The Beginning of Semiconductor Research in Cuba

Abstract

I was invited to Cuba in 1962 to initiate some efforts in semiconductor development. I had been a physicist and senior research engineer with various electronic companies of the “Silicon Valley” of California, south of San Francisco. I had heard of the efforts made by the new revolutionary government of Cuba to advance the level of science and technology, and I was anxious to see what I could do to help.

Theodore Veltfort (Author was deceased at the time of publication) (1915–2008)

Appendix

1.1 A Short Biography of Theodore Veltfort by Connie Veltfort

Ted Veltfort was born into a conservative upper-middle class family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1915. He became radicalized as a college student at Princeton and Swarthmore in the early 1930s. When war broke out in Spain in 1936, he joined the International Abraham Lincoln Brigade and drove an ambulance on the war front. Ted developed a passionate admiration for the Soviet Union because of the support that it lent to the Republic and the struggle against fascism. After his return to the United States, and after the Second World War, he suffered the repression of the McCarthy era for his leftist politics and his history as a “premature anti-fascist.”

Shortly after the Cuban Revolution in January of 1959, Ted saw in it the rebirth of his ideal, and offered his services as an electronics engineer and physicist to the new revolutionary government. His offer was accepted, and in 1962 he arrived in Havana with his family. With the same fire and conviction with which he fought against fascism in Spain, he embraced the Cuban Revolution and its quest to create a just and developed society. He worked first for JUCEPLAN, under the leadership of Ernesto Guevara, and then for 5 years at the University of Havana in the School of Physics, directed by Dr. José Altshuler.