MEXICO CITY, Mexico.- The Observatory of Academic Freedom (OLA) denounced the invitation that La Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute extended to the rector of the University of Havana, Miriam Nicado García, to commemorate the legacy of the University of Havana (UH).
In an event chaired by Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute, and which will also have the participation of the vice-rector of the UH José Antonio Baujín, the Madrid center will host one of the most notorious repressors of intellectual freedoms in Cuba.
The Cuban house of higher education, which Cervantes recognizes as the number one in the Caribbean and one of the most important in Latin America, is governed by officials who have committed “attacks on academic and individual freedoms.”
Next October 16, the Box of Letters (@CajaDLetras) from the Cervantes Institute of Madrid (@InstCervantes), will host the legacy of the University of Havana (@UdeLaHabana).
We open pic.twitter.com/WYCBm7sqZq
— Academic Freedom Observatory (@OLAcademica) October 14, 2024
The invitation to Nicado García makes the mission of the Cervantes Institute questionable, OLA pointed out, since the Spanish institution is a long-standing institution in the promotion of the Spanish Language, “which defends cultural exchange and the promotion of permanent alliances around the language.” of the community of Spanish-speaking countries.”
In her career as a civil servant, Miriam Nicado has promoted the reduction of intellectual freedoms “long before reaching her current position as rector of the UH.”
Listing the acts repressive of the current rector of the UH, OLA recalled that in 2012, when she was still rector of the University of Informatics Sciences (UCI), she wrote a letter of complaint against the economist Omar Everleny Pérez.
In In 2017, he promoted a repudiation rally against the graduate Eliecer Ávila, whom he expelled from the UCI when he requested certification of grades to continue postgraduate studies abroad.
Furthermore, in July 2019, already being rector of the University of Havana, she agreed to fire the professor of the Higher Institute of Design Omara Ruiz Urquiola.
“Three years later, in 2022, Nicado García supported the arbitrary separation of the UH Doctoral Program in Historical Sciences from the historian and science researcher Leonardo Manuel Fernández Otaño,” said OLA.
The invitation, therefore, constitutes a negative precedent for Cervantes.
The UH has been singled out for the indoctrination within the study center and the repression that predominates on its campus.
Last year, law students criticized the repression and lack of freedoms in Cuba through an open letter published.
The authors of the letter, who preferred to protect their identities for fear of reprisals, assured that in Cuba “the Law is prostituted,” while saying they felt disappointed by the situation the country is going through.
The students argued that, in a country marked by misery and lack of freedom, it is logical that most young people only think about leaving the country, many of them encouraged by their own parents.
“We write to you with the frustration of not being able to achieve much, but also with the responsibility to do something. To report what is happening. We live surrounded by teachers who pretend, who do not believe in the ethical codes of a good teacher and jurist. Because they are professors who have lacked the most basic human and intellectual condition: the commitment to the truth.”
Political prisoners, pressure and new Penal Code were other of the scourges denounced by the authors of the letter.
The students also questioned the censorship that exists within Cuban classrooms, where the reality of the country is barely talked about.
“In our classes we do not talk about Human Rights and when it is done it is done poorly, in passing, as if it were something distant, abstract. There is also no discussion of how in a country like this there can be a democratic Constitution and at the same time citizens’ rights are trampled. Under these conditions, why do we study Law?”
