Bush’s restrictions have forced more than 300 universities to cancel their exchange programs with Cuba

BY ROSE ANA DUEÑAS —Special for Granma International

AS the U.S. government continues to choke off exchange between U.S. and Cuban students and educators, it is cynically proposing to spend $10 million for what it refers to as “education and exchanges.”

Bush’s restrictions have forced more than 300 universities to cancel their exchange programs with CubaThose two elements — repression and money — are part of the same plan by the Bush government to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and destroy its achievements, including in education. To that end, the administration has approved a budget of $80 million to pay for the proposals of the so-called Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.

The $10 million that the “Bush Plan” would include for “education and exchanges,” according to a brief paragraph in its second edition, issued in July, would pay for “on-island university training from third countries” and “scholarships for economically disadvantaged students from Cuba, identified by independent non-governmental entities and civic organizations, at U.S. and third country universities.”

That is, they want to dictate to the Cuban people how to educate their students – preferably in non-Cuban schools and using non-Cuban teachers and materials – because, according to the report, Cuban textbooks are “ideologically skewed” and need to be “withdrawn.” And it says nothing more about what those $10 million would be spent on.

THE BLOCKADE AGAINST EXCHANGE CONTINUES

While it presents itself as a champion of democracy and education with such absurd proposals, the U.S. government has continued to increase restrictions on travel to Cuba by students and academics – as well as travel in general – and has stopped almost all visits by Cuban academics to the United States.

From October 2005 to date, the U.S. government has granted only two entry visas to Cuban scholars to visit the country, explains Milagros Martínez, of the vice president’s office for international relations at the University of Havana. In March of this year, for example, 65 Cuban academics – the entire delegation from the island – were denied U.S. visas to attend the Latin American Studies Association conference. “You could say categorically that such exchange has been frozen,” she commented.

And for young people from the United States to study in Cuba, they must be enrolled in an academic exchange program that has a travel “license” from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the measures approved by Bush in June 2004 set strict requirements: the program must be for a minimum of 10 weeks; a permanent, full-time employee of the university must accompany the students; the students must be enrolled full-time in the same university; and for graduate students, the class in Cuba has to be toward their degree. There are also restrictions on how much money universities can spend in Cuba and how it is spent, among others.

Complying with those requirements was not feasible for the overwhelming majority of universities, and more than 300 had to cancel their exchange programs with Cuba, according to Professor John W. Cotman of Howard University.

For the 2003-2004 school year, before the new restrictions went into place, there were 296 U.S. students participating in exchange programs, explains

Mayra Heydrich, a microbiology professor and coordinator of these semester programs at the University of Havana. This semester, fall of 2006, only 41 U.S. young people from the United States – 32 undergraduate and nine graduate students – from four universities are participating, and in the spring another 30 from three universities are expected, Heydrich notes.

“Unquestionably, I do not see any opening in that direction, or any plan that would bring about exchange,” she comments. “We have exchange with Canada, Europe and other countries; we do joint doctorates and master’s programs and experiments together, and we share material. Nothing would be better than a fluid exchange with the country only 90 miles away.”

The students agree.

“Academic exchange is vital; it is absolutely necessary,” affirms Laura Fielder, a graduate student in Hispanic Literature at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who was the advisor for 14 students who came for the spring 2006 semester. “It’s essential for students to form their own opinions; they have to be able to see things with their own eyes. A lot of Americans just don’t know anything about Cuba.”

Jake Patoski, 20, is from Austin, Texas and studies international relations, particularly environmental issues in developing countries, at the American University in Washington D.C, one of nine from that school who came in the spring. “The articles I read just confused me more – in the United States, there’s been this veil over Cuba for the last 50 years,” he commented.

LAWSUIT AGAINST THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

In response to these attacks on academic freedom, more than 450 professors and scholars in 45 states formed the Emergency Coalition to Defend Educational Travel. The group and four individual plaintiffs — Cotman, Wayne Smith of Johns Hopkins University, and Jessica Kamen and Adnan Ahmad (both students at Johns Hopkins) — filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department in June, demanding that the new restrictions be removed immediately. The coalition’s lawyer, Robert L. Muse, says that expects a response from the government early this fall.

The “2004 restrictions clearly violate well-established academic freedoms,” the coalition said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “The First Amendment to the Constitution protects academic freedom, which the courts have defined as the right of educators to decide, without any interference from the federal government, which courses will be taught, how they will be taught, who will teach them, and who can take them.”