This week’s commencement exercises at Columbia were a joyful occasion for members of the Class of 2006, but one man was not able to celebrate the conferral of his degree at Morningside Heights. The university had awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws to a leading Cuban democracy activist, Oswaldo Paya. Fidel Castro, however, did not award Mr. Paya permission to leave that country in order to receive his degree. His chair on the dais was empty.

Mr. Paya most recently has garnered attention for releasing a proposed new constitution for Cuba, one that would ban propaganda, protect private property, encourage private entrepreneurship, and guarantee the right to criticize the government. It’s not the first offense against Cuba’s ruling regime for Mr. Paya. In 1996, he started the Varela Project, a petition drive to accumulate the 10,000 signatures his Christian Liberation Movement Party would need to force, under the 1976 “constitution,” a referendum on changes to guarantee the freedoms of speech, assembly, and free enterprise, as well as creating multiparty elections and releasing political prisoners.

By 2004, he had gained 25,000 signatures, no mean feat considering what a risk each signer had to take in putting his or her name to a protest document in a repressive state. Despite meeting the legal threshold, no referendum has been forthcoming. Instead, the government has declared its commitment to socialism to be “irrevocable.”

Columbia university honored Mr. Paya’s request that it not award the degree in absentia; he holds out hope that he will one day be able to travel to New York to accept the honor in person. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, did read the citation, which says, in part, “Engineer, journalist, activist, tireless campaigner for human rights, and advocate for the people of Cuba, you represent the aspirations of millions around the world yearning for freedom and democracy. At great personal sacrifice and despite nearly constant surveillance and harassment, you have remained committed to nonviolent dissidence and political change. You embody a life of principle in practice, and we are proud to celebrate your extraordinary dedication to peaceful, democratic values.”

Mr. Paya was not able to speak to the Class of 2006 upon the conferral of his degree, but the remarks he offered when he accepted the European Union’s Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in December 2002, which he accepted on behalf of all Cubans, give a sense of his spirit: “We bring from Cuba a message of peace and solidarity for all peoples. The people of Cuba accept this prize with dignity and in the hope that we can rebuild our society with love for all, as brothers, and as children of God. Cubans are straightforward people and want nothing more than to live in peace and progress in our work, but we cannot, we do not know how to, and we do not want to live without freedom.”