Einstein's 30 hours in Cuba

by José Altshuler

Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted

·Homer, ODYSSEY

When the world famous author of the theory of relativity set foot on Cuban soil in the morning of Friday, Decem-ber 19, 1930, he mentioned that he wished to purchase a summer hat, since it looked like it would be a hot day.

His Cuban hosts took him immediately to the most fashionable store in Havana — El Encanto — where the store owners presented the illustrious visitor the best panama hat they had. In exchange they only asked him to pose for a portrait in the establishment's photo stu-dio. After the photo was taken Professor Albert Einstein, Nobel laureate for physics of 1921, started to follow the plan his hosts had set for the first day of his visit to Havana.

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Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Photo taken in Havana, December 19, 1930

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Pomp and circumstance First on the agenda was a courtesy visit to the Cuban State Department (the Foreign Office) followed by a solemn ceremony in his honor at the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana, offered jointly by that institution and the Geographical Society of Cuba. It began at eleven o'clock in the morning. The Secretary of Health and Welfare, who was also president of the Academy at the time, said a few words of welcome and praise. Einstein briefly thanked him, "extolling the work of the Cuban people, in whom he already glimpsed the essence of great and marvelous destinies," according to a journalist's ac-count.

The distinguished visitor was asked to write a few words in the so called Golden Book of the Geographic Society and he wrote:

The first truly universal society was the society of re-searchers. May the coming generation establish a politi-cal and economic society which will insure us against catastrophes.

News on Einstein’s visit in a Cuban newspaper.

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What exactly did he mean by this? We don't know for certain but we can well imagine, as at that time the world was going through a tremendous economic crisis, and the unemployed numbered millions, even in the most industrialized countries. "Hitler is living upon Germany's empty stomach," Einstein had declared a few days earlier in New York.

The scheduled activities continued as planned. At one o'clock in the afternoon, after he and his wife Elsa had been honored by the Jewish community in Ha-vana, Einstein and his companions attended a ban-quet offered in his honor by the president of the Academy at the roof garden of the Plaza Hotel. After the banquet, Einstein was taken on a tour of the city, since he had expressed the wish to "get to know Ha-vana and the Cuban countryside as much as possible in the few hours which the itinerary allowed."

Einstein writes in the Golden Book of the Cuban Geographical Society.

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The visitors were taken to the exclusive Country Club and Havana Yacht Club, and later to the nearby town of Santiago de las Vegas, so they could admire "the scenery of the Cuban countryside, in all its lush green-ery despite the season," and also visit the local water-works, the Mazorra asylum for the mentally ill, the Cur-tiss aviation field, and the Industrial Technical School which had been recently inaugurated. As one might have expected, no visit was planned to the University of Havana, which had just been closed indefinitely by de-cree, for it had become the most glaring center of the popular rebellion then going on against the current dic-tator, Gerardo Machado.

The last event of the day in which the celebrated physicist participated was a reception held in his honor by the Cuban Society of Engineers. It began at five in the afternoon with a speech by the Society's president, to which the honored guest responded by stating his gratitude for the attentions received, which had allowed

December 19, 1930: Einstein thanks his Cuban hosts at the main hall of the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana, whose premises now belong to the "Carlos J. Finlay" National Museum of the History of Sciences.

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him to become acquainted with the most pictur-esque landscapes, and wished the nation a prosper-ous future.

After the speeches, a "splendid buffet" was served. Einstein then signed the visitors' book and a virtual avalanche of requests for autographs fell upon him from some two hundred people present at the reception. The audience comprised not only engi-neers, but also "other invited intellectuals" whose names — however — were not included in the ac-count published in the Society's journal "due to lack of space and to avoid regrettable omissions." The au-thor of the account chose not to mention the less than formal way in which the reception ended when the guest, undoubtedly worn out by so many atten-tions, suddenly left the place, hurriedly got into a waiting car, and went off with his companions toward the pier to board his ship.

At the Cuban Society of Engineers.

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A lively voyage Einstein had declined the official invitation to stay at the Nacional Hotel, the most luxurious of the Cuban capital, which was to be inaugurated in a few days. He wanted to spend the night on the steamship that brought him to Cuba, the Belgenland. He had done the same during his earlier five-day stopover in New York, December 11 to 16.

On that occasion, just after the ship's arrival, fifty reporters and as many photographers showed up, with the idea of interviewing him. He noted afterwards in his diary: "The reporters asked particularly inane questions to which I replied with cheap jokes that were received with enthusi-asm." More than anywhere else, autograph seekers hounded him. Faced with the impossibility of eluding them, Elsa devised a way for them to contribute to a hu-manitarian cause by suggesting that "the doctor will be very happy" if every letter requesting an autograph was accompanied with "say, three dollars for the Berlin poor."

Einstein in Havana, as seen by cartoonists Román (on the left, with Einstein’s autograph) and Massaguer.

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In addition to his wife and a friend of the family,

the celebrated scientist was accompanied on that trip by his secretary, Helen Dukas, and the Austrian mathema-tician, Walther Mayer. The latter had been closely col-laborating with Einstein for nearly two years on what at that point had become an obsession for him to establish a unified field theory capable of linking electromagnetic phenomena with the gravitational attraction between bodies, since the general theory of relativity applied only to gravitation.

On board steamship Belgenland: on Einstein’s left, his scientific col-laborator Walther Mayer and his secretary Helen Dukas; on Einstein’s right, his wife Elsa and a friend.

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Looking for evidence in the heavens Einstein and his companions had boarded the ship at the Belgian port of Antwerp on December 2, in order to reach San Diego, California, via the Panama Canal, and then travel by highway to the neighboring city of Pasa-dena, where they arrived with the new year. They had been invited by the director of the California Institute of Technology, Robert Millikan, the Nobel laureate for physics of 1923 for his important experiments, one of which allowed the formula for the photoelectric effect, obtained by Einstein in 1905, to be fully confirmed. Sig-nificantly, another guest was Albert Michelson, winner of the 1907 Nobel prize for physics, whose experiments on the propagation of light were closely tied to the spe-cial theory of relativity formulated by Einstein also in 1905, when he was barely twenty six years old.

For the renowned scientist, the visit to Pasadena held a special attraction, as it would give him the oppor-tunity to visit the nearby Mount Wilson observatory, whose exceptional potentialities could be useful for "un-dertaking certain research which should provide new findings to confirm my general theory of Relativity [since] I believe that Mount Wilson's powerful instru-mentation will allow me to obtain unquestionable astro-physical proofs." This is what Einstein stated on the deck of his ship in an interview with a journalist from the Cuban magazine Bohemia. But what seems today the kind of proof Einstein was seeking was obtained much later, when a certain celestial object (the binary pulsar PSR1913+16) was discovered in 1974, and four years were spent performing delicate radiotelescopic measurements on it. Einstein, however, could not enjoy this finding, since he had died more than twenty years earlier, in 1955.

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The other reality We still have to account for Einstein's last hours in Cuba, after he spent the night of December 19 on his ship.

The next morning, the director of the National Ob-servatory and his wife came for him and his companions to take them around the city. They felt surprised by the distinguished guest's insistence on touring "the poorest neighborhoods; since after having visited the parks, the clubs, the residences of the wealthy, now they were de-termined to see the other side." The journal Revista de la Sociedad Geográfica de Cuba, reported that Einstein entered "the most wretched homes, and the untidy yards of the solares [very humble Cuban tenement houses]." The group also went "to the Mercado Único [the main market in Havana], to the most modest stores on Monte Avenue, and to the typical neighborhoods of Cu-ban destitution, called by their inhabitants such strange names as Pan con Timba ['Bread and Guava Paste'] and Llega y Pon ['Come and Flop']."

Einstein said farewell to his guides, and thanked them for their kindness in complying with his unusual demands. At one o'clock in the afternoon, the Bel-genland weighed anchor and headed for the Panama Canal, after having remained some thirty hours in the port of Havana. Behind lay neocolonial Cuba. "Luxuri-ous clubs side by side with naked poverty mainly affect-ing the colored people," Einstein wrote in his diary that Saturday, December 20, 1930.

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Memorial plaque on the facade of the "Carlos J. Finlay" National Museum of the History of Sciences.

Postage stamps in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Einstein’s visit to Cuba.