New York – Columbia University conferred an honorary doctorate Wednesday on Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya, the highest-profile advocate of democracy and human rights who has remained on the Communist-ruled island despite years of harassment by authorities.
Paya was not able to be present at the ceremony.
The award was bestowed in recognition of his peaceful struggle for human rights and democracy in Cuba.
A vacant chair was set up in the graduation hall to represent and honor the dissident on a day when more than 11,000 Columbia students received their diplomas.
University provost Alan Brinkley, who was responsible for presenting awards at the ceremony, told the assembled crowd of students, their family members and other guests that the seat was vacant because the Cuban government has not given Oswaldo Paya the necessary exit visa” to allow him to travel to New York.
The words were received with some boos from the students, who then cheered when they heard that the Cuban dissident had asked that Columbia present him with the honorary degree “when I have the freedom to travel.”
Cuba, governed for the past 47 years by a one-party regime, is one of the few nations in the world that obliges its citizens to get official permission to leave the country.
Columbia president Lee Bollinger recalled the important work done by Paya in pursuit of “a free and democratic society” in the face of the Cuban regime’s many acts of harassment.
He called Paya a “tireless fighter” for human rights and a defender of the Cuban people, who had expressed his desire for freedom and democracy for millions of people all over the world.
Bollinger also mentioned Project Varela – Paya’s initiative to seek a referendum to improve the human rights situation for Cubans – and called it a “model of civic activism.”
Paya, 54, began his opposition to the Cuban regime when he was young, and in high school he was already repudiated for not being sympathetic to Communist ideology, preferring to maintain his faithful devotion to the teachings of the Catholic Church.
His opposition to the Castro regime caused many problems for him in getting accepted to college, but he eventually managed to graduate with a degree in physics and telecommunications engineering by attending night classes.
After refusing to leave Cuba, in contrast to other dissidents, Paya in 1988 founded the Christian Liberation Movement and began a phase of peaceful struggle against the regime for which he was arrested and jailed for short periods several times in 1990.
During the early 1990s, Paya launched several initiatives to try and reform the Cuban Constitution – getting 10,000 signatures from supporters for one of them – and he also tried to run for a seat in the National Assembly of Popular Power, the island’s legislature, a move that was prevented by the political police.
In 1995, he first called upon the United States to lift its embargo of Cuba for medicines and food, and in 1999 he published the manifesto “Everyone United,” with which he launched another signature drive for a referendum on Project Varela.
On May 10, 2002, Paya delivered 11,020 signatures to the Cuban legislature, thus converting Project Varela into a bill, as provided for in the Cuban Constitution.
The response of the Castro regime was to make the “socialist” character of the Constitution irreversible and to approve that measure prior to a vote on Project Varela, a violation of its own rules calling for bills to be voted upon in the order that they are presented.
Over the past few years, Paya has been invited many times to travel to human rights forums in Europe, Latin America and the United States, but the Cuban government has imposed a series of restrictions upon him that have prevented his traveling abroad.
Recently, Paya has been the recipient, in absentia, of numerous awards, including the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov prize for Freedom of Thought and the Averell Harriman Democracy Award bestowed by the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute.
