On Wednesday, March 8 from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. in the Vieux Carre Room of the LSU Student Union, the Eric Voegelin Institute and Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation are co-sponsoring “Castro’s Legacy and the Future of Cuba,” a panel open to the University community.
The panel will feature speakers John Suarez and Rosa María Payá and will offer lunch to the first 35 attendees of the panel.
“The original idea was an attempt to … get the story out of [communism],” said James Stoner, professor and director of the Eric Voegelin Institute. “Naturally enough, some of the speakers most engaged would be people who are from places that are still ruled by communists.”
Stoner worked with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, as well as colleagues at University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Tulane University to bring the speakers on a three-day tour, speaking at each of the universities.
The University’s sponsor of the event, the Eric Voegelin Institute, “is a humanities and social sciences research institute devoted to the revitalization of teaching and understanding of the “great books” of Western civilization in comparison with other traditions,” according to its website. It is named after a Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, former professor in the University’s Department of Government.
The other sponsor of the event, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, is a non-profit organization “devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes,” according to its website. Its mission is to educate everyone fully about communism.
“Almost always when I ask young people about whether they learned about the Nazis and so on, of course they have,” Stoner said. “Then I ask them what they know about Stalin and the Gulag camps in Russia, and the faces go blank.”
Suarez is an activist as well as the international secretary of the Cuban Democratic Directorate. In addition, Suarez also launched the Free Cuba Foundation and runs a blog entitled Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter.
Payá is a member of, and the daughter of the national coordinator of, the Christian Liberation Movement and executive director of Cuba Decide, an initiative in support of fair elections for Cuba. Payá, much like her father Oswaldo Payá who was a Sakharov Prize laureate of the European Parliament and leader of opposition to the Cuban government, fights in support of legal and non-violent changes for Cuban citizens’ basic human rights.
Recently, the Cuban government denied visas to recipients of an award named in memoriam of Payá’s father, with Cuban foreign ministry citing an “an open and grave provocation against the government” of its current president, forcing Payá to accept the award on their behalf.
“It’s passing strange that [communism], it’s not altogether ignored, its significance, it seems to me, under noticed,” Stoner said. “At least in the popular mind and in high school history, historians would know.”
