Visit To Cuba Finds Scientists Resolute In Face Of U.S. Embargo

Face Of U.S. Embargo Most American scientists know little about Cuba, except as a principal in a conflict with their country, and they seldom think of the American economic embargo or its effects upon ordinary Cubans. Most Cuban scientists seldom think of anything but this embargo. After I set aside Americans' divergent views of Cuba's Castro, Castro's government, and the two governments' adventures, what came into my sight as a visiting scientist in Havana last autumn was the remarkable citizens of Cuba and their meager lives during this time of embargo, hardship, and privation. To Cubans, this embargo and the hostility between their country and the United States ought to be handed over to history. In their opinion, there seems to be no reason for this embargo to stand today, if there ever was. It seems deeply irrational to them that the anger persists between the two governments. Cuban scientists feel frustrated that their own lives and opportunities to participate in the full range of international science are becoming lost. They watch hopefully for small signals of change in national relations, and they are encouraged and cheered by small gestures of their government or the U.S.'s. This past month, however, those Cubans watching the situation carefully have become increasingly glum and exasperated, and with reason. The shootdown in February of two small planes off the coast of Cuba has become an occasion for intensified, official bellicosity toward Cuba. Congress has passed the Helms-Burton Act, which President Clinton has signed. The act commits to permanent U.S. law the provisions of this embargo, eliminating flexibility to gradually improve relations with Cuba. Most ordinary Cubans experience the embargo as a loss of choice and a severe shortage in food and material goods; they feel a strain that comes from daily searches for prosaic necessities and transportation. In recent years, food shortages have resulted in severe malnourishment in some outlying regions. There are other Cubans, such as the scientists, who see the embargo as leading to a waste of their careers because they cannot easily participate in world scientific activities, and as a lost opportunity to participate in a larger cultural and intellectual world. In the midst of this privation, the Cuban government has made an intense commitment to medicine and science, molecular genetics in particular. The Cuban health care system provides one neighborhood-based physician for every 150 to 200 patients; it performs hundreds of heart, liver, and kidney transplants each year; and it maintains effective disease detection and prevention programs. The Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, a government institution in Havana, is the embodiment of the country's determination to build Cuba's economic future upon scientific accomplishment. In Havana, where rotating local power blackouts due to fuel shortages are part of daily life, the campus of the center has an enormous power plant to generate electricity without interruption. The Cuban government explains to its citizens its commitment to science, sometimes boldly. While we were driving through a modest neighborhood of small houses, a turn of our car carried us past a billboard high above the palm trees that declared: "SCIENCE IS OUR FUTURE!" Cubans are adaptable and inventive, traits that have served well during the economic crisis of the last several years. Meat and fish are available, but not abundant and not affordable; some people keep chickens in balcony pens in their five-story apartment buildings, somehow tolerating the noise each dawn. Automobiles that here would have been junked or committed to a museum are now in their fourth or fifth decade of service, thanks to mechanics who fabricate engine and transmission parts from scrap. Scientists are combining 15-year-old 8086 personal computers with modern object-oriented programming techniques to develop rapid peptide sequencing techniques with mass spectrometry. Because of shortages of electrical power, one may drive in Havana at night through streets in unnatural, nearly absolute darkness, with few lights except for an occasional automobile. But the streets are not empty; instead, the car's lights reveal swarms of bicyclists, many of them young and often riding double on bicycles recently imported from China, and sometimes the car's lights reveal crowds of habaneros socializing in parks in nearly complete darkness. Young habaneros may congregate around the entrance to a salsa palace or an outdoor cabaret to sample the music by cultural stars like Adalberto y su Son performed inside for foreigners or Cubans with dollars. A concert at a jazz club awaits the return of electrical power after the evening's rotating black-out, and early arrivals sit outside with drinks in the dark, to cheer quietly later when the lights blink on, in anticipation of an explosion of horns and drums and piano to follow. researchers experience the effects of this embargo in an additional way, as a miserable complication and attenuation of their careers. To scientists, the inability to travel to the U.S. and the lack of access to U.S. research supplies and equipment is a reason for ongoing frustration. The U.S. occupies the crossroads of world scientific activity, and Cuban scientists are attempting to perform world-quality research without access to the major source of equipment and supplies and publications, and without access to U.S. research conferences and contacts with U.S. scientists. The inability to purchase U.S. supplies slows research planning and experimentation to a crawl. A lack of money to purchase books, supplies, equipment, and software is a constant. A group leader in molecular biology explains his routine of performing an experiment: About a year in advance, he is required to list for his purchasing manager all the restriction enzymes, cell strains, reagents, chromatography supplies, and equipment that will be needed. This list is then faxed around the world to get a low bid on the entire lot, a mechanism that usually means that some of the supplies are substandard. This researcher wonders how anyone can anticipate so far in advance what obstacles or unexpected results he will find after the experiment has started, perhaps precipitating the need to quickly obtain new materials to perform supplementary analyses. He understands as well that no one undertakes a research project that is not changed many times in the course of experimentation. When a new item is needed, his group sends faxes to friends and colleagues in Europe and Japan, to see if they can help locate the needed enzyme or reagent. As of this winter, major Cuban research institutes did not have a connection to the Internet, and routine access to molecular genetics databases, electronic libraries, and the World Wide Web is impossible. The Cubans are eager to offer their U.S. colleagues access to their own scientific accomplishments. Their practical achievements in biotechnology, for example, have brought to the clinic new vaccines for meningitis and hepatitis and new approaches to accelerate burn therapy and skin regeneration through use of epidermal growth factors. Recently, without explanation, the head of one of the divisions of the Center of Genetic Engineering was denied a visa by the State Department for travel to the U.S., where he had been invited to consult with California and Minnesota biotechnology firms and to lecture at the University of Minnesota. Nearly every research group leader in this large scientific organization has been denied a visa for travel to the U.S. for study or to attend conferences. Graduate or postgraduate students instead go to Europe or Japan for study. These Cubans are eager to join a scientific world in which the U.S. so far has remained an unwilling host. Cubans are determined to work around these obstacles as best they can. They remain stubbornly busy, unwilling to give up. They have an enormous self-confidence. This embargo draws out resourcefulness and a sense of pride, and generates in Cubans far more annoyance with the U.S. than with their own government, which they see as helpless in this encounter with American political realities. The U.S. government continues to diminish its own citizens and their national values with the continuing embargo, while disrupting the daily existence and shriveling creative lives and careers of citizens of Cuba. To Cubans, and to citizens of international allies of the U.S., this embargo is mean-spirited, illogical, and a vestige of the Cold War, an era most of the world has moved beyond. It is time to change U.S. policy and end this embargo, rather than fortify it. Robert Brambl is a professor in the department of plant biology at the University of Minnesota who visited the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Cuba in November.

Visit To Cuba Finds Scientists Resolute In Face Of U.S. Embargo

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