The disgrace and hypocrisy of Duke University’s trips to Cuba
In a brilliant Op-Ed published in the Herald Sun, Cuban American neurosurgeon and Duke alumni Dr. Javier Garcia-Bengochea y Bolivar takes his alma mater to task for their shameless and flagrant hypocrisy in organizing tourist junkets to the communist island of Cuba:
Duke heading backward with alumni trips to Cuba
I am a Duke alumnus and Cuban exile, one of more than a million people forced to flee Cuba virtually penniless since 1959 as well as one of 14 million Cubans in Cuba and worldwide collectively robbed of their property, rights, freedoms and heritage as Cubans. Fortunately, I was not one of the hundred thousand who died trying to escape Cuba.
As you read this, Duke returns from another alumni trip to Cuba, exploiting a loophole in U.S. law. Travel to Cuba is chic. “Everybody” is doing it and so, too, is Duke.
Yet, this is not an innocent enterprise. Time has passed, but not as a catalyst for change in Cuba. Cubans continue to be denied property rights, including their civil rights and vote and are more repressed each year. Americans speciously believe that exposing Cubans to them will bring change. For Duke this “opportunity to learn” and be part of “the conversation about Cuba” occurs entirely in a vacuum.
The isolation of Cuba over five decades extends well beyond the U.S. embargo, which has obscured what Cuba is, an international pariah due to perpetually hostile policies towards her people and her partners, past and present.
Since the Cuban missile crisis exposed Fidel Castro as the most dangerous figure since Stalin, democratic nations have spent trillions of dollars fighting Cuban aggression on every continent. Cuba has been a haven for terrorist groups, including the PLO, ETA, FARC and probably al-Qaeda. Cuba seeks our enemies for alliances.
The Castro regime has defaulted on more than $75 billion of international debt, excluding several hundred billion dollars in damages to former property owners in Cuba. Cuba continues to expropriate foreign assets in Cuba without compensation. Cuban agents rob U.S. taxpayers through Medicare fraud estimated to be billions of dollars and facilitate drug trafficking. Cuba is unrepentant for taking an American, Alan Gross, hostage. These are only a few of their sins.
The result has been the systematic destruction of virtually all material and social value in Cuba. Only the vices, the pre-revolutionary past, Cuba’s natural resources and the indomitable spirit of the Cuban people remain to be exploited. Tourism, the regime’s last hope for hard currency, will eventually exhaust these, too.
Duke, in its complicity, contends Cuba travel is an academic exercise. Really? These trips are entirely scripted and choreographed by the Cuban state or, more precisely, the oligarchs who control the Cuban economy. These elites select the hotels, restaurants, and events, even supplying the “dissenting” voices aimed to bamboozle Duke alumni that Cuba tolerates free speech. Duke accepts this indoctrination without question. Such bias in the work of any Duke student would be categorically rejected. As an academic and intellectual exercise, these trips are pure fraud.
Duke never considered that the majority of the items and venues in their November trip, “The Art & Architecture of Cuba,” are stolen, not only from Americans and Cubans in exile, but from the millions of Cubans still living in Cuba.
Continue reading HERE.
Academia is like a gaggle of schoolgirls, obsessed with being fashionably “with-it” and terrified of being perceived as uncool or out of the loop (the “correct” loop, naturally). Such a mindset is always sad, but in the case of academia, given its considerable intellectual, scholarly and moral pretensions, it’s beyond pathetic—it’s downright contemptible. Alas, the disease is endemic and pervasive, and its name is Legion; Duke is merely one instance among a very great many.
Unfortunately, as with the MSM, conforming to the party line is easier, more convenient and safer, or perceived as such, and few are willing to risk being the odd man out. But it’s not just a matter of expediency; it’s also a matter of delusion or willful blindness, fed by both ivory-tower unreality and self-righteous arrogance. These people think they know better and ARE better, certainly better than Cubans themselves regarding Cuba. Such presumptuousness is so outrageous it should be laughed out of existence, even though it’s not so much comical as perverse, not to say malicious.
I don’t know the solution; I suspect even someone long familiar with the belly of the beast, like Professor Carlos Eire, doesn’t have one either. The problem is that this is NOT about ignorance, which would be curable; it’s about the refusal to see and accept the truth.
In the meantime, these trips are mightily exploited by the regime to conduct indoctrination of the naive students that attend these boondoggles. You wouldn't believe the kind of stuff that goes on during the visits and how they manipulate the growing list of 'useful idiots' that facilitate these 'educational' forays to the forbidden fruit. As if that wasn't enough, our Universities absolutely unravel at the chance to invite Cuban 'academics' (i.e. state security operatives) to come pitch their indoctrination techniques here in the States. Despicable scumbags....