Hare: U.S., Cuban Education to Collide
Paul Webster Hare, former British Ambassador to Cuba and visiting lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that the new diplomatic openness between Cuba and the United States could lead to increased information sharing and cooperation in education.
Hare made the argument in an article cowritten with Andy S. Gomez, a former senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Cuban Institute, in the Feb. 26 edition of The Atlantic. The article was entitled “How Education Shaped Communist Cuba.”
“The background [of the article] is interesting,” Hare said. “A former student in my Cuba class at BU, Alia Wong, is now education editor at The Atlantic. Andy Gomez, my coauthor, was with me in the Brookings Cuba group. He has served as Provost of the University of Miami and was Undersecretary for Education in Massachusetts during the 1990s.”
In the text of the article, Hare and Gomez say:
“F is for Fidel, Y is for Yanqui. This mantra used for teaching the alphabet in revolutionary Cuba shows just how far its educational divide with the U.S. has stretched. No sector illustrates better how Cuba and the U.S. have grown apart in over 50 years than education. Cuba claims today that its academic standards are among the highest in the world, and the country has educated tens of thousands of foreign students, mostly in medicine. U.S. policymakers know little about the methods used in Cuban education, nor what practical opportunities for collaboration in research and business might exist. With the agreement the two countries made last December to restore diplomatic relations, that may be about to change.”
You can read the entire article here.
Ambassador Paul Webster Hare was the British ambassador to Cuba from 2001-04.
Hare graduated with First Class Honors in Politics and Economics from Oxford University in 1972 and from the College of Law in London in 1976. He worked for 5 years in the private sector, in law and investment banking, before serving for 30 years in the British Diplomatic Service. Hare served overseas in Portugal, New York, at the UK Representation at the EU in Brussels, and in Venezuela as Deputy Head of Mission. He was Head of the Foreign Office’s Non-Proliferation Department and the first Project Director for the UK’s presence at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.