-Caveat Lector- >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Wednesday, December 23, 1998 Science Bridges U.S. Gap With Cuba ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By Mark Fineman Los Angeles Times Service ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HAVANA - 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. By September, it had paved the way for an unusual expedition: A U.S. government research vessel, flying the Cuban and American flags, quietly spent a month in Cuban waters, the first such joint mission in four decades. On board, scientists from two nations that have no diplomatic ties and 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 new age of scientific collaboration - a fast-growing, yet discreet development that the scientists say has enormous potential for bridging the ocean of social, cultural and political mistrust between the United States and Cuba. A rebirth of personal and professional friendships among a new generation of American and Cuban scientists has transcended politics. Together, these colleagues are reawakening a scientific partnership that dates 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. They share important discoveries and visit one another by the dozens each year. Through it all, they are carefully and meticulously unraveling a web of complex bureaucratic barriers in both countries 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 (145 kilometers) of ocean, are inextricably linked by nature: Migratory birds, fish, pollution and the weather do not recognize national borders. The long history of U.S.-Cuban scientific collaboration that ended with the victory of Fidel Castro's revolution 40 years ago left another legacy of scientific necessity: As much as 80 percent 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 Mr. Castro came to power. 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 government permission. Rules of the U.S. economic embargo require a Treasury Department license 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, said to his Cuban audience during the visit. Studies published in dozens of scientific journals and interviews with more than a dozen Cuban and U.S. specialists 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 co-authoring 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 is using a Russian-made laser to study the hole in the ozone layer and its effect on weather - data he is sharing with U.S. scientists. Manuel Iturralde has a personal perspective on this new era of scientific d�tente. The 52-year-old Cuban geologist discovered the prehistoric sloths in partnership with Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mr. Iturralde and other Cuban scientists 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 the 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 Gilberto Silva, a Cuban bat specialist and the senior researcher at National Museum of Natural History in Havana. ''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 Mr. 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.'' Mr. Silva, 71, who has known Mr. Castro since the revolution, 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,'' he said. In the end, Mr. Silva's case was irrefutable: Cuban and U.S. plants and animals were geographically linked - and utterly different from those in the socialist nations thousands of miles away. Then, Mr. Silva told his compatriots about the holotypes. Holotypes are the single specimens chosen as models for newly discovered species, and Mr. 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 percent 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 Mr. Smith faced an even steeper uphill battle persuading U.S. officials to permit the new collaborations - one that continues today. U.S. authorities decide whether to issue visas or 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,'' Mr. Walter, the American Chemical Society president, said. ''The fact is, right now it is much easier for an American scientist to collaborate with a Russian scientist or a Chinese scientist than a Cuban scientist.'' ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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