He was proud when he showed the lab to Paula, like a little boy with a new toy. She looked at him in puzzled amusement. “You never mentioned research,” she said. “Why now all the interest in research?” She had taken a position with the government health service and was leaving to become health officer in a small mountain village in Oriente Province, in the Sierra Maestra.

Because I am up to my ass in bagasse, because I do not wish to drown in sugar, he thought. “It’s needed,” he said, convincing neither of them.

In the laboratory next to his was a Ph.D. biochemist named Rivkind, who had come to Cuba from Ohio State under a small grant from the Cancer Foundation. His reason for being there, he admitted to Rafael, was that it was cheaper to live in Havana than in Columbus. The only time Rivkind began a conversation was to complain bitterly because the University would not buy him a lousy two-hundred-and-seventy-dollar centrifuge. Rafe owned one in his new lab, a fact he was too embarrassed to mention. They did not become friends. Every time Rafe stepped into Rivkind’s cramped, crowded cubicle, the American seemed to be working.

In desperation, he decided to work himself.

He became a writer. He wrote a list.

Leptospirosis, a mean little bugger.

Leprosy, a ragged begger.

Jaundice, a yellow bastard.

Malaria, something to sweat about.

Other febrile diseases, many hot problems.

Elephantiasis, one big problem.

Dysentery-like diseases, a lot of shit.

Tuberculosis, can we hack it?

Parasites, living off the lean of the land.

He carried the list folded in his pocket for days, pulling it out to read until it was tattered and doomed.

Which problem should he concentrate on first?

He became a reader. He drew great piles of books from the library and on Monday and Tuesday of each week he sat in his private laboratory surrounded by stacks of volumes and he read, taking copious notes, some of which he managed to save. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday he went to his office at the sugar mill and collected other literature, Pythium Root Rot and Smut in Sugar Cane, The Genesis and Prevention of Chlorotic Streak, market reports, U.S. Department of Agriculture tracts, sales treatises, confidential memos, an entire sugar library lovingly gathered for him by Uncle Erneido. These he read with less interest. By the third week he was ignoring the sugar literature entirely, bringing a medical volume to the sugar plant office in his briefcase and reading like a thief, the door locked.