“How did you spend your spring break, Stan?” Contrary to the wishes of my dermatologist, in the sun — in Cuba, albeit mostly indoors.

I wrote some weeks ago about my interest in Cuba, and my efforts to build programs to bridge the chasm that has come into existence between the Cuban and U.S. academic communities. The main vehicle for these efforts has been the Working Group on Cuba of the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), which I chair. We began this work in 1997, funded primarily by the Christopher Reynolds Foundation (and for a while by the MacArthur Foundation). The harshly restrictive Treasury regulations imposed upon American activities in Cuba in the latter years of the Clinton administration, and more seriously by the Bush II administration, have made it difficult to mount a broad and sustained program. But since 2000 we have been funded by the Ford Foundation to work with Cuban libraries and archives, and this has been satisfying and modestly consequential. We have funded both U.S. and European specialists to conduct trainings in advanced conservation and preservation techniques. We have worked with local institutions to rethink their prospective needs in terms of fundable projects (something that does not occur naturally in a socialist economy). And, most important, we have worked with the major libraries and archives to develop common and cooperative approaches to their most pressing needs — especially in the context of the need for national/regional disaster planning. Toward this end we have developed a Standing Committee composed of librarians and archivists from France, Mexico, Jamaica, and the U.S. We held a meeting of this committee on Tuesday in the Capitolio (national capital building), working with representatives of Cuban libraries and archives to plan future cooperative activities (in the hope of attracting further Ford funding).

On Tuesday I was joined by Craig Calhoun, the president of the SSRC, who has not previously visited Cuba. The purpose of his visit was to familiarize the Cubans with Craig, and to give him (he had not been to Cuba previously) an idea of conditions on the ground. We were hosted by our partner organization, the Cuban Academy of Sciences, and scheduled meetings at the Center for Psychology and Sociology, the National Library, the Hemingway Museum (where we are digitizing the Hemingway papers that remain in Havana) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Minrex) — where we met with my longtime colleague, the newly appointed vice minister, Dagoberto Rodriquez (for the past seven years the head of the Cuban Interests Section office in Washington, DC). Craig gave a lecture on the state of the social sciences in the U.S. before a small but distinguished audience of academics at the Casa de las Americas on Thursday, after a meeting of the Working Group convened to think about future plans.

The big question for the Working Group is what we will be able to do in Raul Castro’s Cuba — and in a United States led by John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton.