Gasser in Cuba
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Michael Gasser is a computer scientist on the IU Bloomington campus and a member of CUBAmistad, the grassroots organization that forged the sister-city status between the Bloomington and Santa Clara, Cuba, in 1999.
Late last year, Indiana University and the Universidad Central de la Villas (UCLV) in Santa Clara signed an agreement of cooperation toward laying a foundation for a working relationship between the two schools. Regulations, however, have curtailed for the time being the educational exchange that both institutions had been anticipating; visa restrictions, for instance, have delayed a course on sustainable development planned by geography professor Dennis Conway and telecommunications professor Ron Osgood, to be taught in rural Cuba.
Gasser got involved in CUBAmistad after reading a story in the local newspaper, and though he didn’t know a lot about Cuba, “I had a romantic kind of feeling about it,” he said.
Cuba is a land of contradictions. Gasser said there’s “a strange combination of poverty and a complete absence of it.” The country’s health-care provision is second in the Western hemisphere only to Canada, and is free to its citizens; a state-supported medical school in Havana trains physicians throughout the world who must promise to practice in the poorest sections of the world in exchange for their educations. Yet visitors to Cuba often pack their suitcases with such scarce commodities as aspirin, notebooks, pencils and CDs.
“The confusion comes because you know that so many want to leave, some with permission and some without,” Gasser said. “If things are so good, why would they want to leave? You see the contrasts all the time. It’s a very poor country.”
Yet Cuba is rightfully proud, Gasser said, of its educational system. Literacy figures are extraordinarily high.
Next month, Pastors for Peace will be coming through Bloomington to collect medical and household supplies, wheelchairs, computers, musical instruments and humanitarian aid for its Friendship Caravan, which gets supplies into Cuba via Mexico.
Read more about sister cities at this Web site:
http://www.uscsca.org/bloomington-santaclara.htm
Read about other outstanding IU employees. http://homepages.indiana.edu/071803/text/atworkarchive.html
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