On Tuesday, August 5, the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, ASCE, perhaps the most important and prestigious organization of Cuban-Americans and many other well-known economists in the world, headquartered in Washington, D.C. for the past 17 years, began its annual convention at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Miami.  This year’s newly elected president is the internationally acclaimed Cuban-American economist Jorge Sanguinetty, a man I greatly admire and who I consider a good friend.  Along with Jorge, seven new directors were elected by the membership and took over the Board of Directors of ASCE yesterday.  Unfortunately, one of those new directors is Marifeli Perez-Stable.

On Monday evening, I wrote Dr Sanguinetty informing him I would not attend the opening session due to the recent death of my mother, for whose eternal rest a funeral mass was offered yesterday evening.  But I also said to Jorge that I would probably not have attended in any case and would not renew my membership in ASCE because of the election of Ms. Perez-Stable as one of ASCE’s seven directors.  The reasons, for those who may not know, are the following:

1)  Ms. Perez-Stable was, by her own admission in her article in today’s El Nuevo Herald, a symphatizer, supporter and collaborator of the Cuban Revolution and its totalitarian government for well over two decades, during the 1970’s into the late 1980’s.

2)  For those who may tend to forgive her trespasses because of her youth and idealism, that is, lamentably not the case.  I knew Ms. Perez-Stable as a young woman and I also knew her parents, although my own parents knew hers far better than I did.  Indeed, they were close friends since Cuba and continued to be here in Miami for years.  Her father was Dr. Eliseo Perez-Stable, a very prominent physician in pre-Castro Cuba and here in his later years, director of the VA Hospital in Miami.  Sadly, the Perez-Stables were extreme leftist ideologues since their high-society Havana days, and they very much inculcated those ideas in their daughter’s young mind.

3)  Far worse, since at least 1993 ( I say at least, because I have found that years before, a disreputable local radio personality, a so-called Reverend Manuel Espinosa, accused her of similar   acts, but I cannot vouch for those accusations), the highly regarded Cuban-American historian and recent author of the best-seller The Moncada Attack: Birth of the Cuban Revolution, Dr Antonio de la Cova, a distinguished history professor at Indiana University, accused Ms. Perez-Stable of being a paid informant and member of the Cuban DGI, the notorious Cuban Intelligence Agency.  Dr. de la Cova has documented these accusations for years.  They were first made known to US authorities by a Cuban deserter from the DGI,  Captain Jesus Perez Mendez (see http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/espionage/FIU-espionage-1993.pdf and   see also http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/espionage/marifeli.htm).  Ms. Perez-Stable has threatened to sue Dr. de la Cova and others who have repeated the accusations for years, but she never has.  Why?  Perhaps because under U.S. law, the truth is an absolute defense against accusations of defamation.

4)  Finally, last week, in Oscar Haza’s nightly TV program “A Mano Limpia," Lieutenant-Colonel of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Chris Simmons, the man  who captured convicted Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes a few years ago, charged on the air that Ms. Perez-Stable, along with three others, was a Cuban spy (he later said she was not an “active” spy anymore, whatever that means).

For all of the above reasons, I asked my friend Jorge Sanguinetty, new president of ASCE, to demand Marifeli Perez-Stable’s resignation as a director of said organization.  Better yet, I urged him to call for her expulsion both as a director and as a member of ASCE.  Will he do it?  We shall see.  But even if he does not, which unfortunately as I also warned him, will only reflect on his new presidency of ASCE and upon the organization itself, most definitely public pressure and outrage will surely force the entire organization to exorcise itself of Ms. Perez-Stable’s fatal presence in its midst.  That is up to all of us.  Yes, this is a private organization, and to its merit, one that does not accept public money, but depends only of the contributions of its members.  But it is mostly made up of Cuban-Americans.  And to have an accused spy and a traitor as one of its directors is simply unacceptable.  I, for one, will never be a member of ASCE again until and unless Marifeli Perez-Stable is expelled from its membership.