Science 9 June 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5779, p. 1450
DOI: 10.1126/science.312.5779.1450

News of the Week
SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION:
Florida Law Bans Academics From Doing Research in Cuba
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Excerpts of article here:

Beginning next month, Florida researchers won't be able to travel to Cuba to carry out any studies. Although the United States allows such interactions, the state has banned faculty members at Florida's public universities from having any contact with the island nation under a law enacted last week. "This law shuts down the entire Cuban research agenda," says Damián Fernández, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami.

Environmental researchers are also chagrined by the new law. FIU geographer Jennifer Gebelein, for example, is currently in Cuba looking at the impact on Cuba's coral reefs of land-cover changes around the island. The work is important from a conservation standpoint "because Cuba's coral reefs are a center of marine and biological diversity in the Caribbean," says Lauretta Burke, a geographer and senior associate at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. Gebelein is scrambling to finish her fieldwork before the law goes into effect on 1 July.