Partisan Pandering Harms Academia

The free exchange of ideas has become another innocent victim in the Bush administration’s reckless and shameless drive to the election. In order to appease a narrow but influential group of voters in Florida, the State Department put politics ahead of academic freedom. Showing utter disregard for the interest of American citizens, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher last week justified an act of political censorship with the revealing decree that “Engagement and dialogue is not an end in itself.”

Boucher’s comment came as he was defending the State Department’s last minute decision to deny visas to 65 Cuban scholars heading for a conference in Las Vegas. According to Boucher, it was in the interest of the United States to suppress the free exchange of information because the “so-called academics” were mere hacks coming to “spout the party line.” As such, it was in the national interest to make sure the Cuban government would “feel the pressure of our disdain for that regime” by denying these academics “the hospitality of the United States.” The State Department is wrong on all accounts, and it fails to conceal its real ulterior objective: appeasing the significant bloc of Cuban-American voters in the crucial swing state of Florida.

Members of Congress, academics around the country, and professors from Harvard were quick to debunk the State Department’s reasoning.

The conference, a leading forum for discussion of Latin America and the Caribbean, is hosted every 18 months by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and brings together 4000 participants from around the world. Cuban scholars have participated in the conference since 1979, and this is the first time since then that the entire delegation has been turned away. After months of open dialogue between the State Department and conference organizers and after an understanding that at least some of the scholars would be allowed to attend the conference, the decision for a blanket denial came less than a week before the conference was to be held and was made at the highest level—perhaps high up in the White House itself. This sudden break with 25 years of precedent suggests that this action was timed to have maximum effect on the approaching election. A well-reasoned diplomatic maneuver it most clearly was not.

The real rationale is further exposed if one examines the State Department’s unfounded claim that, as Cuban government employees, none of the scholars had “distinguished him or herself for free thinking and for questioning anything the regime has said.” The facts disagree. Several of the scholars were invited to the LASA convention to present parts of a book they had co-written with two Harvard professors: John H. Coatsworth, director of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Jorge I. Domínguez, director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. The balanced content of the book, including several sections which are critical of the Cuban government as well as sections that point out positives in Cuba, belies the State Department’s explanation and makes clear that, as Domínguez writes, “These are real academics. They point out things that one government will like and the other one will not, and this changes depending on what page one reads.”

Yet such balanced content will not be pleasing to the Cuban voters Bush so desperately inklings to in Florida. Fidel Castro and the Cuban government—the supposed targets of the State Department’s actions—will remain unscathed by the decision. Regardless of what one thinks about the longstanding U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, it is clear that the State Department’s censorship of viewpoints is damaging to Americans who are deprived of their first amendment right to the free exchange of information. As Coatsworth said, “The only people really disadvantaged, in a way, are scholars in the U.S., who need to know something about Cuba and who will suffer from this isolation.” Harvard students were also hurt in a special way, as one of the scholars had intended to stop here for conversations with undergraduates.

But alas, to the Bush administration, engagement and dialogue is not an end in itself. No, instead, the only relevant end to the Bush administration is winning the election in Florida—even if it means stifling academic expression. As Domínguez succinctly put it: “The U.S. government has sent one clear message to the Cuban government in all of this: If you do not like what academics write, censor them.”