Remembering some of the victims of Cuban communism: Martyred student leader Pedro Luis Boitel Abraham

"Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world." - Mishnah  (1135-1204)

Pedro Luis Boitel Abraham  (1931 - 1972)

Some psychologists argue that as the number of victims increase into the hundreds, and thousands that compassion collapses out of the human fear of being overwhelmed. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin put it more succinctly: "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." In the case of Cuba the communist regime has killed tens of thousands, and many have become numb in the face of this horror. Therefore on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first communist regime in Russia, that caused so much harm around the world, will focus on the small corner of Cuba and on an infinitesimal sampling of some of the victims of Cuban communism. 

The ninth entry focuses on a student leader, who fought by Fidel Castro's side to bring an end to the Batista dictatorship and restore Cuban democracy. However as Castro came to impose a communist regime on Cuba and to achieve that the University could no longer be a bastion of academic freedom and independent student activism. This led to this young man opposing the regime and being sent to prison for 11 years in 1961. He served his sentence, but the dictatorship refused to free him. This drove him to start a hunger strike that ended in his death in 1972.  

Previous entries in this series were about Cubans trying to change the system nonviolently. The first entry concerned Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a humble bricklayer turned courageous human rights defender who paid the ultimate price in 2010 for speaking truth to power.  The second entry focused on Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, a Catholic lay activist, nonviolence icon, husband, father of three and the founder of a Cuban opposition movement that shook up the Castro regime with a petition drive demanding that human rights be respected and recognized in Cuba. This action and speaking truth to power led to his extrajudicial killing in 2012. The third entry focused on one of the great crimes of the Castro regime that has been well documented by international human rights organizations and reported on ABC News Nightline that claimed the lives of 37 men, women, and children. They were trying to flee the despotism in Cuba to live in freedom and were extrajudicially executed. In the fourth focused on an act of state terrorism when two planes were shot down on a Saturday afternoon at 3:21 and 3:27 on February 24, 1996 over international airspace while engaged in a search and rescue flight for Cuban rafters killing four humanitarians. Their planes were destroyed by air-to-air missiles fired by a Cuban MiG-29 aircraft on the orders of Raul and Fidel Castro.  

In the fifth focused on Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Wilman Villar Mendoza who died on hunger strike protesting his unjust imprisonment on January 19, 2012 at the age of 31 left behind two little girls, a young wife and grieving mother. The sixth entry focused on one of the many non-Cuban victims of Cuban communism. Joachim Løvschall was studying Spanish in Havana in the spring of 1997. He was gunned down by a soldier of the Castro regime in Havana, Cuba twenty years ago. The identity of the soldier was never revealed to Joachim's family. No one was ever brought to justice.  The seventh entry focused on a young woman, Yunisledy Lopez Rodriguez, who tried to warn a friend who was being targeted by the secret police for a violent end. They went to the authorities to make a formal complaint, but nothing happened. Four months later she was murdered in front of her two children stabbed 18 times. Eight months later her friend was the victim of a brutal machete attack and nearly killed. Yunisledy was just 23 years old.  The eighth entry focused on Yuriniesky Martínez Reina, a young men shot in the back and killed by a state security agent in 2015. His "crime"? Building a boat with other friends to flee the Castro dictatorship and live in freedom.

Pedro Luis Boitel at the CMQ radio station

Pedro Luis Boitel was born in Cuba to a family of modest means of French origin. He studied at the University of Havana while working as a radio technician. Opposing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista he joined the July 26 movement led by Fidel Castro. The majority of the movement's members like Pedro were anti-communists.

Once Batista left for exile and Fidel Castro took control the anti-communist members of the July 26 movement became an obstacle to absolute power. Following the revolution, Boitel returned to University were his fellow students nominated to run for the presidency of the Federation of University Students in 1960.  Fidel Castro personally intervened to remove him from the presidency. Pedro Luis Boitel's threat to the emerging communist regime was that he refused to betray the Federation of University Students and sought to maintain academic freedom and autonomy.

As time went on and the dictatorial nature of the Castro regime became more apparent, the student leader became an opponent to Fidel Castro. Condemned to a decade in prison in 1961 he served the cruel and unjust sentence but as the date of his release came and went prison officials refused to free him. In response to the years of cruelty, torture and now denial of his freedom he went on hunger strike on April 3, 1972. Pedro Luis Boitel died forty five years ago on May 25, 1972 after 53 days on hunger strike in Havana in the Castillo del Principe. Academic freedom and autonomy ended in 1960 replaced with fear, repression, and ideological litmus tests to attend university. It has still not been restored today.

Human rights and academic freedom under the new regime at the University of Miami's Cuba programs

Worse than it first appears

Taking a closer look at the special report titled "Cuba and the Caribbean" prepared by UM News, a part of University Communications at the University of Miami and some observations arise that undermine the claims made by UM political science assistant professor Michael Touchton that there is "so much superior work that could be done if we team up with Cuban academics." Without academic freedom and the knowledge that careers can end and doors can be closed by raising certain issue, central to them are human rights and civil liberties in the area of political science scholarship is effectively neutered. Now associate professor and department chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Lillian Manzor, is right when she says that “engagement with other countries has proven to be better than isolationist tactics,” but Cuba like North Korea is not just "another country."

This can be seen in the UM special report itself where there are no references by UM faculty to human rights with regards to Cuba and the only Cubans in prison talked about are innocent migrants in U.S. prisons.  . Miami Law’s Immigration Clinic Director Rebecca Sharpless and Professor David Abraham address the changes to migration within the narrative of  normalized relations and putting the Cold War past behind us.

Rebecca Sharpless: We are seeing Cuban immigrants detained in county jails for the first time ever—Cubans with no criminal history who would be eligible for the Cuban Adjustment Act. I think the new normal is that Cubans and non-Cubans will be treated the same way, which is not well, even with respect to people fleeing persecution or extreme poverty.

David Abraham: The future of Cuban-American relations, particularly regarding immigration, seems very much up in the air. The longtime special quality of Cuban migration, hung on anti-Communism, is behind us. The Cuban Adjustment Act is behind us. Just as Cuba becomes an ordinary foreign country, the entire immigration regime in the U.S. is in question, and we may be operating in an entirely new environment.
For the past 50 years, we've been operating like the Cubans get a free pass because any Cuban who touches American soil was a year away from permanent residency unless they committed a felony, whereas every Haitian was headed to detention and deportation. One was fleeing a failed state and a bad economy, and the other was a victim of a Communist monster. I find it ironic that they are now simply in the same lousy situation.

First, I found it interesting that no mention was made of President Obama gutting the Cuban Adjustment Act or the fact that the "Communist monster" continues to destroy lives and murder Cubans on the island for thinking differently in the article "On the Frontlines of Immigration." The only direct reference made to human rights referred to Haiti but none concerning Cuba.

Second and more disturbing are the comments by Kenneth W. Goodman, professor and director of the UM Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, and co-director of the University of Miami Ethics Programs. He claims that Cuba is changing in a positive direction. In the article "A Hemispheric Approach to Bioethics and Health Policy" the claim is made that  "[w]hile Cuban scholars do not yet enjoy academic freedom of speech or press, that is reported to be changing, he added, noting that Cuban scientists and clinicians want to be “participants on the global stage.” In keeping with that objective, Cuba’s researchers appear to follow international standards of informed consent and patient privacy when conducting clinical studies." Professor Goodman should talk with Felix Llerena who visited the University of Miami to take part in a human rights workshop and was expelled from his university when he returned to Cuba earlier this year. There have been others. Professors have also been fired for their political beliefs or merely having a dissident in the family.

Many other universities have academic exchanges with Cuba and self censorship is part of the game of continuing the programs running and scholarship suffers. This practice of self-censorship to maintain access has been seen and reported on explicitly with regards to foreign journalists based in Cuba

The only bright spot in this dreary affair is the interview with Yoani Sanchez that addresses some of the realities on the ground in Cuba. One can agree or disagree with her policy prescription, but her journalism is spot on.

With regards to healthcare in Cuba one should review the case of Sirley Avila Leon carefully that shines a light on what happens when the dictatorship tells doctors not to treat gravely injured patients.

On the subject of academic exchanges the University of Miami would do well to study what happened to Florida International University's academic exchange program when Carlos Alvarez, one of the leaders of that initiative was arrested by the FBI, along with his wife, for being a spy.

Cuba is a unique country in the Western Hemisphere because for the past 58 years it has had more in common with far away North Korea than its neighbors. It is a communist, totalitarian dictatorship with a very dark past and it continues to write new chapters in a terrible history that those engaging with the regime will refuse to do out of a fear of losing access and having their programs shut down. Hence why human rights, academic freedom and labor rights are at the margins, if mentioned at all. Sadly this special report by the University of Miami confirms it.

Following controversy UM postpones event but the drive for engagement with the Castro regime continues.

UM's drive to engage with the Castro dictatorship continues.

The University of Miami has been under a cloud of controversy following the announcement that the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies (ICCAS) would be closed, then back tracked that it would remain open, with a new director. Furthermore that the founding director Professor Jaime Suchlicki had not retired but resigned in protest over the direction Cuba Studies was taking under the new UM President Julio Frenk.

As the weeks went by the claims made by Professor Suchlicki's about the University of Miami going in a different direction that requires placating the dictatorship in Cuba became more evident. The University of Miami has now produced a special report titled "Cuba and the Caribbean" that has a clear editorial line, including a slanted poll that makes little or no mention of human rights or dissidents.

Screen grab from A University of Miami Special Report

ICCAS had a track record of serious scholarship that debunked Castro regime propaganda and opened its doors to Cuban dissidents from the island. This included important studies and books on the nature of health care and education in Cuba that no doubt irritated the Cuban dictatorship. The shuttering of ICCAS and replacement of the entire faculty of the the institute is troubling and an assault on academic freedom, but makes sense if the priority is having a relationship with the communist regime in Cuba that does not tolerate critical academic inquiry. Dr. Suchlicki resigned from the University of Miami but continues his highly respected academic inquiry into Cuba at the new Cuban Studies Institute, along with Jose Azel and Pedro Roig, who were also forced out of ICCAS despite their academic credentials and numerous publications. Dr. Jose Azel had been the Senior Research Associate and Pedro Roig, the Senior Consultant at ICCAS.

One would hope that a university would challenge communist propaganda in an academic setting with an exchange of differing views with the goal of getting at the existing reality. Unfortunately what had been planned at the Department of Public Health Science at the University of Miami was a one sided presentation by Professor Roberto C. Villafranca, MD, MS, PhD of the University of Medical Sciences in Matanzas, Cuba. The flier reproduced below is an uncritical repetition of Castro government propaganda. There is plenty of evidence that the Cuban Public Health System has serious problems that are not reported in the official statistics provided.

Roberto Cañete Villafranca is a visiting scholar at the University of Miami

Katherine Hirschfeld, an anthropologist, in Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 who spent time in Cuba studying its healthcare system, contracted dengue while there, experiencing first hand the 'discrepancies between rhetoric and reality,' She found a repressive, bureaucratized and secretive system, long on 'militarization' and short on patients' rights.  Professor Hirschfeld had spoken at the old ICCAS.  One wonders if she would be invited to speak at the new ICCAS?

Professor Sherri L. Porcelain who has taught Global Public Health in World Affairs at the University of Miami for more than 30 years wrote an important analysis titled U.S. & Cuba: A Question of Indifference? I could not find this article on the ICCAS web site but found it instead at Professor Suchlicki's Cuba Studies Institute and what it reveals is disturbing.

"Investment in the health of people includes protecting human rights. This means allowing the health community to speak out and not to be jailed for releasing information about a dengue epidemic considered a state secret, or not sharing timely data on a cholera outbreak until laboratory confirmation of travelers returning from Cuba arrive home with a surprising diagnosis. This causes me to reflect upon my personal interviews where the remaining vigor of public health actions in Cuba exists to fight vector and water borne diseases. Sadly, however, health professionals are directed to euphemistically use the vague terms of febrile illness in place of dengue and gastrointestinal upset for cholera, in contradiction to promoting public health transparency."

 This led to cries that the agreement reached with Julio Frenk that the University of Miami did not want to set up academic exchanges that would legitimize the Castro dictatorship was not being fulfilled. On October 17, 2017 after requesting the day before what steps would be needed to attend the event on the 18th the following message was received from one of the organizers of the event:

"Thank you for your interest in attending the Department of Public Health Sciences’ Grand Rounds on the Cuban Public Health System. As you might have heard, this event has been postponed till further notice. It was decided that for this topic, a different structure that incorporates presenters with different viewpoints on public health in Cuba will be more beneficial. We will announce through our usual channels once another date and time has been decided."

Meanwhile reviewing the section on Politics and Policy finds the "party line" of the new Administration being repeated in the article "A Renewed Tenuous Relationship" with statements such as Michael Touchton, a UM political science assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences: “[t]here is so much superior work that could be done if we team up with Cuban academics,” he says. “They don’t have the resources, but by combining our expertise we can do excellent work.” It is repeated once again by Lillian Manzor, associate professor and department chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the College of Arts and Sciences who said: "I think the establishment of relations is long overdue,” she says. “Engagement with other countries has proven to be better than isolationist tactics.”

Equally disturbing is the article "A Trusted Ally for Leftists" on the negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC guerillas in Cuba. The article fails to even mention the explosion in cocaine production during these negotiations and makes the charge that the vote by Colombians to reject the peace agreement was based on "partial lies and misinformation" and "post-truth." Colombian voters understand that the FARC will use drug money to finance its entry into Colombian politics and attempt a Venezuelan style take over over the span of a few election cycles. This point of view is not reflected in this "special report" because dissenting points of view were purged from ICCAS back in August of 2017 and replaced by an Interim Director willing to adopt the new line from the University President that echoes those already mentioned above and are now found on the Institute's new website.

ICCAS, under Dr. Suchlicki, produced serious scholarship that not only embarrassed the Castro regime by debunking its propaganda but was also a challenge to other academic centers that study Cuba and are compromised by their need to satisfy the Castro regime's demands to be able to continue to have access to the island. Professor Suchlicki is the co-editor of the tenth edition of Cuban Communism. Reviewers of the 901 page tome say that it "has widely come to be known as 'the Bible of Cuban Studies.'" The distinguished periodical Foreign Affairs said of it: "There is no handier guide to the Castro regime and the debates swirling around it."

 Mike Gonzalez, currently a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation think tank, has written an important analysis of how foreign governments influence what Americans learn in college. The term "influence" is an understatement. He outlines how China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Cuba have successfully censored and propagandized what is taught at American colleges and universities.  The section of the article on Cuba described what is now taking place at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies:

Long a thorn in the side of the communist dictatorship in Havana, ICCAS has constantly received vituperative attacks by the regime’s propaganda outlets. Never before, however, has it come under the threat of the university’s own leadership. Frenk is a long-standing and well-known admirer of the Cuban regime’s health practices. As Mexico’s health secretary in 2001, he said Cuba had the best health indicators in Latin America, and Mexico would benefit from learning about Cuba’s success.

Unfortunately for Frenk, the ICCAS kept saying the truth about Cuba’s failed health system, as it did on July 20 in a report called “Cuba’s Silence is Dangerous to Your Health.” That report notes that “After a century hiatus, cholera, malaria and dengue have returned to Cuba.” I post the report here because it seems to have disappeared from the ICCAS website.

 Let me be clear. Believing in academic freedom I have no problem with Cuban "academics" speaking at the University of Miami or any other college. The word academics are in quotation marks because in a totalitarian communist dictatorship there is no academic freedom and academics are constrained by the demands of the dictatorship in what they can say and write and that needs to be taken into account.

However I do have a problem when dissenting voices are silenced or purged to satisfy the demands of a dictatorship for the sake of access or funding.  Incorporating presenters with different viewpoints in an academic setting to debunk propaganda and get to the facts is a positive step. Unfortunately, American academia seems to have been corrupted and the University of Miami that it in the past with ICCAS had been an oasis of academic excellence is eager to join the desert of accommodation with tyrants repeating the same lies in order to have a relationship with a totalitarian dictatorship. One can call that many things, but academic scholarship is not one of them.

Meanwhile I salute Professor Jaime Suchlicki for his truth telling and look forward to continue reading the work of the Cuban Studies Institute. I look forward to seeing who is finally selected as the new permanent director of the Institute of Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami and pray that he can fill the chasm left by Dr. Suchlicki.

What was not seen on Venezuelan television today

Mass nonviolent protest march for academic freedom and autonomy 

RCTV_CONTIGO: What you did NOT see on TV

First learned of this march in Venezuela on June 25, 2013  via the twitter feed of María Corina Machado an opposition member of the National Assembly who explained it in 140 characters that: "Great National March in defense of the FREE, PLURAL, DEMOCRATIC, and AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY Saturday 29 at 10am."

Photo from Maria Corina Machado's twitter

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans went out to march for academic autonomy and freedom in their universities. It was a remarkable demonstration of civic solidarity and resistance.

The Maduro government had called for a counter march by regime supporters in an effort to disrupt the opposition march and generate violent clashes. He failed. The opposition was able to take counter-measures and maintain its nonviolent discipline in the defense of freedom. 

Opposition activist, Roderick Navarro responded over twitter that "The "countermarch" is a sign of weakness that is so evident" and in a previous tweet said: "Don't ask me to be nice to Madurisms fanatics: who I insulted only with indifference! This regime won't last forever."

Roderick concluded on Saturday night, after the march and countermarch, over twitter: "Day of deep reflection, analysis and decision making for the future..."

As was done in Cuba over a half century ago the Maduro government is trying to do away with independent universities.

All eyes on Venezuela. The freedom of Venezuelans hang in the balance.

Photo from Maria Corina Machado's twitter