a retired educator who spent a lot of time explaining how things work in my casa. Later her husband offered to go to the market for me. Cuba has two currencies: convertible pesos and Cuban pesos. I don’t have any Cuban pesos at the moment, and my hosts say that at the market I will be overcharged. Vendors often treat convertibles on a one-to-one exchange with Cuban pesos, even though the convertible peso has about 24 times the value.

Later, Maruchy—María Sánchez, a colleague of Ernesto’s and the president of the Cuban Physical Society—collected me, and we crowded into one of the vintage cars with three other passengers and rode to old Havana. Many of the vintage cars are used as unofficial taxis—another place where Cuban pesos are the preferred currency.

Maruchy gave me a tour of the neighborhood. She showed me where Ernest Hemingway drank mojitos, where he is said to have written The Old Man and the Sea, where the University of Havana used to be located, the theater where President Obama met with people, and much more. She also gave me a rundown of the university and the country’s physics community. The streets were lively—kids were out on their own, along with locals, tourists, cats, and dogs. To get back, we caught a ride in a 1950 Studebaker.

Early in her PhD studies, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Maruchy spent half a year there at the Ioffe Institute. At the time, she says, one could live in Cuba on a professor’s salary. For young people today, it’s tougher. Maruchy’s daughter is pursuing her physics doctorate in France. “She sees that I am a professor, I am head of the Cuban Physical Society, I have been dean of physics, and I don’t have a car,” Maruchy says. In fact, she and others say, university professors today earn less than waitresses.