Nature Is Nurturing Cuban Ties

It started with sparrows, egrets and the ivory-billed woodpecker.

It led to the discovery of a sloth dating back 12 million years--the earliest land mammal identified at the time in the Greater Antilles.

And by September, it had paved the way for an unprecedented expedition: a U.S. government research vessel, flying the Cuban and American flags, quietly spending a month in Cuban waters, the first such joint mission in four decades.

On board, scientists from two nations that have no diplomatic relations and nearly 40 years of bitter history surveyed a population of sharks that travel more freely between Cuba and the United States than do the humans who inhabit those lands.

Those are but a handful of landmarks in a bold new age of scientific collaboration: a fast-growing, yet discreet, development that the scientists say also has enormous potential for bridging the ocean of social, cultural and political mistrust between the United States and Cuba.

It is, in fact, a rebirth of personal and professional friendships among a new generation of American and Cuban scientists that transcends politics. Together, these colleagues are reawakening one of the United States’ oldest scientific partnerships--one dating to the 1830s.

Largely unnoticed and deliberately unheralded, scientists from the two nations are communicating almost daily by phone and e-mail. They are working together on cutting-edge research projects--from fossils and spiders to the ozone layer and hurricanes.

They are sharing important discoveries by the month and visiting one another by the dozens each year. And through it all, they are carefully and meticulously unraveling a web of complex bureaucratic barriers in both nations to open new relationships that are helping to gradually erode the suspicions of their political leaders.

These emerging relationships are based, in part, on the inescapable pragmatism of science. The United States and Cuba, separated by 90 miles of ocean, are inextricably linked by nature: Migratory birds, fish, pollution and the weather do not recognize national borders, the scientists note.

What is more, the long history of U.S.-Cuban scientific collaboration that ended with the victory of Fidel Castro’s revolution 40 years ago come New Year’s Day left another legacy of scientific necessity: As much as 80% of the research and specimens of flora, fauna and rocks collected in Cuba over a 130-year period are in U.S. museums, largely off limits to Cuban scientists since Castro came to power.

Earlier this month, nearly a dozen U.S. chemists spent a week in Havana with their Cuban counterparts at an international conference, a visit that came only after the U.S. scientists fought for nearly a year to win Treasury Department licenses. Rules of the more-than-3-decade-old U.S. economic embargo require those licenses for virtually any American wishing to visit Cuba legally.

“Blockades and restrictions on free trade and travel are antithetical to science,” Paul Walter, president of the Washington-based American Chemical Society, one of the world’s largest scientific organizations, declared to his Cuban audience during the visit.

“We often hear in the United States a phrase coming out of Cuba: ‘Cuba si, Yankee no.’ And in the United States, we often hear a phrase from some of your countrymen living there: ‘Cuba no, Yankee si.’ I’m here to tell you that, as scientists, we cannot accept that formulation.”

Projects Underway in Natural Sciences

The official policies that have grown out of that formulation have made collaboration especially difficult for chemists and others in what are known as “hard” sciences. Those research fields often have dual civilian and military uses, and U.S. authorities have denied visas for Cuban scientists for national security reasons.

But studies published in dozens of arcane scientific journals and interviews with more than a dozen Cuban and U.S. experts in such natural sciences as biology, botany, geology, oceanography and paleontology show that an array of collaborative efforts are underway or have been completed in recent years.

Among them:

* More than 100 specimen cabinets and archive supplies worth $300,000 left New York earlier this month for Havana--a donation from more than a dozen U.S. institutions that will furnish Cuba’s new National Museum of Natural History, which will open early next year in the same space that housed the U.S. Embassy before Washington cut diplomatic ties.

* A Cuban geologist and an American colleague in New York are coauthoring a book on their theory of Gaarlandia. The theory, which traces the origin of mammals in Caribbean nations to a land bridge that linked South America to the islands about 38 million years ago, is based on the two scientists’ 1994 discovery in Cuba of the fossilized sloth dating back 12 million years and their later find of a sloth in Puerto Rico dating back 35 million years.

* A Cuban meteorologist, who completed two years of study at the University of Maryland this year in the first such exchange in 40 years, is now working in the Cuban city of Camaguey, where he’s using a Russian-made laser to study the hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer and its effect on weather--data he is sharing with U.S. scientists.

* U.S. government aircraft routinely are allowed to fly into Cuban airspace during U.S.-bound hurricanes, acquiring data valuable to both nations. Meteorological officials in Washington, Havana and Miami communicate 24 hours a day on a dedicated communications link that improves weather forecasts in both nations.

* A Cuban arachnologist and an American counterpart have coauthored several groundbreaking studies on spiders, including one on biodiversity that will appear early next year in a newsletter published jointly in both countries. That same Cuban specialist is now helping U.S. scientists study more than a dozen new spider species collected on a recent Interior Department-sponsored expedition to Navassa Island off the coast of Haiti.

* And a Havana-based Cuban American scientist, a Soviet-educated biologist and historian, is writing a book with the sponsorship of Washington’s Smithsonian Institution that will document the origins and long history of U.S.-Cuban scientific collaboration.

Manuel Iturralde has a personal perspective on this new era of scientific detente.

The 52-year-old Cuban geologist discovered the prehistoric sloths in partnership with Ross MacPhee of New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Iturralde said he clearly remembers his earliest years as a young geologist in the mid-1960s. He had to hide microfossil specimens in holes he cut into journals, which he then sent to research institutions in the United States. The American institutions housed most of Cuba’s earlier specimens, which were needed to identify his finds.

Iturralde and other Cuban scientists--among them the spider specialist, Giraldo Alayon--said their Havana University professors encouraged them to carry on written communication with U.S. scientists, despite bans on direct contact.

Formal efforts to break through the scientific isolation go back to the mid-1970s, when the Smithsonian Institution and Cuban government agreed to exchange small groups of ornithologists to study migratory birds and search for North America’s last remaining ivory-billed woodpeckers in Cuba.

According to most accounts, the breakthrough came in 1989 through a chance meeting between two zoologists: Michael Smith, an American who now heads the Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation, and Cuban Gilberto Silva, a bat specialist and the senior researcher at Havana’s National Museum of Natural History.

“I had been trying for some years to figure out how to make contact in Cuba. Finally, I got permission from both governments to visit Havana--I was there when the Berlin Wall came down,” recalled Smith, 48, who was working at the American Museum of Natural History at the time.

“I walked into the natural history museum in Havana. I approached a man I found in one of the hallways and held out my business card. I said, ‘I’m an American ichthyologist, and I’m looking for a Cuban ichthyologist to collaborate with.’ That man turned out to be Gilberto Silva.”

Cuban Scientist Had Difficult Task

Silva recalled the initial suspicion he faced from officials in the ruling Communist Party.

“It was quite difficult to make people here understand the need to collaborate with Americans,” said the 71-year-old white-bearded, soft-spoken Silva, who has known Castro since the revolution.

“They said: ‘We have all the help from socialist scientists. Why do we need the Americans?’ The first thing we did was to deeply analyze this inside the party group.”

In the end, Silva’s case was irrefutable: Cuban and American plants and animals were geographically linked--and utterly different from those in the socialist nations thousands of miles away. Then, Silva told his compatriots about the holotypes.

Holotypes are the single specimens chosen as models for newly discovered species, and Silva explained that the long history of joint American-Cuban expeditions on the island had left most of them in U.S. museums.

“We estimated that 80% of the holotypes of the Cuban fauna were in the United States,” he recalled. “These are the ultimate standards of our science, and we couldn’t follow them.”

But Smith faced an even steeper uphill battle persuading U.S. officials to permit the new collaborations--one that continues today.

U.S. authorities enforcing the embargo decide whether to issue scientists visas or Treasury Department licenses on a case-by-case basis in an often agonizingly long review process.

“It is a discouraging process, and I think it is meant to be,” Walter, the American Chemical Society president, said in an interview here. “The fact is, right now it is much easier for an American scientist to collaborate with a Russian scientist or a Chinese scientist than [with] a Cuban scientist.”

Added Zafra Lerman, a Chicago-based chemist and educator: “It’s very sad that, in the greatest democracy in the world, our own citizens have to ask for permission to travel. Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Science May Help Normalize Relations

Scientists in both nations argue that their collaborations can--and do--serve as a catalyst toward normalizing relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

“At the official level, I think science already is seen as a factor in the relaxation of tensions between the two countries,” said Cuban American science historian Pedro Pruna, who was born in Havana, educated in Moscow and is now writing the Smithsonian-sponsored history book.

“After all, when people meet each other, they realize it is possible to work together even when relations between the two countries are at their lowest level.”

Citing recent sociological studies showing that natural scientists historically are the last to lose contact when nations sever ties and the first to restore it when tensions begin to ease, Smith said he expects the new understanding to expand--even into political affairs.

“This schism between the United States and Cuba is one of the longest-lasting and most bitter in our hemisphere,” Smith said in a recent interview. “I’ve always thought that science is one of the best ways to get the healing process going.”

Smith’s colleagues in Havana concurred.

“It’s better to go step by step, slowly and cautiously, but with very strong steps,” said spider specialist Alayon. “This is the future. We are in the globalized world, and science is one of the best tools for globalization.”

Added Silva: “Things are changing here. There’s a relaxation of dogmatic thinking. There’s more flexibility, and that’s good.”