By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer
Gloria Leon, head of the party cell in the university's History Department and a teacher of U.S. history, was the third Havana professor censured for political reasons in the past year, the sources said.
Party officials also summoned political science professor Miriam Gras to a hearing. She was ejected from the party last year after publishing a paper on Cuba's lack of democracy, and friends said they now fear she will be fired from the university.
The suspension of Leon's party membership after a turbulent eight-hour disciplinary hearing on July 19, while largely symbolic, highlighted some of the problems the party has faced since it began recruiting and promoting younger members in the wake of Eastern Europe's collapse in 1989.
``You foreigners always watch the anti-Castro dissidents,'' one party official told a U.S. visitor in December. ``But the highest level of dissidence in Cuba is to be found inside the party. In my group, we question everything.''
Some party reformers fell silent after a harsh speech by armed forces chief Raul Castro in March, but others held their ground and complained publicly of the government's growing political rigidity.
Their stand was credited with averting a broader crackdown, though the Leon sanction was viewed by some in Havana as a sign of another tightening of the screws on academic and party dissent.
Leon, described as in her mid-30s, was an outspoken member of the reformist current within the party who often clashed with University Rector Juan Valdez and the top party official at the university, Sonia Negrin.
She had supported Gras and Jorge Luis Acanda, demoted as head of the Havana University Philosophy Department after telling U.S. journalists about the sagging interest in Marxist studies in Cuba.
The official charge against Leon: attending, without the required party and university permission, a British Embassy luncheon in mid-June for Joe Sullivan, departing head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana.
Leon, in fact, did not attend the luncheon, friends said. But she had been under fire for months for her political and academic activities, they added.
She publicly defended Gras last year as well as a group of sociology students involved in a seminar last summer by a Swiss professor who later wrote a report critical of Cuba. Sociology Department chief Teresa Muñoz was demoted to professor, but the students went unpunished, one friend said.
As head of the History Department's international section, Leon maintained contacts with U.S. and Canadian academics involved in exchange programs, but was viewed with suspicion by orthodox party and university officials.
After Raul Castro's speech in March, she complained publicly to a senior party official that university professors and low-ranking party members feared ``a return to the 1970s'' -- when the party enforced tough Soviet-style ideological limits on Cuban i ntellectuals.
Leaders from the party's top cell at the university, and even from its Havana provincial level, attended the Leon hearing. The decision to suspend her party membership was made public the next day, one day after the university had closed for summer rece ss.