Editors' note: This is a transcription of our “Political Science Podcast” hosted by Marko Grdešić with Helen Yaffe, which took place on September 20th 2025. Helen Yaffe is a professor of Latin American Political Economy at Glasgow University in the UK. The interview is available here.
Grdešić:
Hello professor Yaffe. Thank you very much for joining us and thank you very much for this opportunity to talk about your research on Cuba. Let me start first by asking you what you feel are some of the largest misconceptions when it comes to Cuba for people like us coming from a Western point of view and, connected to that, what are some of the hurdles when somebody like you tries to do research on Cuba?
Yaffe:
Rostow, thank you. What Walt Rostow called the take-off stage. That progress was interrupted by the Cuban revolution. Fidel Castro and later Raul Castro were synonymous with the revolution. So all decisions, all new ventures, all new policies were Fidel's decisions or Raul's decisions. There's no civil society, it's completely repressed, there's no democracy, Cuba is a dictatorship. We have these bearded men making all the decisions, apparently they know about everything that's happening in every corner. Also, in the period when the Soviet Union still existed, that Cuba's international interventions, its internationalism, was all at the behest of the Soviet Union, so that the Cubans were a satellite state.
Grdešić:
Rostow.
Yaffe:
Rostow, hvala. Prema onome što je Rostow nazvao fazom uzleta. Taj je napredak prekinula kubanska revolucija. Fidel Castro, a kasnije i Raul Castro, bili su sinonimi za revoluciju. Dakle, sve odluke, svi novi pothvati, sve nove politike bile su Fidelove ili Raulove odluke. Nema civilnog društva, ono je potpuno potisnuto, nema demokracije, Kuba je diktatura. Imamo te bradate muškarce koji donose sve odluke, oni znaju sve što se događa u svakom kutku zemlje. Također, u razdoblju kada je Sovjetski Savez još postojao, kubanska vanjska politika i njezin internacionalizam su zapravo djelovali po nalozima Sovjetskog Saveza, tako da su Kubanci bili satelitska država.
As I said, these key tenets define the paradigm of Cubanology. I think that a lot of my work has been to try and challenge those key tenets. But, on the other side, there's also a tendency to see Cuba as such an exception. Cuban exceptionalism. So what happens in Cuba can't be replicated anywhere else. That what Cuba has achieved in health and education, and so on, which is extraordinary, is sort of not relevant to talk about, because Cuba is such an outlier. And the other aspect of my work has been trying to locate Cuba within a broader framework of understanding the challenge of development for underdeveloped countries, which are the majority of countries in the world, the Global South, which have been subject to hundreds of years of colonialism and imperialism. Understanding that when the Cubans chose revolution, and state planning, and state control, and investments in health, and education - it's because they chose socialism, because they saw socialism as the best solution to those historical development challenges.
I feel like in the last ten, twenty years, Cubanology has become less dominant because there are new young researchers from the West – I'm not talking about the Cubans because of course they're doing their own thing – who are doing research on Cuba that is outside Cubanology. They don't have such a political agenda. They're interested in studying Cuba as a country with people, not as a dogma and as an ideology or part of the Cold War. That doesn't mean that those researchers don't come from their own precepts, if they have a concept of what democracy is. For example, democracy is a multi-party electoral system, usually with a capitalist economy. And they look at Cuba and they say: “Well, that doesn't exist, therefore there's no democracy in Cuba.” I think those are the key paradigms and that's been where I've located my work, because so much of what has happened in Cuba, such extraordinary developments, are not well known in the West. And I think that's what I was trying to do with my latest book.
Grdešić:
Speaking of which, your book We are Cuba! looks at the way Cuban society and its political system actually function. In that respect, how would you say the ways the Cuban regime pursues democratic legitimacy differ from what we usually think when we say democracy? We usually have multi-party elections in mind. They obviously don't have quite that system, but they do have some sort of democratic legitimacy. How do they go about this in the daily workings of the system?
Yaffe:
I've just submitted for publication a chapter on Cuban democracy and participation in revolutionary Cuba, which is coming out in a new book edited by Ana Kladnik on socialist democracy. And I point to five mechanisms of Cuban democracy. I, by the way, do not regard Cuba as a dictatorship, and I don't refer to it as a regime. Like many people who have actually studied the system of elections and representation and participation, I've concluded that Cuba is extremely democratic in the original sense of democracy, in the sense of people's power.
First, there is a very comprehensive system, national system of people's power, which starts with elections on the level of street committees. These are rotating elections where the majority of Cubans participate and have some experience at some point of serving. A lot, not a majority, but a lot of Cubans have experience of being representatives, they're accountable and so on. I'll get to that in a minute. So that works at the neighborhood level, the municipal level, the provincial level and the national level. I remember going into a mountainous rural area of Cuba, near Guantanamo, which, as you know, is legally occupied by the United States, and I was speaking to their local representative, who was a black Cuban woman, and we asked her: “How close do you feel to the center of power?” And she said: “I am in the center of power, because I go to the national parliament and I am one of 600 national delegates in the National Assembly.” The national assembly is the highest decision-making body in Cuba.
The second mechanism of democracy is neighborhood representation. So this starts very early on with street committees that are set up in 1960 and they're in every street and they start out as necessary for vigilance because this is the era just after the revolution where there's a lot of sabotage and terrorism that is being supported from the United States, and funded and organized from the United States and the internal opposition. Later on, they set up People's Councils during a moment of crisis. When the collapse of the Soviet bloc happens and Cuba's GDP plummets by a third, there is a scarcity of everything. And this is something that's also a characteristic for Cuba. In moments of crisis the Cuban state has responded by deepening democracy, giving Cuban citizens more responsibility and more resources to take control of their own community. So that's really interesting.
The third mechanism of democracy in Cuba is national debates and consultations. There are many examples, but very recently we've had national referendums about a new constitution, which was approved in 2019, but the process before the referendum was a process in which millions of Cubans went to debates organized in their neighborhoods, in their workplaces, in their study centers, cultural centers, where they debated and argued. And many elements of the constitution were amended in a response to the opinions of the Cuban population. So it's not a paper exercise, it's a real ability to have leverage. And then the other recent example was a similar process that happened and actually was a very strong debate in relation to the new Families Code, which was very controversial to some elements of Cuban society, which are still very affected by sort of chauvinist attitudes or Catholicism, because it gave progressive rights for LGBT+, and is recognized now as one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in the world. So that's the third.
The fourth is the organizations of the masses. And these actually really are key for mobilizing people from the very early 1960s. Some of them predate the revolution like the University Federation and the trade unions. There are 19 independent trade unions in Cuba funded through members' contributions. And I could give many examples, we'd be here for hours, but I could give many examples of where they've had leverage on policy, where they have actually been able to stop a policy that's been implemented to say they're not happy with the impact on workers and so on. The organizations of the masses include workers and students, as I said. Then also small farmers, the women’s federation. You also have the Union of Young Communists, you have pioneers, who are children between 7 and 14. Unbelievably, they have a seat at the table for any discussions on national policy. And then the high school students as well.
The fifth mechanism of democracy I would argue is democratic access to resources and opportunities. So that is the fact that Cuba has free universal access to healthcare and education at any level. You can be in your seventies and you decide you want to study biochemistry, and you can go to the university for free, that's guaranteed in the constitution. But another way to look at this is in terms of living standards. There is recent study by Jason Hickel, who's a social anthropologist who does a lot of research on the environment. He assessed the Cuban system of food distribution and the low rate of malnutrition, and the low rate of death from malnutrition in Cuba as a result of it, and then compared that to other countries around the world within a small period, I believe it was from 1990 to 2015. Their study concluded that 16 million people had died around the world because they didn't have the Cuban system of food distribution. So, this is an element of democracy, which is excluded from discussions about democracy in neoliberal countries, in capitalist countries, where it's all about liberal economics. It's the sort of politics to go with liberal economics. You have the right, you have freedoms to do this and that, but there's no discussion about having the resources, having the material conditions to be able to fulfill those freedoms.
Grdešić:
You mentioned briefly the “special period.” So, this is the period after the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba found itself in a very precarious situation. How did Cuba survive this period?
Yaffe:
Well, that's the subtitle of my book: How a revolutionary people have survived into a post-Soviet world? And one chapter, a key chapter of the book, is about the special period. So, why was Cuba so vulnerable? Cuba was particularly vulnerable to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. It had more state ownership than other countries in the socialist bloc. It was extremely dependent on the Soviet Union mainly, but also other socialist bloc countries for trade and investment. That collapsed. There was an 87 percent fall in investment and trade. And so now, in this new context, the Cubans have to reinsert themselves into an international capitalist market dominated by the United States, which has openly declared its intention to destroy the Cuban revolution and to revert the country back to capitalism, and to semi-colonial domination. So, the story of how Cuba survived is really rather extraordinary and it merits examination.
We can look at the economic measures that were taken. The reinsertion into the international economy happened on the basis of services exports, tourism first, and then the export of professional services, which are mainly medical services. And then you can look at the way that the state basically made the decision that it wouldn't follow the domino effect and transition to capitalism, and understood that in order to preserve socialism, you had to have the commitment of the population. They couldn't be forced into accepting socialism in those circumstances. You had to use politics and ideology to convince the population, but you also had to alleviate the worst elements of shortage and suffering. The government, even while the economy shrank, actually increased the social investments in keeping people fed and keeping people employed. Sometimes they didn't have productive work because industries had collapsed. But, the function of work in Cuba is more than just what they produce, right? It's a political forum, it's a place where people go and they have food, so they have free lunches or free breakfast and so on. They organize, they have social events together, so they kept people in employment.
There's a graph that I've got in my book, which is rather extraordinary. I don't think you'd see this anywhere else in the world. It has two lines. One line is the GDP, which absolutely plummets from 1990. It's already going down before the collapse of the Soviet bloc because the Soviet Union stopped providing Cuba with goods, from contracted pre-agreed preferential prices they went to market prices. So it collapses. But at the same time, the line for employment goes up. In any capitalist country, if you have a recession, unemployment goes up. And in Cuba, actually, the opposite happened.
So they protected people through employment, but also equally, the measures that came from the bottom up. The fact that people saw empty plots of land and started to sow fruit and vegetables, which were for them and their neighbors, and then the neighborhood got involved. And that sparked an urban agricultural movement, which really took off nationally. The government saw it, appreciated it, and helped it to spread. They organized the old farmers, the old campesinos, as they say, peasants in Cuba, who had experience from decades before, to go around to cooperatives and small private farmers, and teach them how to use oxen instead of tractors, because the tractors were left to rust. They had too many tractors. There was no fuel, there were no chemical fertilizers, so they had to learn to use organic techniques, and all the rest of it. It's an incredible story of a society finding collective solutions to daily problems. campesinose, kako kažu, seljake na Kubi, koji su imali iskustva od prije nekoliko desetljeća, da idu u zadruge i među male privatne poljoprivrednike te da ih nauče kako koristiti volove umjesto traktora, jer su traktori bili ostavljeni da hrđaju. Imali su previše traktora. Nije bilo goriva, nije bilo kemijskih gnojiva, pa su morali naučiti koristiti organske tehnike i sve ostalo. To je nevjerojatna priča o društvu koje pronalazi kolektivna rješenja za svakodnevne probleme.
Hitch-hiking was another one. So a rule came in that anyone who had a state vehicle – so the state had given people a car or there were state trucks – when they came to the amarillo, which is the person who stands at the side of the road wearing a yellow uniform with a clipboard, they had to stop and say where they were going. And the person with the clipboard knew where the hitchhikers were, what were their destinations, and they would say: “Right, those of you who are going to Pinar del Rio, you get in this car, you get in this van.” I was in Cuba in 1995 and I traveled up and down the country hitch-hiking through this system. And even today in Cuba they have a new fuel crisis, which is a direct result of the Trump administration's really tightening very punitive sanctions, threatening shipping tankers taking oil to Cuba. They're going to fine them, then they threaten their insurance companies, the insurance companies' insurance companies, and it just goes on and on. And people still move around Cuba hitch-hiking and people stop, and they help each other, people they don't know, because that's part of the consciousness that they have from that period. amarillo, a to je osoba koja stoji uz cestu u žutoj uniformi s pločom za pisanje, svatko mora stati i reći kamo ide. Osoba s pločom je znala gdje su autostoperi, koja su im odredišta, i rekla bi: „Dobro, oni od vas koji idu u Pinar del Rio, sjednite u ovaj auto, sjednite u ovaj kombi.“ Ja sam bila na Kubi 1995. godine i putovala sam gore-dolje po zemlji autostopirajući zahvaljujući ovom sustavu. Nastavlja se čak i danas, kada na Kubi imaju novu krizu s gorivom. To je izravna posljedica veoma pooštrenih i vrlo kaznenih sankcija Trumpove administracije. Prijete tankerima koji prevoze naftu na Kubu. Kaznit će ih, zatim prijete njihovim osiguravajućim društvima, osiguravajućim društvima osiguravajućih društava, i to se tako nastavlja u nedogled. Ali ljudi se još uvijek kreću po Kubi autostopirajući i ljudi se zaustavljaju, i pomažu jedni drugima, ljudima koje ne poznaju, jer je to dio svijesti koju imaju iz tog razdoblja.
Grdešić:
So talking about the economic system and economic policy also takes us back to your first book, which is on Che Guevara and his contribution to the economic debate, both in Cuba but also internationally. I think people would be surprised to learn that Che Guevara was such an intellectual who read so many different things and taught these things as well to his comrades in Cuba. So what would you say are the main points of emphasis when it comes to his view on how to run an economic system?
Yaffe:
I mean, this is the topic of my PhD and my first book, but I'll try and synthesize it in a few words. So when I was doing my PhD, I would say: “I'm doing a PhD on Che Guevara's economic ideas.” And most people would say: “I didn't know he had any” (laughter). In fact, he really studied Marxism and had a very critical view. So I tend to characterize his influences from three different strands. So, the first was his reading of Marx, but not just CapitalAnd there are fascinating stories about the socialist bloc exchange. After the Cuban revolution, the Soviet Union sent a professor to give Marxism classes to the top, the leadership of the Cuban government. And Che Guevara asked him to come to the Ministry of Industries when he was minister from February 1961. And they did sessions in the Ministry of Industry. They'd start at nine at night, after the working day, and often they went on to four in the morning, and apparently this professor was at his wits' end with Che. He was pulling his hair out because Che Guevara was so rigorous and critical of everything that was being said and he used to read Capital and say: “Look at the role of the operation of the law of value. The Soviet manual of political economy says we must use the law of value to develop socialism. This is a contradiction.” Debates that took place were described as boxing matches and really showed his penetrating analysis. And he wouldn't just accept what someone said. He'd want to drill deeper into it. So the first was Marxism.
The second source of knowledge or influence was from the debates that were taking place contemporaneously in the socialist bloc. This is a moment when there's a lot of economic stagnation and lower productivity. And the response in most socialist countries was to make, as Che Guevara conceived it, concessions to the market. So, instead of getting to the root of the problem and saying why are these things happening, why is production or productivity low, why is there a lack of incentives, why are workers absent and so on, instead of trying to deal with it within the socialist framework, it was always opening more space to market mechanisms. He was aware of those comments. For example, I think in 1962, someone had asked him: “Do you know about the debates at the latest Polish Communist Party congress? Do you know about the new system?” He said: “Oh, I know that new system. I knew it from Argentina, it's called capitalism” (laughter). Although there's the language issue and obviously the material would have been limited, he did read in French. I'm not sure about English, but certainly Spanish, of course. He was aware of those debates.
Now, the third influence, which is really interesting and surprises people, is that he was very aware and interested in some of the capitalist technologies and administrative procedures that he saw in Cuba. When some US-owned companies were nationalized in Cuba, Che Guevara was at that point the head of the Department of Industrialization, and he personally got all the documents from these US companies, and he studied them and examined them. And he noticed that they used a kind of centralized budgeting system. So, for example, if the headquarters in New York had to send material to a subsidiary in Cuba, they would not charge to make a profit from it because it's one company. He looked to that and he said: “Well, if that makes sense under capitalism, it makes more sense under socialism.”
And as a consequence of these ideas, but also the practical experience of trying to manage industry in this context, as things are being nationalized overnight, they were having these all-night meetings. And suddenly it would be announced that 200 US companies were now nationalized. That meant that they had to find 200 administrators the next morning to run these companies. They had to be people who had some basic economics or managerial experience, people who were loyal to the revolution. And it was really hard. And this is why I tell the story in my book about when they nationalized a whole load of sugar refineries, they ended up putting a bunch of teenagers, taking them from a boarding school, where they were getting an intense training and saying they have to take over temporarily. Because in the first years of the revolution a million people left Cuba and they were the bourgeoisie, they were the people who managed, they were the professionals, they were the wealthy and they left Cuba, so the Cubans were trying to take over a state, dismantle the old apparatus, create a new apparatus with an average literacy level that was terrible, and hence the immediate investments in education.
Che Guevara developed something called the “budgetary finance system”, which borrowed from those US capitalist efficiencies, but within the socialist framework, within the Marxist theory as well. And it was a unique system for the transition to socialism. It was a unique system for the socialist countries. And Fidel Castro gave him the freedom, the institutional and ideological freedom to develop his system. Meanwhile, in other industries, they had basically adapted the Soviet system of management and planning. So it was very interesting. This created the institutional conditions for something called the “Great debate.” And the Great debate took place in Cuba between 1963 and 1965. And it was a debate about which economic management system was most appropriate to Cuban conditions for the transition to socialism, and then communism. It focused on different elements. There were differences in terms of incentives and consciousness, differences in terms of the role of the bank, and finance, and should there be credit, and interest, organizational differences on how you get workers and enterprises to produce more. Do you use material incentives, do you use administrative mechanisms? Che Guevara, not only did he have economic ideas, he was in a very rare position to be able to turn them into policies to sort of test his ideas in practice. And that was what was so fascinating.
Grdešić:
Thank you. Cuba has gone back and forth in terms of more market, less market, more planning, less planning, and throughout the years there's been a swinging of this pendulum. Where would you say things stand now and what would Che say about this?
Yaffe:
Well, the first thing to say is that where Cuba swings in this pendulum is determined not just by domestic conditions. It's actually more determined by international conditions. And, in general, even people who feel – I'm talking about Cuban economists and analysts – who feel that Che was idealist, they still associate Che's proposals and Che's systems with the vitality of socialism. They just feel that Cuba is too underdeveloped to be able to depend on the administrative levers rather than financial levers, and so on. At the moment, Cuba has swung in the pendulum away from Guevara's ideas. But the international conditions couldn't really be much worse. Cuba has lost its fraternal partnership with the Soviet bloc that collapsed, it's isolated. The Cuban revolutionary state has existed for longer since the collapse of Soviet bloc than before, and it's really interesting when you read all that Cubanology literature that it says: “Cuba only survives because of the Soviet Union.” By the time I wrote my book, it had been around for longer without.
It has allies like Venezuela. There was a lot of development aid and assistance, mutually beneficial exchange, e.g. oil for doctors, and so on. But Venezuela has been the target of terrible sanctions and attack as well. And, in fact, there were statements from the first Trump administration, where they were saying that they will attack Venezuela, attack Nicaragua, and then Cuba will fall. During his first administration, Trump introduced 243 new actions – new sanctions, coercive measures and actions against Cuba – including during the pandemic. So when the UN and other bodies were saying to rescind sanctions that affect a country's capacity to deal with this pandemic, to save lives, the US was adding sanctions which directly affected Cuba's capacity to save lives. And it was one of the first times that it was really clear that the US blockade is genocidal and that it kills people in Cuba. Because, often people have said to me: “They have a blockade, but it can't be that serious. Because where are the deaths?” So you look at UK and US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, when the UN was saying that 150 children are dying every day because of those sanctions. And they look at Cuba and there's no equivalent. But that's because Cuba is a socialist state and it used its resources to protect the population.
That was the first Trump administration. Biden came in and said he would revert those measures. He was vice president to Obama who restored diplomatic relations and introduced rapprochement. But Biden did nothing. He was obviously told, his advisors told him that Cuba's close to collapse, with the impact of COVID, which was hard hitting for Cuba. They lost the tourism revenue. They had the first violent protest in 2021. I was in Cuba when that happened. It was shocking for Cuba, but a really minimal sort of spark if you compare it to anywhere else in the world. And now Trump has come back in and he continues with this maximum pressure strategy. He doesn't want to just pressure Cuba. They want to see the collapse of the Cuban government at any cost, they really do not care about the human cost for Cubans. Any talk about support for the Cuban people – “We want them free” – is absolute rubbish because the situation in Cuba, particularly with electricity is as bad as it was during the special period.
I've just been to Cuba this summer. It's bad in Havana. There's long blackouts. But outside Havana, some places have an hour and a half of electricity a day. Some places have four hours on, four hours off, eight hours off, four hours on. And if people hear the electricity go on at three in the morning, they have to get up at three in the morning, and do their washing, cooking, charge their phones, charge everything. Cuba is in a really difficult place. And many of these measures are designed to impact the government. And it's been a conscious policy.
The Cuban government cannot make transactions in the international banking system. But, some of the sanctions have been designed to help private enterprise. So it forced their hand in that sense. The Cubans need financial resources, we could say capital, they need money for investment to rebuild their infrastructure, to invest in the social welfare system. Where can they get money from? They are excluded from all international financial institutions because of the blockade, they cannot get money from development banks, they can't get loans. Even during COVID, the difference between Cuba and the rest of the world was that they had no access to emergency funds or a lender of last resort. The only mechanisms that they have to get financial resources is remittances and foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investors are being persecuted, threatened with fines by the United States so FDI has gone down massively in Cuba. And the US has put a cap on remittances. The idea of allowing people to have self-employment and small private businesses also encourages people to send remittances into Cuba. So at least you're getting financial resources in. The state can then capture those and use those in the international market when they have to buy things up front in cash, make transactions under the radar. The blockade is so intense now that if I as a British citizen with a British bank account try to send a one pound transaction to you in the European Union, and I put the word Cuba in the transaction, even though it hasn't been transferred into dollars, even though it's not going to Cuba, that transaction will be blocked.
Then you ask yourself: How does Cuba get anything into the country? How do they manage to do any exports at all? Because 90 percent of transactions, more or less, internationally are carried out in the US dollar. The US dollar is the international currency, but they also have the right to decide who can and can't hold their currency. So it's a terrible situation for Cuba, and they are being forced to make more concessions to the market. And that's what we're seeing. But I would still say they've maintained the fundamentals of a socialist system. Economically, they still have planning, they still have a majority state control of property, and majority of people who are employed in Cuba work for the state sector, and they still have what they call the triumphs of the revolution, the healthcare, their education, the free provision provided through the state.
Grdešić:
Let me take a step back and finish our conversation with a question on what it's like doing research in Cuba. So what is it like for a researcher such as you to go into Cuba? What is it like working with Cuban intellectuals, professors, working in Cuban archives? And how did you get started? How did you get interested?
Yaffe:
Well, I actually went to live in Cuba when I was 18. I just finished my A-levels, my pre-university exams, and my sister had visited Cuba on a solidarity brigade and she was fascinated. She went in 1994, which was the worst year of the special period, so the economy had plummeted. And yet, it was such a vibrant dynamic society, and it sort of took everything we knew from capitalist or imperialist Britain and turned it on its head. She said: “Look, why don't we go and live in Cuba for a year?” So we did. And people have often asked this question about research as if there's an assumption that it's difficult to go into Cuba and do research because I'm a Westerner. And it may have been more difficult in previous decades, but I have never had a problem. I now speak Spanish with a Cuban accent, which helps. And I can say to them that I lived in Cuba in this period, but I've never had any obstacles to doing research.
When I did my PhD research on Che Guevara and his work in Cuba, I did nearly 80 interviews with more than 50 people who worked with Che. Many of them had never given interviews before. Most of them have died since then because it was 20 years ago and they were already quite old, in their 70s and 80s. But I would just turn up with my recorder. There was no vetting process, I didn't need permission, my transcripts weren't revised, and I’ve continued in that way. And it's also true that people go to Cuba with an agenda and they request access to prisons or Communist Party archives with the intention of writing in a hostile way about Cuba.
I think that some of my work is critical about certain aspects. And I think actually the Cubans appreciate that because I'm able to have a debate with them and a discussion. I think there's a misconception that you can't criticize, but actually I would challenge anyone who's listening to this to read some of the speeches by Fidel and Raul Castro. And you couldn't be much more critical than they have been about their own revolutionary society. I would encourage anyone who wants to go to Cuba to do it. I think Cubans are very trusting, they have a very open-door policy. The obstacles you'll have to doing research are to do with the materials and the facilities. So I was once in the Che Guevara Study Center. They gave me the transcripts of their internal meetings of the Ministry of Industries that happened every two months. Huge big document. They only had one copy and they trusted me to take it. I said I was only there for four months I don't have time to just read this one document, please let me go and copy it. And they trusted me to go and do that. And I found a photocopier but no paper. And then I found paper but no ink. So those are more likely to be the obstacles, the material conditions in Cuba. But, I now have PhD students, they've had fantastic experiences doing research in Cuba, so if anyone's thinking about it, go ahead.
Grdešić:
Professor Yaffe, thank you very much.
Yaffe:
Thank you for inviting me to do the interview.
