The Cuban professor and activist Omara Ruiz Urquiola publicly revealed that Florida International University (FIU) notified her nearly six months ago about the cancellation of her Mellon scholarship, related to the Program for Threatened Cuban Scholars in the Humanities, administered by the Cuban Research Institute (CRI) at that university.
In a lengthy Facebook post, Ruiz Urquiola described three years of what he qualifies as institutional abuse of power, fraud, and political pressure that prevented him from joining the program.
"This nausea surpasses the hangover from any chemotherapy, and I know quite a bit about that. That’s why it has been almost a semester since I received the official notification of the cancellation of the Mellon fellowship from Florida International University," wrote the activist.
The scholarship awarded to Ruiz Urquiola in May 2023 was part of a program at FIU aimed at hosting 12 Cuban scholars, each for one semester. The program received total funding of $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in December 2022.
The professor was never able to join the program due to difficulties in obtaining an academic visa. In 2024, she reported this issue, and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) attributed the rejection to the expiration date of the invitation letter for the FIU scholarship.
According to the complaint by Omara, the then director of the CRI, Jorge Duany, intervened with the State Department to withdraw support for her visa change application while she was in Miami.
Jorge Duany, the director of the CRI that originated the fraud, had urged the Office of Cuban Affairs at the State Department to withdraw my support and deny the change to an academic visa while I was in Miami, he reported.
Duany retired in September 2024. That year, he gave an interview with CiberCuba in which he denied the initial accusations from Omara and stated that immigration regularization was the responsibility of the beneficiary.
Ruiz Urquiola also points to the current interim director, Sebastián Arcos, whom he describes as "as shameless as the first," and details that those responsible for the CRI subjected her to an interrogation to seek inconsistencies in her academic record, including requesting contacts to verify her time at Cuban institutions —the same ones that censored her and prompted the granting of the scholarship—.
On December 10, 2025, the activist formally requested an investigation from FIU regarding the performance of the CRI. According to her account, she received no response. "This is how mafias operate, and they are experienced in impunity," she wrote.
The political factor: Núñez, Rubio, and university autonomy
A central focus of the complaint is directed at Jeanette Núñez, president of FIU since February 2025, former lieutenant governor of Florida, and political ally of Marco Rubio, who participated via recorded message in her investiture as the seventh president of the university in October 2025.
"The president of FIU, to whom I directed the request, was the lieutenant governor of Florida and a political ally of Marco Rubio. She was appointed to the academic position with a blatant disregard for any notion of university autonomy. It was a political interference in the public educational institutions of that country," stated Ruiz Urquiola.
The activist additionally links the alleged reprisals against her scholarship to the public complaints made by her brother, Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, regarding alleged irregularities in sectors of the Cuban-American activism supported by Rubio.
"Now they are trying to exterminate any autonomous notion of a country, from one extreme to the other, both mafias, the one inside and the one across, are pushing to annihilate us as a thinking people," said the professor.
Ruiz Urquiola was expelled from the Higher Institute of Design in Havana in July 2019 after more than twenty years of teaching, in what she and her brother denounced as a political reprisal by the Cuban regime. It was precisely that persecution that led the CRI to award her the Mellon scholarship.
In his denunciation message, he stated: "Additionally, I know the worth of my dignity, and that is rarely achieved: $50,000 (and counting). Who knows who usurps it or what trickery they employed to obtain it."
Related videos:
Filed under: