Scholars at Risk (SAR) has offered support to the Cuban scientist Ariel Ruiz Urquiola to continue his academic career at the University of Bern with a research project interrupted on the Island due to the political persecution of the Cuban regime, the Observatory of Academic Freedom (OLA) reported on its Facebook page.
Although this network of universities includes various variants of support, the scholarship awarded to Ruiz Urquiola is particularly competitive. Designed for doctors, it evaluates the significance of the results in the respective fields of research, so the curricular weight and its scientific impact are decisive.
The Cuban biologist once again serves as principal investigator of the project “Phylogeographic study on taxa from the Sierra de los Órganos, western Cuba”with the participation of Cuban researchers who formed this international scientific cooperation initiative between the University of Havana and the Museum of Natural History Berlin, the Humboldt Institute of Evolution and the Universität zu Berlin, from 2014 to 2016.
According to the OLA, in this new stage, the research is supported by Dr. Catherine Peichel, head of the Division of Evolutionary Ecology of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the University of Bern; and by her research colleagues, doctors Thomas von Rintelen and Lukas Rüber, curators of the Natural History Museums of Berlin and Bern, respectively.
“The connotation and significance of this granting, both for the knowledge of the state of academic freedom in Cubaas well as with respect to the dissemination of the environmental situation of the country, whose concealment was broken by the scientific work of Dr. Urquiola, are incalculable,” considered the OLA.
For the observatory, The recognition of SAR also “validates the environmental activism in Cuba supported by scientists and citizens permanently harassed by parapolice forces at the service of political power”.
“A Cuban biologist, harassed from his student days for fighting the violation of his country’s nature until being expelled from the academy and imprisoned as a criminal, today receives protection from the democratic world. The former prisoner of conscience of the Kilo 5 Penitentiary Center in Pinar del Río is once again a full-fledged academic“, celebrated the OLA.
Scholars at Risk is the most important network of associated universities to protect academics who are victims of discrimination and whose research involves significant scientific contributions.
Since 1999, the program, with current locations on the campuses of Greenwich Village, New York University, and Maynooth University, Ireland, constitutes a paradigm of the defense of academic freedom in the world. The elite of higher education is connected through SAR, integrating 530 universities from 42 countries.
Activist Omara Ruiz Urquiola, sister of the award-winning scientist, expressed her pride in a post on Facebook, where she also spoke of the mixture of joy and sadness that invaded her when she heard the news.
“Today is a happy day for my family, but I can’t stop crying. The fights at the Marine Research Center, in the rectorate of the University of Havana, in the court, lawyers, judges and prosecutors come to mind. who do not even know how to read, the murdered animals, before the San Felipe keys and the ‘scientists’ endorsing the extinction of the turtles, Viñales… the pigs for Kilo 5, mommy, the Prison Room at the Abel Santamaría Provincial Hospital, the henchmen preying on their ignorance… the corruption of CITMA, Cuba depredated,” he wrote.
“The truth prevails, Cuba is going to rise for all time and I am proud of every bit of blood that runs through my veins,” she concluded.
The name of Ariel Ruiz Urquiola became relevant in 2016, when he was arrested for starting a hunger and thirst strike in front of the National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology (INOR), in the Cuban capital, to demand that his sister receive the treatment she needed as a cancer patient. Then, in 2018, he made headlines again when he was arrested at his home in Viñales, Pinar del Río, for having a verbal altercation with rural officials, after which Farbitrarily tried for contempt and sentenced to one year in prisonpart of which he completed under extra-penal leave for health reasons.
On May 11, 2019, now out of prison, he participated in the first independent Cuban march in favor of the rights of LGBTIQ+ peopleknown as 11-M, which ended with a wide repressive deployment by police and State Security agents.
In mid-2022, once exiled, Ruiz Urquiola went on a hunger and thirst strike, this time in front of the headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in Geneva, Switzerland, to denounce the Cuban regime’s decision to not allowing the return to the island of his sister, who was in the United States receiving cancer treatment that had been arbitrarily denied to her in Cuba.
