Cuba: University of Havana

The eighty-eight step stone staircase telescopes up to the elegant, neo-classical rectory, with four columns.
Nearly at the top is the Alma Mater, a bronze statue cast by Czechoslovakian artist Mario Korbel in 1919. Dressed in a Roman tunic, she welcome students with outstretched arms, seated atop a marble pedestal.
The University has been founded in 1728, and its majestic campus was inspired by Columbia University in New York.
The nomenclature of the university has takes its turn to change over its more than 280 years of existence. It was first called "Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Gerónimo de la Habana" (in English Royal and Pontifical University of Saint Jerome of Havana).

At those times, universities needed a royal or papal authorization in order to be created and thus the names Real y Pontificia. The two men who gave that authorization to the university were Pope Innocent XIII and King Philip V of Spain. In 1842, the university changed its status to become a secular, royal and literary institution. Its name became Real y Literaria Universidad de La Habana (in English, Royal and Literary University of Havana) and later, when Cuba was a free republic, the name was changed to Universidad Nacional (in English, National University).

Currently the University, has an enrollment of 60 000 students spread over its 17 faculties and 15 municipal locations. In the current educational teaching period studied 32 races.

The University was traditionally a hornet’s nest for political conspiracies. It was the site of the demonstrations, known as tanganas, during the Machadato and the refuge of gangsters during President Grau’s years. It’s autonomy has been codified in the Constitution of 1940, and in theory, police were barred from the “sacred hill.”
The nearly eighteen thousands students, in thirteen faculties, were governed by the Federation of University Students (FEU). During the 1950s, the students would once again lead the fight against dictator, Batista.
It is here that Fidel Castro enters the story. After, graduating from Belen, he had enrolled as a law student in 1945, more interested in politics than attending classes. Castro dreamed of being elected President of FEU but met with little success.
The FEU was headed by Jose Antonio Echevarria, an architecture student from Cardenas. Affectionately called Manzanita, Eschevarria was a catholic intellectual with a gift of oratory. In November 1955, he organized a rally on the escalinta ( university’s steps) to commemorate the death of the medical students by the Spaniards in 1871.
Batista’s enforcers, known as esbirras moved in, hospitalising several students. Echevarria, himself was severly beaten. The FEU called for a student strike and riots spread throughout the island, met with ever more brutality by Batista’s secret police.
Because of the Cuban revolution, the university had been closed down for three years in 1956, yet the demonstrations of the escalinata continued .
The pedestal of the Alma Mater provided a podium for many passionate speeches. The students then marched down the stairs linked, singing the Cuban national anthem and shouting “Abajo Batista!” The police awaited them on San Lazaro Street, assaulting them first with water cannons, then truncheons, then bullets.

During the months that followed, the police executed many of the students that led the failed coup. President Batista ordered the university to be closed, and it remained so until Batista fled the country and Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959.

The Castro regime re-opened the university in 1959 and put an end to student demonstrations and political affiliations. By 1961, particularly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, public student gatherings were forbidden unless they were government sponsored. As per the information in the university's website, the student body was "purified" of all opposition to Fidel Castro.
Today, people from around the world come to the University of Havana for Spanish courses bereft of any violence.