Digitizing Papa Hem’s Cuba papers is all well and good. Still, it isn’t the same thing as being there. (Photo source)

Here I am, sitting in my cozy office in Princeton, looking out at perfectly filthy New Jersey weather — freezing rain and sleet. It is doubtless around 80 degrees in Havana, with clear skies and a brisk wind. Ah well! I was able to enjoy the weather, the food, and the company of good friends and colleagues there for the past four days.

Travel to Cuba is not so easy, even if one has a Treasury license (without which it is illegal to spend any U.S. currency in a country under American embargo). I was traveling with two Princeton colleagues in order to plan a proposed policy seminar at the University of Havana. We left for Miami Saturday afternoon, ate a terrific meal at the Versailles restaurant in Little Havana, and flew on a charter flight to Havana at 2 p.m. Sunday. Alas, the charter companies flying to Cuba require a check-in three hours prior to departure. The flight to Cuba is only an hour from Miami, but three charter planes arrived at the same time as ours and it took more than an hour to go through Cuban immigration and customs. On the flight back yesterday, our charter was delayed by a mechanical problem in Miami (but no one in Havana seemed to know that) and arrived more than two hours late, forcing us to miss our flight from Miami to Newark. But we were able to get on the next flight — still, we left our Havana hotel at 7 a.m. and did not get home until 8 p.m. When there are direct flights, it will be five hours door to door.

The Bush administration steadily tightened restrictions on travel from the United States to Cuba, both for Cuban-Americans planning family visits, and for those of us with “approved” reasons to travel to the island. One such Bush change was the requirement that undergraduate students only go to Cuba if they are enrolled for at least 10 weeks in a Cuban university, thus eliminating the short student study trips that Princeton and many other American institutions organized as recently as five years ago. Nevertheless, several American colleges and universities currently have groups of undergrads enrolled at the Universidad de La Habana — Sarah Lawrence, Brown, Harvard, North Carolina, Presbyterian among them. We are hoping to have a Woodrow Wilson School junior seminar on some aspect of Cuban public policy during the spring term, 2010, and we found a warm reception for that proposal at the University on Tuesday. We actually found greater difficulty in securing suitable housing for our students, and we are still working on that problem.

I spent some time on this trip with officials of the Cultural Heritage administration (the Patrimonia of the Ministry of Culture), talking about completing the digitization of the Cuban portion of the Hemingway Papers, which the SSRC and I have been working on for several years. We have sent the microfilm of Hemingway’s correspondence to the Havana Museo Hemingway, which will shortly announce its availability to scholars. This has been one of the most satisfying of the projects we have been able to undertake with Cuban colleagues.

Everyone we met in Havana had clearly “voted” for Obama, who announced early in his campaign that he would loosen the restrictions on travel to Cuba. People there are optimistic that he will follow through. Why not, since he won Florida? Of course I am also eagerly awaiting the new administration’s Cuban policy. I feel confident that the harshest restrictions on movement between the countries will be loosened or eliminated. And I hope that before too long the Helms-Burton Act and the other punitive pieces of legislation will be repealed. But that will be more difficult than changing regulations (which can be done at the discretion of the President), and it will take longer.

“Sin embargo“ means “nevertheless” in Spanish, but “sin“ means “without, and I would love to see a world without the embargo! I voted for Obama, too, and I am optimistic. It would be good for both countries to have a more normal relationship, though of course the century-long history of bad relations between the United States and Cuba will take many decades to repair. 2009 seems a good year to begin the healing.