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.
Cuba is one of six countries that the U.S. State Department has designated as a "sponsor of terrorism," although U.S. scholars can travel to Cuba for research if they first obtain a government license. The Florida measure, which passed the state legislature unanimously, essentially closes that loophole by disallowing state-funded institutions from using public or private funds to facilitate travel to such countries. (The list includes North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Sudan.)
A newly enacted Florida law, sponsored by David Rivera, will force the state's academics to abandon research projects such as this University of Florida-led study of Cuban agriculture. "Florida's taxpayers don't want to see their resources being used to support or subsidize terrorist regimes at a time when America is fighting a war on terror," says David Rivera, a Republican Cuban-American state legislator who introduced the bill. Florida researchers won’t miss out on anything by not going to Cuba, he adds: "I don’t think there’s anything there that cannot be studied in the Dominican Republic or other Caribbean islands."...
Marine scientist Frank Muller-Karger of the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, says that Cuba's plans for offshore oil exploration make scientific exchanges between Florida and the island more important than ever before. "Any major pollution event off the coast of Cuba may reach Florida, and many important fisheries in the Keys may be connected to Cuba," he says....
Fernández and others are backing a plan by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida to challenge the law in court....
Comment. Rivera made a mistake to supplement his national security rationale with a supposed scientific rationale (there's nothing to study in Cuba that can't be studied in the Dominican Republic). That opens his argument to rebuttal by people who actually know what they're talking about. When will politicians learn that the threat of terrorism can justify any new prohibition all on its own?
Update (June 12, 2006). The Florida Sun-Sentinel has published a sensible op-ed against this inane idea.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/10/2006 12:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
