Einstein on the Road by Eisinger Josef

Author:Eisinger, Josef.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services

AT SEA AGAIN: HAVANA AND PANAMA

After only one day at sea, the weather was noticeably warmer and it was pleasantly humid. Einstein went back to work. Together with Mayer, he studied Dirac's recent papers in which he derived the relativistic wave equation.19 Einstein also worked on a new exposition of general relativity theory, which he planned to sell to a university press. He discovered that most of the new passengers were old ladies, but with the sea calm and the weather getting warmer day by day, he relished the peace and quiet on board—but ‘from Cuba, the Jews are telegraphing already….'

The Belgenland arrived in Havana on December 19. Havana, at the time, was in the grip of ongoing civil unrest aimed at Cuba's military dictator, Gerardo Machado. (Two years down the road, Machado would be replaced, with US help, by the equally corrupt Fulgencio Batista.) Einstein commented that although the city was in the midst of a revolution, it was not noticeable. In the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash, the largely foreign-owned Cuban economy had collapsed; world sugar prices had dropped to an all-time low of one-half cent per pound—a devastating blow to the country.

Einstein and Elsa were welcomed ashore by local government officials and intellectuals and by Franz Zitelmann, the local German consul. They were immediately taken on a tour of Havana. In view of the frigid weather he had experienced in New York, Einstein was particularly delighted by the balmy Cuban winter. He admired the city's old Spanish buildings and the absence of ‘Americanism' despite heavy American investments. His hosts, on the other hand, left him unimpressed, as they ‘dragged him around' from one reception to the next: from the Geographical Society to the Astronomical Society and the Engineering Society, followed by Havana's Hebrew Association—they all seemed the same to him. In the evening, at the Academy of Sciences, Einstein gave a talk in which he laid out his scientific plans for his stay in Pasadena.

What truly appalled Einstein in Cuba was the vast contrast between the luxurious clubs where the receptions took place and the abject poverty of the mostly colored people who lived in windowless shacks. But in spite of severe unemployment and pervasive poverty, Einstein saw many happy faces—thanks to the mild climate and the abundance of bananas. He came to the conclusion that dire poverty exists only where the climate is severe and people are detached from the land.

Einstein had an interview with President Machado the following morning. Later he met with Cuban Zionists, and then with Jewish immigrants who manufactured dresses and undergarments and had brought a children's chorus along to sing for him. A youthful astronomer walked with him to a picturesque fruit market in bright sunshine, before Einstein ended his brief visit to Havana by calling on Consul Zitelmann and meeting his ‘clever wife' and their three blonde ‘daughters of the Rhine.'

The Belgenland departed Havana at 1:00 p.m., but not before Einstein had a most pleasant and utterly unexpected surprise:

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