• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 05 / 21 / 2011

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By LINDSAY PETERSON | The Tampa Tribune. May 18, 2011. Updated: May 20, 2011 - 11:07 AM. TAMPA. University research projects in a dozen disciplines came to a halt in Florida five years ago when the state Legislature passed what amounted to a ban on academic trips to Cuba.

The state ban held even when the Obama administration announced in January it was relaxing federal rules on travel to Cuba.

But Florida academic researchers allowed their hopes rise this week when they heard the U.S. Supreme Court had invited the administration to file a brief in a case challenging Florida's 2006 law.

The court hasn't made a decision on whether it will hear the case, filed by the ACLU of Florida and three state universities, but USF faculty are already envisioning what they would do if the ban were lifted.

USF marine scientist Frank Muller-Karger would return to his studies of the loop currents that sweep along Florida's coast, around Cuba and back to Florida.

Noel Smith, of USF's GraphicStudio, would mount an exhibit in Havana's national museum and put on a long-awaited seminar with Cuban artists.

Rachel May said she'd have the tools to "attract a new class of graduate students and faculty" to the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean, which she directs.

Practically every department at USF and universities across the state would benefit, Smith said.

Cuba, about the size of Louisiana, lies just 93 miles south of Key West.

"There's great opportunity to study anthropology, agronomy, migration studies, disaster studies, infectious diseases just about anything you could think of," Smith said.

A lot of this work was flourishing in 2006, then "the door slammed shut."

The state Legislature voted that year to prohibit public schools and universities from using government money to travel to countries deemed by the federal government to be "sponsors of terror" — Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba.

The law applied even to the use of private grant money given to a university.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida sued and a U.S. District judge in Miami declared the law unconstitutional in 2008. But a federal appeals court upheld the law in a case last year.

In March, the ACLU and faculty members at USF, the University of Florida and Florida International University asked the highest court in the land to hear their challenge.

"The consequences of letting this ruling stand is almost like allowing each state to dictate what research is permitted and not permitted," said Howard Simon, ACLU of Florida executive director.

"Letting this law stand would be a horrible blow to scholarship and the academic freedom of universities around the country," he said.

U.S. Rep. David Rivera, a Miami Republican, disagrees. Rivera sponsored the ban as a state representative in 2006.

"In Florida, the elected representatives of the people — the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Governor — overwhelmingly determined that taxpayer funds and taxpayer resources should not be used to facilitate or subsidize travel to terrorist nations," Rivera said in a statement.

"This law does not prevent any travel to terrorist countries. … This law simply prevents Florida's public funds or public resources from being utilized to facilitate such travel."

The way the law is written, however, Florida researchers can't use any time or money other than their own to travel to Cuba, Simon said.

And if they're students, they can't get credit for work resulting from a trip, May said.

Meantime, with the Obama administration easing federal restrictions on travel to Cuba, researchers from universities across the country are rushing to set up programs there.

"Florida's practically the only place not represented," May said. "It's embarrassing really."

The ban on research there "is like having this big hole in the curriculum," she said.

"We're like that cruise ship company that took Cuba off the map."

What worries Muller-Karger, of USF's College of Marine Science, is that Cuba is on the verge of drilling for oil in the Caribbean.

USF researchers are building charts of the way the ocean currents loop from the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba's coast and around to the Florida Keys and the eastern U.S. coast.

"It's very important to understand that what comes from the Caribbean comes to Florida and to the rest of the east coast," Muller-Karger said. "We were starting to develop a project to do that and it got stopped right in its tracks" when the travel ban passed.

The ban also interfered with research into the coral reefs near Cuba, which are healthy while Florida's reefs are dying.

"We were just trying to understand why we were losing them, and that got stopped in its tracks," he said.

"It's really a problem. … We are hurting ourselves. We are squelching our quest for knowledge and that's just wrong. It's un-American."

In 1999, USF's Smith began cultivating ties between USF and Cuba's artists, who among the best in the world, "bar none," she said.

GraphicStudio associates help artists from around the world reproduce prints and sculptures. The studio helps sell the pieces and uses part of the proceeds to pay for its research.

Now the studio's contact with the Cubans is almost exclusively via the Internet, with associates having to rely on emailed designs to reproduce the work.

Hoping for a break last year, Smith began organizing lectures and master classes on art reproduction, and an exhibit at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana.

"We were hoping and hoping and hoping they would do something" to lift the ban, she said. Instead, the federal appeals court upheld the state law.

"This whole thing since the ban started has been devastating," she said. "I had really lost hope."

Then she got the news of the possible U.S. Supreme Court hearing.

"I'm just so incredibly excited. It's just fantastic," she said.

"We in Florida share so much with Cuba that we see in our culture, our history and language. We should be the first in the country in research. We should be the first in going down there and creating academic ties and participating in new opportunities."

Simon said if the court decides to hear the case, oral arguments could begin in the fall.

Source: www2.tbo.com/news/education-news/2011/may/18/1/usfs-hopes-renewed-by-courts-interest-in-cuba-ban-ar-208802/