{"id":271060,"date":"2023-06-11T05:00:25","date_gmt":"2023-06-11T09:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=271060"},"modified":"2023-06-10T07:40:02","modified_gmt":"2023-06-10T11:40:02","slug":"assault-oncademic-and-cultural-exchanges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba-usa\/assault-oncademic-and-cultural-exchanges\/","title":{"rendered":"Assault on academic and cultural exchanges?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first visit to Cuba by a major U.S. academic institution, such as the Latin American Studies Association (<\/span>LASA<\/span><\/a>), took place forty years ago around this time.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the head of that delegation was the anthropologist <\/span>Helen Safa<\/span><\/a>, the second woman elected president of LASA since the organization had been created, sixteen years earlier. Helen was none other than the director of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville, the state\u2019s leading public university, whose budget was approved by the local government. To top it off, Safa had a \u201cleftist reputation,\u201d as she was called the Red Queen of Latin American Studies.<\/span><\/p>\n

But coming to Cuba was not just a challenge to the powers of Miami, but also to the White House itself. We were at the height of the Central American wars, and of the Reagan administration\u2019s military offensive against Nicaragua, and the Salvadoran and Guatemalan guerrillas.<\/span><\/p>\n

A general named Alexander Haig, U.S. Secretary of State, had said in public a few months before that the solution to that \u201clow intensity conflict,\u201d according to Pentagon jargon, was \u201c<\/span>going to the source<\/span><\/a>\u201d; in other words, to bomb the Cuban airports from which, according to them, the weapons for the Central American fighters came out.<\/span><\/p>\n

In private, General Haig had told Reagan, with a usual expression among the military and politicians who waged the Vietnam War, that at a signal from the president, those Cuban airports could be transformed into \u201ca parking lot\u201d by the power of the U.S. Air Force.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t a game.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is worth remembering this, because when some current chroniclers evoke those years in which we dedicated ourselves to digging shelters and doing militia practices (the War of All the People), it would seem that it was an arbitrary policy (\u201ca Castro obsession\u201d), aimed at \u201cdistracting attention from the country\u2019s problems.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I only mention, in passing, that we were living in the years of the highest standard of living under Cuban socialism, when migratory pressure came precisely from having opened a dialogue with emigration, and that leaving and returning every so often was a new horizon. And I evoke it, above all, because it is relevant to understand the kind of uphill that the academic exchange had to face.<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>another article<\/span><\/a> I have told part of this story and its champions. Academicians such as the historian Louis A. P\u00e9rez, the literature professor Emilio Bejel, the agrarian economist William Messina, the professor Mar\u00eda Cristina Herrera, the sociologist <\/span>Lisandro P\u00e9rez<\/span><\/a>, had to defend the exchanges with Cuba in the capital of anti-Castroism (Florida), which is why they suffered pressure from the established powers, threats, visits from the FBI, and the occasional bomb in front of their homes; in addition to the suspicion of their own institutions, on which their jobs depended, and their subsistence and that of their families.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then would come the Torricelli Act (1992) with its two-track policy: blockade and \u201csupporting the Cuban people.\u201d The latter consisted of assistance provided by \u201cappropriate NGOs, to support individuals and organizations that promote nonviolent democratic change in Cuba.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Nowhere did the Act mention academic and cultural exchanges, not a word about sectors of Cuban society such as youth, artists, academicians, scientists, or journalists or the military. But the old idea of creating turbulence for the Cuban government by promoting belligerent anti-communist groups, violent or not, echoed the image of the dissidents of Eastern Europe and the USSR, agitated the recent scenario of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and conditioned a psychological effect of carrot as harmful as the stick itself, due to the autoimmune reaction that it aroused among us.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, in the aftermath of Perestroika, some in Cuba coined and circulated the term \u201csoft parties\u201d to identify sectors supposedly more vulnerable to the enemy\u2019s policy of seduction. I say supposedly because, as is known, those who caused the debacle of Soviet socialism were not precisely these sectors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite a track 1 reinforced by the so-called Helms-Burton Act (1996), and the autoimmune effect of track 2, <\/span>cultural and academic exchange<\/span><\/a> would count on more and more Cuban institutions, as corresponded to the main communication bridge with the United States, its society and non-governmental institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n

A glance at the state of relations during <\/span>the Obama years<\/span><\/a> can give an accurate idea of its significance.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2016 alone, barely the second year of the normalization process, the total flow of artists and intellectuals from both sides reached more than 5,000. Institutions of Plastic Arts, Music, Performing Arts, ICAIC, ISA (now the University of the Arts), the Juan Marinello Institute, became visible on the other side. Although the main weight was carried by the private sector there, public institutions such as the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennedy Center and even the State Department and its cultural programs had interlocutors on the island. None of these institutions, here and there, were dedicated to anything other than facilitating the meeting between artists, an interflow that had been occurring for years.<\/span><\/p>\n