settled into my seat on a plane bound for Cuba feeling frustrated. When I planned the trip, I had assumed that my Cuban collaborators and I would hit the ground running, heading out into the field straight away to collect water and sediment samples from rivers. That's how I'd done fieldwork in Namibia, Bolivia, and Greenland. But not in Cuba, it seemed. Five days earlier, a Cuban scientist emailed to inform me that we'd only be meeting to talk about our planned project. Sampling would happen during a later trip, she wrote. That left me feeling impatient and unhappy. Why did I need to travel there to have a meeting? But I had something to learn in Cuba.