I leave for Miami tomorrow en route to Havana. I really should remain in my office, reading drafts of term papers and evaluating fellowship applications, but I have a couple of interesting tasks in Cuba.
The first is to try to arrange to send a small group of Woodrow Wilson School undergraduates to the University of Havana for the spring term next year. We require our juniors to take a Policy Task Force in each semester — these are research seminars intended to give the students an introduction to public-policy research. We offer several PTF’s on our campus each term, but also a few taught abroad. Our students enroll and take courses in the foreign university, except for the locally taught PTF. So my primary task next week (along with two colleagues) is to negotiate arrangements with the university, and to identify a Cuban academic to lead the seminar.
I have been travelling to Cuba since 1997 in the hope of building better academic and cultural relations with the United States. To that end, we (at ACLS and SSRC) created the Working Group on Cuba (which I chair) to bring together Cuban and American academics (and a Mexican, to keep us honest) to plan joint activities. We secured funding from a small but wonderful NYC foundation, the Christopher Reynolds Foundation, as well as from the MacArthur Foundation, and began a modest program of mutual scholarly visits, support for Cuban libraries, archives and museums, joint research, translation into English of Cuban scholarship, and the like.
But after the shoot-down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes and the subsequent passage of the Helms-Burton Act in the late 1990s, the American government toughened both the embargo and regulations on travel between Cuba and the United States. Both countries restricted their issuance of visas — especially the Cubans. Things were bad enough during the late years of the Clinton administration, but, after the Florida presidential vote in 2000, things got much worse for research and educational relations. In recent years, therefore, our efforts (with Ford Foundation funding), have primarily been restricted to work with Cuban libraries and archives — crucially important work, but on the margins of our original, broad cultural aims.
After November 4, however, I am hopeful that there will be a genuine opening in U.S.-Cuban relations. Barrack Obama has promised to loosen restrictions on travel (and some of the other regulations imposed by the U.S. Treasury). He can do that “with a stroke of the pen” at any time after his inauguration, and I think he will make at least a gesture in that direction.
He will have to spend more political chits to secure the repeal of Helms-Burton and the rest of the embargo legislation, but I also hope there will be legislative action before the end of this presidential term. Any movement to improve relations, in the context of the slow but tangible transition occurring in Cuba, is likely to make a significant difference both in Cuba and for U.S.-Cuban relations.
So, while I am always excited to be going to Cuba, where I have many colleagues, I am especially optimistic that the efforts of those of us who have been committed to the notion of good international scholarly relations will now begin to bear fruit. There is a great deal of good will in Cuba for Obama and his administration, and I hope that we will find creative ways to respond to it.
