While working to improve the travel situation, AAAS is also promoting existing and future scientific cooperation between the US and Cuba. The isolation of Cuba by the US has generated the mistaken perception that scientific cooperation is impossible or illegal. However, scientific partnerships between Cuba and the U.S. date back to the 1830s. And, while scientific cooperation between the two nations has significantly dropped since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, it has never completely stopped.
Current regulations allow for many forms of scientific cooperation .
We encourage scientists in the US and Cuba to take advantage of the existing opportunities to engage in a scientific or academic collaboration between the two countries. Cuba is the most scientifically advanced of the Caribbean islands. U.S. and Cuban scientists agree that scientific and academic exchanges are beneficial to the development of science in their respective countries. Scientific and academic collaboration also has enormous potential for improving the current political climate between the U.S. and Cuba, because the universality of science encourages scientists to talk to each other freely not only on science matters. In this section, we include a selection of existing cases of US-Cuba scientific collaboration and funding opportunities.