David Abel, Globe Staff
    CAMBRIDGE - 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. After more than four decades as a committed revolutionary who rose to a prominent position
in Fidel Castro's government, Mario Coyula-Cowley this semester became the first Cuban professor since the 1959 revolution to teach
at Harvard, which has ties to the island long predating the rebels' rise to power.
    A renowned architect and longtime member of Cuba's Communist Party, Coyula is one of a small but growing number of Cubans taking advantage of the
Clinton administration's relaxation of the US embargo. The policy changes in 1999 allowed US universities to pay salaries to Cuban professors for
the first time in decades. ''I have no problem bringing Mario Coyula here,'' said Harvard professor Jorge I. Dominguez, an expert on Cuba.
''It's no different than hiring a good physicist who thinks Fidel Castro is the best invention since sliced bread. I don't have to agree with his
political views to respect his professional work. That's what a university is about, ultimately.''
    Coyula, who came to the United States with his wife and son, is one of the
few Cubans allowed to travel as he likes. He went to the same Jesuit high school as Castro, helped organize the rebellion against dictator Fulgencio
Batista as a student at the University of Havana, and supports the regime's limits on free expression as a senior member of the National
Union of Artists and Writers. As a result, he isn't considered much of a threat of embarrassing the Cuban government. He also has a daughter and
grandchildren in Cuba.
    He says he came to Harvard to collaborate with the university's respected architects and urban planners, several of whom he worked with in Cuba and
visited on previous trips to Cambridge. But living here, he says, is quite different than visiting. ''There are too many choices,'' he said. ''You go
to the supermarket and there are 80 different kinds of cereal when you're just looking for oats. Or you make a call and you end up talking to a
machine when you're looking for a person. Your health plan covers some drugs, but not others; in Cuba, it's all free.''
    A US salary, however, doesn't trouble him. Cubans on average earn the equivalent of $15 a month. As director of a government agency overseeing
preservation and development efforts in his country's dilapidated capital, Coyula earned about $35 a month. At Harvard, for teaching two classes this
spring at the Graduate School of Design, the gray-haired revolutionary will earn $50,000, more than he could make in a lifetime working in his
homeland.
    ''By Cuban standards, it's certainly a lot of money,'' said Coyula, who plans to use the money to replace the rickety Soviet Lada automobile he
has been driving for years and to make improvements to his apartment, the same one he grew up in. ''But money isn't everything.'' The soft-spoken
professor says he plans to spend his time at Harvard teaching about architecture and his work in Havana - not politics.
    But one anti-Castro group questions whether Harvard should be hiring Cuban government officials, especially since Coyula's post is as visiting Robert
F.  Kennedy professor. ''Robert F. Kennedy is clearly identified with democracy, human rights, and anticommunism,'' said Dennis K. Hays,
executive vice president of the Cuban American National Foundation, a Miami-based anti-Castro group.
    Harvard officials defend bringing Coyula and paying him a generous salary, even if the Cuban government ends up taking some of it in taxes. Coyula,
in fact, is part of an increasing exchange between Harvard and Cuban academic institutions, which in 1997 was supported by a $200,000 grant
from the MacArthur Foundation. The number of Cubans who have visited Harvard (always briefly and with only expenses paid, before Coyula's
visit) has risen in the past several years.
    Now, 20 to 25 Cuban researchers come every year, Harvard officials say. ''We expect to see more exchanges with Cuba,'' said Steve Reifenberg,
executive director of Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. ''We see this as an opportunity to engage people who
don't see the world in the same way we might.'' Representatives of the Cuban government and the State Department say Harvard represents a broader
trend of increased travel of academics and artists between the countries.
    Last year, for example, 49 Cubans applied for a special US visa for academics and artists. And according to the Treasury Department, 386 US
academic institutions now possess licenses either to send their faculty to Cuba or employ Cuban professors in the United States. For Coyula, who is
the former director of the architecture school at the Instituto Politecnico Jose Antonio Echeverria in Havana, the freedom to travel back
and forth is the best of both worlds.
    Unlike some noteworthy Cuban baseball players or his mother and two sisters, he says he has no plans to defect. Although he wouldn't mind more
political pluralism at home, he said, ''Open opposition could lead to the destruction of the revolution'' and ''Fidel Castro is the glue that holds
Cuba together.'' ''Cuba is my country and a country where my family has been settled for many generations,'' he said. ''It's nice to travel, but
it's always nice to go home.''
    American City Business Journals - The University at Buffalo is working with the University of Havana on a collaborative effort to
provide students an interdisciplinary master's degree in humanities with a specialty in Caribbean studies. A delegation of UB faculty
members traveled to Cuba last month for a six-day workshop to facilitate the effort, which is scheduled to begin in the fall,
pending final approval.
    The goal of the workshop was to set the stage for effective collaboration between faculty members who will teach in the program and possibly conduct
future research together. Organizers from both schools hope to identify problem areas and design knowledge-based strategies that promote a better
understanding of Caribbean societies and cultures.
    Students in the two-year program will have the opportunity to spend two semesters studying and living in the Caribbean, beginning with a first
semester of studies in Havana, and engage in on-site investigations and immediate participation in the processes that shape daily life in the
region.
    Credits for coursework at Havana will be transferable to UB. UB established the first graduate program of Puerto Rican Studies in the
United States in 1967. It recently launched the Center of the Americas, an interdisciplinary initiative for hemispheric studies.  The new master's
program follows a summer exchange program institute in 1997 that sent students between the United States and Cuba, which at the time was one of
the few permitted by the U.S. Treasury Department.