Cuba Official Comes to Harvard

In 1959, just months after seizing power in Cuba, Fidel Castro traveled to Cambridge to speak at the Harvard Law School. More than 40 years later, an official for Castro’s regime recently began a semester-long stint as a visiting professor at another Harvard graduate school.

Mario Coyula-Cowley, who is a member of Cuba’s Communist Party, will spend the semester as Robert F. Kennedy professor at the Graduate School of Design.

Harvard professors said he is widely regarded as one of the foremost academics in Cuban urban design and policy.

At the design school, he is teaching a seminar, or studio, titled “Havana: Challenges and Opportunities.”

“I’m very excited about this studio. We have very nice students,” he said. “They are very interested.”

His arrival this term was greeted with fanfare in the Boston Globe, which published a story Monday under the headline “Harvard hosts Communist professor.”

The story began: “There’s a Communist teaching at Harvard. That might not seem like news here, but this tweed-jacketed professor is on the payroll of the Cuban government.”

In an interview yesterday Coyula-Cowley expressed displeasure with the publicity and said his goal is simply to help teach Harvard about Cuban culture.

“I hope my presence here can make a little understanding between two cultures that, by the way, aren’t too different,” he said.

Coyula-Cowley’s colleagues dismissed the notion that the professor’s ties to Communist Cuba would compromise his academic integrity.

Steve Reifenberg, executive director of Harvard’s Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, which administers the Kennedy professorships, lauded Coyula-Cowley’s accomplishments.

“Everyone thinks of him as a brilliant architect and urban planner,” Reifenberg said. “We’re enormously pleased to have him here.”

Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack, who is also a member of the Rockefeller Center’s executive committee, said Harvard will benefit from Coyula-Cowley’s extensive knowledge of urban design and planning.

“I would say that he’s as distinguished a guest as anyone else who’s held the position,” Womack said.

Womack even praised the professor’s political involvements.

“Personally, I think it’s admirable he’s served for that government,” he said.

Professor of History James T. Kloppenberg, who teaches a course on democratic theory, said Harvard should judge only Coyula-Cowley’s academic competency—not his political ties.

“I think that the quality of a person’s scholarly work, not his or her politics, should determine whether he or she teaches at Harvard,” he said.

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.