The criteria to evaluate the performance of academia in any given country should be the production and dissemination of rigorous knowledge, as well as how useful said knowledge is in the public sphere—by international standards. Describing, analyzing, questioning and proposing something should be the goal of anything or anyone that calls themselves an “academic.” An analysis which uses scientific methods, and studies the social repercussions of the production of knowledge, is the bare minimum. But in recent years, autocratic regimes -as Russia, China and Cuba- have using academic spaces and subjects, through legitimization and manipulation discourses, as resources for the preservation of power