A Perspective on Physics in Cuba

Abstract

The author is Cuban by birth: the son of an Afro-Cuban mother and an Afro-American father. He spent the first 8 years of his life attending schools in Havana and New York City. He left Cuba in 1958 so as to gain a more uninterrupted educational experience. This led to his PhD in theoretical physics from Columbia University in 1978, followed by a post-doctoral appointment at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He returned to Cuba in 1980 as a member of an academic tour organized by the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. This provided an introduction to various government-run scientific facilities in Havana and the easternmost city of “Santiago de Cuba” in the province of Oriente.