Keeping Academics Out of Cuba

Keeping academics out of Cuba

by Wayne Smith
Baltimore Sun
April 30, 2007

The Bush administration's restrictions on academic travel to Cuba
are so harsh that they have brought such travel virtually to a halt.
Now, about 450 professors and academics from colleges and
universities across the nation have banded together to take the
federal government to court and challenge their legality.

The stated purpose of these restrictions was to deny hard
currency to Cuban government coffers. But visiting professors
and students are not exactly known as big spenders. The pittance
they might have left behind would have had little impact on a
Cuban economy registering strong growth rates.

Most of the restrictions are simply inexplicable. One says that
courses in Cuba can be taught only by full-time, permanent
members of the faculty. I have taught every semester at the
Johns Hopkins University for 24 years and am the director of the
Cuba Exchange Program. But because I am an adjunct professor,
the new regulations ban me from teaching courses in Cuba - even
were it possible to organize such courses.

How does that deny hard currency to Cuba? Did I, and other
adjunct professors who may have been involved, have such
reputations as high rollers that U.S. officials believed keeping us
off the island was a good way to bring down the Cuban economy?
Absurd. So what was the purpose?

Of course, there are no more courses for me to teach in Cuba,
even if I wanted to be a full-time member of the faculty. From
1997 until we were prevented from doing so in June 2004, Johns
Hopkins had taken to Cuba 15 to 20 students for three weeks
every January to focus on some aspect of Cuban society, history
or culture. These courses were very popular with our students,
especially because they neatly fit between semesters and did not
interfere with graduation schedules.

But the new regulations require that the courses be no less than
10 weeks. That would mean spending an extra semester
registered at Hopkins and would bar on-time graduation. Our
students prefer to graduate, and so, for all practical purposes,
Hopkins courses in Cuba have been brought to a halt - as have
courses in Cuba organized by most other colleges and
universities.

Another provision of the new restrictions is that in order to register
for a course given in Cuba, students must be full-time degree
candidates at the college or university offering the course. This
goes against the traditional practice of allowing students from
other institutions to participate in such courses and ended
academic consortia that allowed colleges and universities to send
students to one another's Cuba programs, thereby greatly
reducing the costs and making them accessible to more students.

Why were these restrictions put in place? The first reason put
forward by the Treasury Department was "to eliminate a practice
[of abusing academic licenses] that was undermining the
embargo's purpose of isolating the dictatorship economically."

But the Treasury Department could point to no abuses. No
academic travel licenses had been revoked. No academic group
had been accused of violating the rules.

One suspects that such "abuses" were nothing more than
inventions of the Treasury Department to give fictitious
justification to its new restrictions on academic travel.

The second reason for the policy put forward by Treasury officials
is even more surreal. It was intended "to promote civil society by
continuing to foster free exchange of ideas between American
students and professors and members of Cuban society."

Can they be serious? They must have known that the new
restrictions would have the opposite effect.

The Supreme Court in various cases has held that an academic
institution may, without interference from the government, decide
which courses could be taught, how they would be taught, who
could take them and who could teach them. The restrictions
handed down in 2004 violate all of these.

That is why the Emergency Coalition to Defend Educational
Travel, of which I am the chairman, has challenged the legality of
these measures. It has just presented its brief to the U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia, pointing out that the restrictions
on academic travel initiated in 2004 can only be seen as an
assault by the executive branch on the constitutionally protected
rights of U.S. citizens. It is an assault that must be turned back.