June 22, 2004
Mr. R. Richard Newcomb
Director
Office of Foreign Assets Control
Department of the Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington D.C. 20220
Dear Mr. Newcomb:
The Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba (CAFC), a body of unnamed federal bureaucrats appointed by President Bush late last year, recently made a recommendation to the Administration calling for imposing restrictions on educational missions to Cuba. This week we learned, not surprisingly, that CAFC's recommendations have been accepted by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control and that the new policy will go into effect on 30 June.
Under the new policy, only those institutions of higher education that commit to having their own students and their own faculty spend at least ten weeks in Cuba will be permitted to run educational programs there. A Chronicle of Higher Education article about this development estimates that "few if any of the nearly 300 institutions that offer programs to Cuba meet the new requirements."
The institution where I used to serve as president is one of those 300 colleges that will be affected by this backward-looking policy. So too will the institution that I am about to head, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the oldest and only higher educational organization dedicated principally to advancing and protecting academic freedom.
I led a delegation of faculty members and trustees to Cuba in January 2000, where I ran into similar delegations from Williams College, Tulane University, and California State University at San Diego, all there for the same purpose. By the close of our 10-day stay, the State University of New York at New Paltz, to my delight, had an agreement with the University of Havana that allowed SUNY students to pursue a rigorous three-week course of study in Havana. Since then, several groups of New Paltz students, led by New Paltz faculty members, have gone to Cuba for study. In return the Cubans sent artwork and visiting faculty to my former campus.
The new Bush policy will likely put an end to such exchanges.
A few months ago, in my capacity as the AAUP's General Secretary Designate, I was invited by the Rector of the University of Havana, Dr. Juan Vela Valdez, to visit with him and his faculty. He had visited AAUP's website and read about our mission to advance academic freedom. That his invitation came, despite knowing the values that AAUP represents, seemed a positive, even encouraging sign to me. I recalled the extremely open and friendly conversation I had with him back in January 2000 about the importance of scholarly exchanges in helping to break down the forty-year old cultural and ideological barriers that had kept our two nations apart.
I concluded then, and believe yet today, that educational exchange between nations is not only a good unto itself, but, as in this case, also serves to advance the primary goal of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, namely, "hasten Cuba's peaceful transition to a representative democracy and a free market economy." After all, American students and faculty have shown themselves to be outstanding public diplomats for the causes of democracy and the benefits of a market economy in such nations as the USSR, China, and Vietnam.
Yet as any recent visitor to Cuba will tell you, Cuba is already moving toward a market economy in some respects, and Cubans already enjoy the benefits of an economic democracy in the respect that their health care system is universal and accessible to all. American academic visitors will also share that Cuban academics freely discuss post-Castro scenarios, and one Cuban political scientist whom I met has been hard at work for years planning the democratic transition for post-Castro Cuba.
Our Cuban colleagues recognize that American academics are by nature and training contrarians—we tend to question received wisdom, we scoff at intellectually vacuous propaganda, and we instinctively "speak truth to power." My discovery in January 2000 was that Cuban academics share many of these same traits and that they value our intellectual openness.
The new Bush policy, most likely prompted by presidential election year politics intended to secure the Cuban-American vote in Florida, will certainly postpone valuable Cuban-American academic exchanges, but the quest for academic freedom—in this case, the freedom of American faculty and students to engage in open, unfettered dialogue with Cuban counterparts—can not be stopped.
Roger W. Bowen
General Secretary Elect, American Association of University Professors
(Posted 06/22/04)