Abstract
Despite the initially unfavourable situation of subalternity and threats coming from outside, by freely resorting to a wide range of sources of support, in the surprisingly short time of less than 15 years a critical mass of scientists with a solid basic preparation was reached and the foundations were laid for an advanced, organic scientific system. Around the mid-1960s a lively discussion developed involving scientific, intellectual and student milieus as well as foreign specialists, about what directions and choices to take in order to promote scientific growth that would meet the country’s basic social and economic needs and promote human progress. While collaboration with the Soviet Union was strengthened, decisive contributions also came from western scientists, for instance in the summer schools held from 1968 to 1973. Particularly relevant was the contribution of western, mainly Italian, biologists in training a school of Cuban geneticists and specialists in other fields of modern biology in which, because of its ideological hostility, Soviet science had remained far behind.
…quality of life lies in knowledge, in culture. Values are what constitute true quality of life, the supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter and clothing. [Ignacio Ramonet and Fidel Castro, My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, 2007]
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Notes
- 1.
Dr. Daniel Stolik, professor of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Havana, and former Director of the previous School of Physics, personal communication.
- 2.
For instance, when the decision to build the big high-energy physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, was taken in the 1950s, with European international cooperation and with the explicit approval of the US, the French proposal to also build a nuclear reactor there was discarded. On the other hand, we recall that at least in the 1960s and 1970s, an overwhelming percentage of investments of physics laboratories for equipment went to the United States.
- 3.
See the previous footnote.
- 4.
The Soviet Union was the first among space-monitoring countries to follow the path of international cooperation. In 1965 the Soviet Academy of Sciences established a council on international cooperation in the field of exploration and use of outer space. In subsequent years a large-scale, complex program of space research, Interkosmos, was started jointly with socialist countries and some non-aligned nations. It was designed to give nations on friendly terms with the Soviet Union access to manned and unmanned space missions.
- 5.
We recall that the origin of the backwardness of Soviet biological sciences has to be traced back to the so-called “Lysenko case”. In fact, genetics in the USSR had during the 1930s an internationally appreciated scholar, Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943). However, around mid-1930s a Soviet agronomist, Trofim Denisovič Lysenko (1898–1976), disputed classical genetics, holding a theory (with a Lamarckist mark), in keeping with Marxist concept of dialectical materialism, along which acquired characters, from environmental and nutrition changes, could become part of the hereditary of a species characteristics and be transmitted to progeny. Lysenko promised rapid progress in Soviet agriculture, violently clashed with Vavilov, and succeeded to expel him from the presidency of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He was strongly supported by Stalin, while Vavilov was prosecuted for plot and sabotage, and died in jail the day before his death sentence was performed. Lysenko’s theories were not confirmed and gradually declined, but only after Stalin’s death the hegemony of these theories definitively declined, leaving, however, a deep delay in Soviet genetics.
- 6.
The initiatives and the contributions that we discuss in this paragraph have been reconstructed through contacts with various witnesses and some documents that have provided us: the Italian biologists Paolo Amati, Marcello Buiatti, Sancia Gaetani, Luciano and Marina Terrenato, Paola Verani, and moreover Colombo’s widow, Maria Cristina Fernandez Lacret, and Gisela Martínez. The latter, was Colombo’s collaborator, and successor at the direction of the Department of Biochemistry (subsequently Department of Molecular Biology) of the Institute of Haematology in Havana.
- 7.
James Shapiro, Curriculum Vitae, http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/cv.shtml. Last access March 15, 2016.
- 8.
For his thirty-year collaboration with Cuba, in 1998 the Council of State awarded Pablo Amati the Finlay medal, the highest Cuban honour for scientific merits.
- 9.
From a previous institute founded in 1937 by Pedro Kourí (1900–1964), a prestigious Cuban physician and researcher; in the 1960s, after Kourí’s death, the institute had declined.
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Baracca, A., Franconi, R. (2016). Reaching a Critical Mass and Laying the Foundations of an Advanced Scientific System. In: Subalternity vs. Hegemony, Cuba's Outstanding Achievements in Science and Biotechnology, 1959-2014. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40609-1_4
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