Dispatches from Cuba: Santiago is a no-go

Physics Today‘s Toni Feder recently traveled to Cuba to learn about the country’s physics community and how it has been affected by the further relaxation of US–Cuba relations. She produced a series of blog posts about her experiences. You can read Toni’s previous post here .

Wednesday, 7 December 2016

Today’s activities were bracketed by trips to the bus station.

I have been hoping to visit the University of the Orient in Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern end of the island, not far from Guantánamo. My contact there was slow to respond to the email queries I sent from back home. When nudged by his former adviser in Havana, he explained that he had asked for permission from his university to meet with me but had not heard back. He said that without approval from the university, he could only meet me off campus. So I prepared to go, willing to meet in town if that was the best we could do.

First I looked into flying to Santiago, but all flights were booked. The bus station was my next option. I bought round-trip bus tickets and started planning to leave early Thursday morning on the 14-hour ride; the return on Sunday would be even longer. I told the owners of the casa particular where I’ve been staying that I’d be leaving for several days, and I asked if they could buy me some cheese, tomatoes, and fruit for the trip. (It’s much cheaper to shop with Cuban pesos than with the convertible pesos that I have.)

But later in the day, after a bunch of interviews at the University of Havana, physicist Ernesto Altshuler said he was terribly embarrassed to bear bad news. It turned out that my Santiago contact finally heard from his university and was denied permission to talk to me. Although he would have met me off campus had the university not responded, with the explicit denial, even an off-campus meeting was now out.

My Cuban hosts seemed most worried about the bus fare, which only gets partially reimbursed. But for my part, I am sorely disappointed not to get to see the other major physics center in Cuba. It turns out that the physicists in Havana haven’t heard back from their university leaders about whether they can meet with me either. But unlike their Santiago counterparts, they’re not worried about repercussions.

Altshuler drove me to the bus station again to return my bus tickets. I was out of luck: Refunds are not made after 5:00pm.

Update, 8 December: Back at the bus station, the woman at the reception window first told me that she had no money to refund my tickets. I waited a while until she had sold enough tickets to complete the transaction.

Editor’s Note, 9 January: The secondary headline of this article was changed to clarify the response of the university. A sentence from the article was removed at the request of a source.