Social Science Research Council

To better understand the relationship between information, management and sustainability, specialists from the University of Florida will travel to Cuba's Instituto de Investigaciones en Fruticultura Tropical to join them in a program of applied research involving two citrus cooperatives. This project represents the first, critical investigation in a nascent collaborative effort: a participatory diagnosis of the trheats to cooperative economic, social and environmental sustainability.

To develop a pilot distance learning training course on agroecology available to students of most Cuban agricultural universities and other interested professionals including farmers. To provide these professionals and students with the basic ecological principles and knowledge necessary for the study of complex farming systems, so that these professionals are well prepared for the future design and management of sustainable agroecosystems.

To facilitate the participation of Dr. Reinalo Funes Monzote, Director of the Geohistorical Investigation Program at the Fundacion Antonio Nunez Jimenez de la Naturaleza y el Hombre in the American Society for Environmental History Conference in Victoria, Canada from March 31st to April 4, 2004. Dr. Monzote presented his paper entitled "Sugar, Deforestation, and Agro-Industrial Spaces in Cuba".

To bring botanist Reina Echevarria Cruz to the Missouri Botanical Garden for one month of advanced training in selected plant systematic techniques and initiation of the treatment of the Campanulaceae for the Flora de la Republica de Cuba, concentrating on the Siphocampylus. The information and computer programs she gathers will be conveyed to her colleagues at the Instituto de Ecologia y Sistematica for broader use in the botanical community in Cuba.

To facilitate the 30 day visit of one Cuban botanist to The New York Botanical Garden in order to conduct research, documentation and writing for Flora of the Greater Antilles and the Flora of Cuba.

To facilitate a research residency by Dr. Julio Barrios and Dr. Jose Machado at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as part of a three-way collaborative project on a variant coxsackievirus and the encephalomycarditis (EMC) virus.

To facilitate the participation of five Cuban librarians in the 122nd Annual Conference of the American Library Association, a joint conference with the Canadian Library Association in Toronto, June 19-25, 2003. The Cuban librarians presented a panel on "Libraries and Librarians in Cuba" as well as a poster session on "Libraries and Literacy in Cuba."

To enable Fundacion Amistad to coordinate, in conjunction with Casa de Las Americas and the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana, an archival collections management workshop. Topics of instruction include the handling of organizational records, and archives and records management. The workshop was taught by Lauren Lassleben, Archivist at the University of California, Berkeley and William M. Roberts, former University Archivist at UC Berkeley.

To facilitate the collaborative research of Dr. Shirley Graham and Reina Echevarria Cruz on the flowering plant family Lythraceae. Activities include the collection of the species in central and eastern Cuba, the consultation of major herbaria in the country to verify identifications of the Lythraceae collections, the resolution of remaining taxonomic problems, and the completion of the distributional database prior to map-making. This floristic study of the Lythraceae family will be included in a new Flora de la Republica de Cuba currently being compiled by a group of Cuban botanists, under the auspices of the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnologia y Medio Ambiente and the Ministerio de Educacion Superior.

To facilitate the collaboration of the Ocean Conservancy with the Centro de Investigaciones Marinas' "Cinderella Project," a major biological assessment of the northwest area of Cuba, termed the "Cinderella" region because it has been poorly studied in comparison with Cuba's other key marine areas. The scientific results from the project will be used to assess the conservation and sustainable uses of the marine biological diversity in the coastal zone of the region.

To facilitate the participation of Luis Montes de Oca, conservator at the Institute of History in Havana, to participate in the conference of the Photographic Materials group of the American Institute for Conservation, which took place in San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 7-8, 2003.

To enable the establishment of an institutional partnership between UC DATA/Survey Research Center and IDICT, facilitating the exchange of scientific and technical knowledge, and the development of IDICT's capabilities in data archiving and research dataset development.

To enable the establishment of an institutional partnership between the Hunter College School of Social Work and the University of Havana Department of Sociology and Social Work Program. The goals of the partnership are to support the development of community organizing in Cuba and to strengthen CUNY faculty knowledge of social work in an international context and community organizing in Caribbean countries.

To enable collaborative work by researchers from the two institutions on the Asteraceae (Sunflower Faimly), Myrsinaceae (Marlberry family), and Arecaceae or Plamae: Zona and Verdecia.

To enable NEDCC to provide internship training at its laboratory in Andover, Massachussetts for four Cuban paper conservators who participated in its advanced workshop on conservation of photographs presented in Havana in March 2002. The two-week internships provided hands-on practice and follow-up training under the supervision of the workshop instructor, Monique Fischer, NEDCC's Photographs Conservator.

To facilitate a short research residency by Dr. Soraya Castro (University of Havana) at American University, as part of a collaborative project with Dr. Philip Brenner and Dr. William LeoGrande on the foreign policymaking process in the United States as it relates to Cuba.

To assist collaborative research between the Institute of Ecology and Systematics (Havana) and the New York Botanical Garden (New York), through facilitating the interchange of five botanists from the two institutions. Research focused on the taxonomy and reproductive biology of Cuban native species belonging to three exemplar plant families-Rubiacae, Meilacae, and Dioscoreaceae-for a better understanding of their reproductive cycles and sustainable uses. These three species were chosen for their high potential values both as a source of secondary forest products and for their medicinal properties.

To enable University of Wisconsin researchers to present lectures and participate in a workshop in Havana on several aspects of geographic information system (GIS) development and management, in conjunction with the Cuban Hydrological and Geodetic Service, the Ministry of Computerization and Communications, and the Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment. It is expected to result in the establishment of a functional, registered Clearinghouse with sample metadata from several institutions, thereby incorporating Cuba into the ongoing international effort to increase information exchange between researchers, development specialists, and planners.

To facilitate the participation of Luis Frades, Deputy Director at the National Archives of Cuba, in the 30th AIC Annual Meeting to be held in Miami, Florida on June 6-11, 2002. Mr. Frades will present a poster project titled "A Work Guided to the Automation and Preservation of Documental Heritage of the National Archive of Cuba."

To facilitate the participation of Dr. Julio Barrios and Dr. Sonia Resik in international virology meetings where they will present their research results, which result from collaborative projects between the Instituto Pedro Kouri in Havana and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, supported by the ACLS/SSRC Working Group and other sources. Dr. Barrios will present his work on the sequencing of the genomes of Cosackievirus A9 at the Clinical Virology Symposium and meeting of the Pan-American Society for Clinical Virology in Clearwater Beach, Florida in April-May, 2002. Dr. Resik will present her work on the pace and nature of evolution and the effect of transmission on the course of the HIV virus evolution at the 27th annual Retrovirus Meeting at Cold Springs Habor, New York in May 2002.

To enhance the relationship between faculty and students at the Cuban National School of Public Health and at Tulane University's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Building upon a four-year collaboration between the two institutions, two Cuban faculty members will travel to Tulane to discuss the development of the Cuban institution's doctoral training program in public health with a focus on social and behavioral science.

To facilitate an exchange between Spelman College and ICIMAF to further work in the field of Computer Aided Geometric Design (CAGD), with implications for the problems of scientific visualization, geometric modeling, surface reconstruction from cross sections, and medical applications. Colm Mulcahy will lead a workshop on CAGD in Havana, while Victoria Hernández will lecture on Algebraic Splines in CAGD at Spelman College, both in the spring and summer of 2002.

To facilitate a five-day workshop on the conservation of photographs, in coordination with the Institute of History in Havana. The workshop will be led by NEDCC Photographs Conservator Monique Fischer and will involve 5-6 students who are experienced conservators from several Cuban institutions.

To facilitate the participation of the Director of the Cuban National Archives, Berarda Salabarría, in the XXXVI International Conference of the Roundtable of Archives Directors, which will take place in Marseilles, France in September 2002.

To facilitate participation by four senior Cuban archaeologists in two joint US-Cuban panels on Cuban archaeology at the 2002 annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The two panels are organized by University of Michigan graduate student Shannon Lee Dawdy and by Cuban archaeologist Gabino La Rosa. Cuban participants include Gabino La Rosa, Lourdes Dom?nguez, Ram?n Dacal Moure, and Pedro Godo.

To facilitate participation in the International Conference on Photon Scattering in Condensed Matter, to be held at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire on August 12-17, 2001. Mr. De Leon will speak on a continuum phenomenological model for long-wave-length optical modes in semiconductor heterostructures.

To assist in training multiple Cuban institutions in book conservation and reparation. This project builds on a January 2000 conference on the same topic, held at Cuba's National Archive and supported by the Working Group. Participants will receive training and the necessary supplies for conservationally-sound repair of valuable research collections. The workshop is being organized by Michigan State Univesrity's Assistant Director for Access & Preservation, Jeanne Drewes, and the IDICT's Lourdes Machado.

To underwrite translation into English of Cuban anthropologist Gabino la Rosa Corzo's book Los Palenques del Oriente De Cuba: Resistencia y Acoso. Published by Cuba's Academy Press in 1991, this book details the history of runaway slave communities (palenques) hidden in the mountain chains of eastern Cuba between 1737-1850. La Rosa's work questions earlier studies of the palenques and suggests that previous scholarship may have exaggerated the importance of these communities.

To facilitate participation by Cuban biologist Pedro Herrera in a symposium on phylogeny and biogeography of Caribbean plants at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America and the American Society of Plant Taxonomists in Albuquerque, New Mexico, August 12-16, 2001. The symposium has been organized by biologist Timothy McDowell (Eastern Tennessee State University); Pedro Herrera, of Cuba's national Herbarium, will be one of ten invited speakers.

To assist an ongoing research collaboration on genetic epidemiology by epidemiologist Ruth Ottman and physician Celia Llanusa.This grant will allow the researchers, who have collaborated since 1999, to team-teach a course on the subject in Cuba, and to travel to two international conferences on epilepsy and human genetics.

To sponsor participation in the 15th International Arachnology Congress, where biologist and director of Cuba's Speleological Society Abel Perez will discuss his work on "The True Taxonomic position of the Genus Neoscotolemon Roewer" (a species Mr. Perez discovered in the province of Pinar del Rio, Cuba) and present a paper on "Female Genitalic Dimorphism in a Pholcid Spider."

To facilitate travel by five Cuban historians of science to the 21st Annual International Congress of History of Science and Technology in Mexico City, in July 2001. The five scholars, all of whom are researchers at Havana's Museum of the History of Science in Cuba, will present on a variety of topics concerning the history of Cuban science and technology. Participants include Orieta Alvarez Sandoval, Pedro Rodriguez Gonzalez, Robert Diaz Martin, Jose Altshuler and Pedro Pruna Goodall.

To assist in efforts to establish a genetics counseling center in Holguin, Cuba. Genetic counselors from Beth Israel Medical Center will offer guidance to staff of Holguin's master's program in Genetic counseling, as well as install a cutting-edge library of genetic counseling materials and software at the center.

To facilitate participation by Cuban historians in a seminar held jointly with US colleagues, following which scholars will also present papers at Florida International University's Third Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. This project builds on a 1999 seminar held in the Provincial Archives of Cienfuegos, Cuba, which brought together Cuban and US scholars working on the formation of nationalist ideology and its relation to race in Cuba.

To facilitate publication in English of a recent book by the editor of one of Cuba's leading cultural and intellectual journals.

To facilitate the participation by Cuban scholars in a special panel in MESA's November 2000 meeting in Orlando, Florida. Four Cuban scholars from Havana's Center for Studies of Africa and the Middle East (CEAMO) will present papers on topics including recent Islamic movements and Middle East International Relations.

To facilitate a brief research residency for the director of the popular communications department of the Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial Center, during which he will receive training on HTML coding and on research techniques involving the Internet and commercial databases available through the DataCenter.

To facilitate participation in the Latin American Sedimentology Congress, in March 2000, in Mar de Plata, Argentina. Dr. Rojas spoke on carbonates found in Cuba's volcanic rock, compared with those found in rock of other countries of the Antilles.

To facilitate participation in the XIV International Archive Congress held in Seville, Spain, in September 2000. Ms. Mujica, who worked for 10 years in Cuba's National Archive, will present a paper on the Bourbon creation of the General Archive of the Royal Hacienda of the Island of Cuba in 1840.

To underwrite the travel by collaborative research project directors Joseph Scarpaci and Victor Marín which examines shared ideas, technology, and socio-political projects of 19th century Cuba and the US, as expressed through the urban planning of Cuban Governor Miguel Tacón and US- based architect Pierre L'Enfant.

To facilitate a visit by two US museum exhibitionists to consult with Cuban colleagues to develop design strategies, evaluate ongoing projects and conceptualize and develop new ideas for a new biodiversity exhibit at Cuba's National Museum of Natural History.

In partial support of a multi-disciplinary course sequence on Cuban culture, team-taught by US and Cuban professors, offered by a consortia of California Universities and coordinated by California State Polytechnic University. Spanning three quarters, the course will encompass units devoted to "Contemporary Cuba" and "Crossroads in the Caribbean: Cuban Culture, Identity and the Arts at Intersections of Everyday Life," as well as student-devised independent research projects. Participating Cuban scholars have been drawn from several academic and cultural institutes, including the Group for Comprehensive Development of Havana, the Center for Studies of the US (of the University of Havana) and The Superior Art Institute of Cuba. In additions, several independent Cuban scholars will serve as visiting lecturers.

To facilitate exchanges between the American and Cuban Chemical Societies. Board members from both scholarly organizations will meet in the US and in Cuba to identify and organize joint chemical research events, elaborate joint research projects on chemical education and medicinal chemistry in Cuba, and identify areas of mutual interest.

To prepare, for US distribution, subtitled videotapes of a selection of important work by Cuban video artists. The project involves transporting Cuban film and videotapes to the US, where they will be transferred to digital video, subtitled and organized into a traveling exhibition.

To support participation by Cuban botanists in the New York Botanical Garden's Flora of the Greater Antilles Symposium, to be held in June 2000. The symposium will provide a forum for reviewing the biological and environmental bases of the diversity of plants and fungi of the Caribbean. Cuban botanists will present research findings related to the systematics or floristic studies of each participant's area of expertise, and will remain at the Botanical Garden for an additional week to consult its extensive herbarium and library collections.

To support a conference in Havana addressing current trends in digital technology and scholarly communications and their potential impact on the work of Cuban archive professionals. The third in a series of related activities involving between the NEDCC and Cuban institutions, this project comprises part of a Cuban initiative to train personnel in digital conversion techniques and their uses providing access to retrospective library archives collections.

To support travel to the University of Michigan's Zoological Museum by icthiology curator Rafael Quiñones, of the Museum of Natural History of Cuba. At the Zoological Museum Mr. Quiñones will identify samples of Cuban fish of the Synbranchidae and Fundulidae families, which he will compare to specimens he will bring from the Cuban museum's collection. This exchange is part of an ongoing project at the Museum of Natural History of Cuba to improve museum curation.

To facilitate completion of a collaborative empirical study of secondary students in Cuba and their official organization, the Federación de Estudiantes de Enseñanza Media (FEEM-Federation of Secondary Students). Funds will support data processing and analysis, and preparation of a book-length manuscript, drawing on fieldwork already completed by the two principal investigators.

Funds were provided to facilitate the participation by four Cuban Sociologists (Aurelio Alonso, Mayra Espina, Ernel González Mastrapa and Juan Luís Martin Chávez) in a series of panels of the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, August 7-10.

Funds have been allocated to facilitate a visit by Dr. de Armas to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he will have access to arachnid specimens crucial to his research.

Funds have been provided to facilitate the participation by Ms. Baró and Ms. Fernández in the 16th annual International Botanical Congress, to be held in St. Louis, Missouri in August 1999.

Funds have been allocated to enable Mr. Genaro to complete a research project on sweat bees at the Ronald McKinley National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Dr. Halstead utilized funds awarded him to visit Havana's Instituto de Medicina Tropical Pedro Kouri in May 1999, where he worked closely with tropical disease specialists at the Institute and assisted in readying articles for publication. Research was focussed on the causes of an unusually severe 1997 outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever in Santiago de Cuba.

Resources have been allocated to assist in Dr. Iturralde-Vinent's attendance at a meeting on marine life during the eocene-oligocene transition, to be held in Olympia, Washington in August 1999. Dr. Iturralde-Vinent will speak on the eocene-oligocene transition as the formative period for the development of primitive biota in the Antilles.

Funds were provided to facilitate Dr. Machado's participation in the American Academy of Neurology's 1999 meeting in Toronto, in April. Dr. Machado, a member of the Academy and a specialist on Death and Coma, delivered a paper at the conference.

Funds have been allocated to facilitate collaborative work in herbarium conservation in order to better preserve the collections of the Herbarium of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, update the collections data base, mount new collections and improve storage conditions for specimens.

Funds were provided to faciliate Dr. Pruna's participation in a meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) held in Oaxaca, Mexico, July 6-10, where Dr. Pruna presented a paper as part of a panel entitled "Histories of Tropical American Field Science and Conservation."

Funds have been made available for a joint research project on disease-carrying arthropods found in both Cuba and the southeastern US. The project will involve collaborative research on and experimental control of dengue fever vectors, and will include seminars by US scholars on recent research.

Funds were allocated to facilitate the participation by three Cuban sociologists (Niurka Pérez Rojas, Dayma Echevarríaand Angel Mario Suero Rodríguez) in the annual meeting of the US-based Rural Sociological Society, held August 4-8, in Chicago. Participants presented on Cuban rural sociology.

Funds have been allocated to permit Mr. Silverberg to present a series of lectures at the University of Havana's School of Architecture. Mr. Silverberg will speak on his Societal Impact Matrix, a tool for analyzing the environmental and societal sustainability of housing.

Partial support was awarded the CEAP to assist in the preparation of a study of the shared history of Cuba and Key West ("Cayo Hueso"). The project traces trans-strait ties since Key West's foundation in 1822 through turn-of-the-century links established when Cuban cigar industries moved to Florida, and to Key West's role in Cuban exile movements for island independence.

Funds facilitated Cuban professor and former diplomat Carlos Alzugaray's participation in the 1999 International Studies Association conference held in Washington, D.C. February 16-21.

The two collaborating institutions are exploring the utility of mycorrhizal fungi in sustainable agriculture. In the absence of inorganic fertilizers such as phosphorus, mycorrhizal fungi offer an organic, sustainable way to increase plant yield. The project seeks to make available in English and to international journals the advanced research Cuban scientists have conducted on this subject, as well as to provide Cuban laboratories with new statistical software packages. Joint research on fungi diversity on Cuba will benefit ongoing research at both participating institutions.

Funds were awarded toward the continuation and expansion of an ongoing program of collaborative research in virology between the partner institutions listed above. Collaborative work to date has involved the sharing of techniques for laboratory diagnosis of viral diseases, exchange of students and personnel, and joint publication of results. The program focuses on the study of coxsackievirus (closely related to the polioviruses) and its connection to malnutrition.

Funds were allocated to facilitate efforts by the Havana-based anthropology museum to improve an exhibition space, develop educational materials and restore and protect collections.

ACLS/SSRC funding supported a microfilming workshop held at the National Archives in Cuba. The conference covered fundamentals of microfilm technology and included a hands-on session with cutting edge technologies. Funding also covered an intensive course on photographic conservation held at the North East Document Conservation Center for Cuban archivists on October 12-23, 1998, at which Cuban conservators received both classroom instruction and hands-on experience.

Funds were awarded to permit Dr. Utset's participation in a week-long conference sponsored by the American Meteorological Society in Dallas, Texas, January 11-15, 1999, where Dr. Utset attended panels on global climate change.