MIAMI, United States. – Dr. Par Kumaraswami, Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), announced this Wednesday that the Annual Conference of the Cuba Research Forum 2022 had been postponed after “receiving a series of aggressive emails with personal threats” against her and the guest speaker, the official spokesman for the Cuban regime Michael Torres-Corona.
“Neither I nor my university are prepared to assume the level of risk that these threats imply,” wrote Kumaraswami on Facebook this Wednesday.
in april this year it was known that Torres Corona, who is famous for his criticism and ridicule against Cuban activists and opponents in the official program “Con Filo”, would attend the XV Annual Conference of the Cuban Research Forum, scheduled to be held from July 6 to 8, 2022 .
Shortly after, Cuban exiles launched a request on the Change.org platform in which they asked the University of Nottingham to suspend the invitation made to the official journalist. Until this Thursday, the petition exceeded 3,000 signatures.
In his Facebook post, Kumaraswami did not allude to Torres Corona’s role in the repressive machinery of the Cuban regime, but limited himself to saying that the Cuban Research Forum “has always been a space for dialogue and constructive debate, often in collaboration with Cuban institutions, and we intend to ensure that it continues that way.”
Kumaraswami, who since September 2020 has been the director of the Center for Research on Cuba/Cuba Research Forum, specified that the event would be held on September 6, 7 and 8, 2022. “The theme will be ‘Decolonization of Cuban studies’ , although any issue related to Cuba is welcome,” he said.
Who is Par Kumaraswami?
According to the University of Nottingham itselfKumaraswami is a founding member of the UK-based Cuba Research Forum. She “she came to understand Cuba by working alongside scholars from the island and listening to their personal stories of revolutionary Cuba. She completed a doctorate (2004) in testimonial writing of women of the Cuban Revolution. She has studied Cuba for 25 years and has published extensively in the area of Cuban culture”, she assures her profile on the website of the aforementioned University.
In his description, the Kumaraswami She assures that she is Cuban. “MI specialized in Cuban cultural policy and practice from 1959 to the present, especially in relation to literature. My doctorate focused on the reception of testimonial writing by women in revolutionary Cuba and included a small-scale but innovative analysis of reader responses to a corpus of texts. Subsequently, I was a co-investigator of a large research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2004-2009) on the interactions of literature and politics in Cuba since 1959″, she also points out.
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