By Ross G. Douthat
                                 History and literature concentrator
                                 Quincy House

                                 In 1937, as part of program of academic exchange with German
                                 universities, Harvard named Albert Speer as a visiting professor of
                                 architecture and urban planning. There was some controversy about this
                                 appointment: not only was Speer a member of the Nazi party, he was the
                                 Third Reich's leading public architect and a close friend of the Fuehrer.
                                 Indeed, shortly after arriving at Harvard, Speer defended the Nazi regime
                                 in an interview with the Boston papers, saying that "Adolf Hitler is the glue
                                 that holds Germany together."

                                 His Harvard colleagues didn't understand why anyone was upset. "I have
                                 no problem bringing Albert Speer here," said one academic, an expert on
                                 Germany. "It's no different than hiring a good physicist who thinks Adolf
                                 Hitler is the best invention since sliced bread." A professor of European
                                 history, meanwhile, said, "personally, I think it's admirable that Speer has
                                 served for that government."

                                 If this story sounds a trifle unbelievable-well, good. It is unbelievable;
                                 indeed, it never happened. Albert Speer never taught at Harvard, even in
                                 1937, when the Nazi regime he represented was merely totalitarian, and
                                 not yet engaged in attempted genocide.

                                 But Mario Coyula-Cowley does now.

                                 Who is Coyula-Cowley, you ask? Why, he is the new Robert F. Kennedy
                                 professor at the Graduate School of Design, where he will teach
                                 architecture and urban planning. He is also a member of Cuba's
                                 Communist Party. Indeed, he is a high-ranking government official, the
                                 head of the island nation's urban planning commission. And he is no
                                 johnny-come-lately to Fidel Castro's government-Coyula-Cowley helped
                                 organize the 1959 rebellion that swept the bearded dictator into power,
                                 and has held numerous government appointments over the decades
                                 since. Among other things, he is a senior member of Cuba's National
                                 Union of Artists and Writers; an organization, needless to say, to which
                                 anyone who disagrees with the government cannot apply.

                                 Apparently, no one at Harvard has any problem with this. Substitute
                                 Coyula-Cowley for Speer (and Castro for Hitler), and the quotes above
                                 represent the view of Jorge I. Dominguez, Clarence Dillon professor of
                                 international affairs, and Bliss Professor of Latin American History and
                                 Economics John Womack, respectively, on the advisability of appointing
                                 an apparatchik from a totalitarian state to the Harvard faculty. To them,
                                 you can add the names of Steve Reifenberg, director of the Rockefeller
                                 Center for Latin American Studies, who is "enormously pleased to have
                                 him here," and Professor of History James T. Kloppenberg, who told The
                                 Crimson that "the quality of a person's scholarly work, not his or her
                                 politics, should determine whether he or she teaches at Harvard."

                                 None of this should be terribly surprising. There has always been a
                                 tendency among America's intellectuals to downplay the crimes of
                                 left-wing regimes, and Castro's Cuba, in particular, has long been the
                                 darling of the American left. With its record of standing up to "Yanqui
                                 imperialism," its much-touted system of universal health care, and its
                                 post-Cold War isolation, Cuba's nasty and oppressive regime seems sad
                                 and bullied and even a little bit cute-the "Tickle-Me-Elmo" of totalitarian
                                 states. And let's not forget the enduring appeal of its cigar-chomping
                                 despot, the "glue that holds Cuba together," as Coyula-Cowley says, and
                                 the only dictator clever enough to get people to call him by his first name.
                                 Why, everybody loves "Fidel"-especially the movie stars, left-of-left
                                 congressmen, and American academics who are always flying down to
                                 hobnob with him.

                                 As for the people who don't love him? Well, many of them are dead, or in
                                 exile. The rest are in jail-although jail might be too kind a word for what is,
                                 to all intents and purposes, a system of warm-weather gulags. Unlike
                                 Coyula-Cowley, they don't have the opportunity to cruise through
                                 American supermarkets and then complain to the Boston Globe that "there
                                 are too many choices" here. They aren't pulling down a $50,000 salary,
                                 and can't say smugly, as Harvard's new professor did in the Globe, that
                                 "money isn't everything."

                                 They do have names, though, Castro's prisoners do. Here are just a few
                                 of them: Vladimiro Roca, Julia Cecilia Delgado, Angel Moya Acosta,
                                 Nestor Rodríguez Lobaina, Rene Montes de Oca, Dr. Oscar Biscet, Jose
                                 Orlando Gonzalez Bridon. They are victims of a regime that in 2001 was
                                 rated by Freedom House as one of the most repressive in the world
                                 -worse than Libya and Syria, worse even than China. They have been
                                 arrested for "disrespect," for "dangerousness," for "conduct that is in
                                 manifest contradiction with the norms of socialist morality." And none of
                                 them will be teaching at Harvard next semester.

                                 That there is a double standard at work here should be obvious. No
                                 government official from a right-wing regime would ever be offered a
                                 Harvard position. No professor here would ever say it was "admirable"
                                 that a visiting academic had served under Augusto Pinochet in Chile, or
                                 Francisco Franco in Spain. No one would blather on about "the quality of
                                 a person's scholarly work, not his or her politics," if the politics in question
                                 were fascist.

                                 Ultimately, though, the double standard is a problem for another day-and
                                 the specifics of Coyula-Cowley's politics matter less than the fact that he
                                 is a willing, life-long functionary of a totalitarian state, and is therefore
                                 complicit in its crimes. If he is not directly responsible for them-well, in
                                 1937, an architect named Albert Speer was not directly responsible for
                                 Nazi atrocities; indeed, he would always claim ignorance of them. But no
                                 one offered him a position at Harvard.

                                 The fact is, all comparisons aside, Castro's regime is manifestly evil, and
                                 its values and policies, which our new professor has spent his life
                                 defending, are in direct conflict with the ideals of truth and freedom that
                                 this university claims to stand for. Coyula-Cowley has blood on his hands,
                                 and such a man has no business teaching here-or anywhere else in the
                                 civilized world, for that matter.

                                 But we are, apparently, "enormously pleased to have him." Isn't that swell?