Cuban-Americans and other close watchers of events in Cuba are voicing strong opposition to the appointment of John Coatsworth as dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

The promotion of Mr. Coatsworth was announced last week by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger. Mr. Coatsworth made national headlines in September 2007 when he defended inviting the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Columbia by saying he would also have welcomed Adolf Hitler to campus. That has also prompted opposition to Mr. Coatsworth from Jewish students and faculty members.

But to some observers of Cuba, Mr. Coatsworth’s view of Fidel Castro is as egregious as his statement about Hitler.

At the heart of the debate is a book issued in 2004 by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, when Mr. Coatsworth was its director. In a preface to the book, which is titled “The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century,” Mr. Coatsworth claimed that Cuba’s economy was only one of two in Latin America that grew in the 1980s, attributing that to “careful management of its economic relations with the Soviet Bloc led by the Soviet Union.”

“The benefits of this strategy were impressive,” Mr. Coatsworth wrote, citing, “rising standards of living in a society characterized by a high degree of equality and universal access to employment, basic nutrition, housing, education and medical care.” When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, he wrote, “Cuba confronted an economic catastrophe roughly equivalent to what would occur in the rest of Latin America if the U.S. government were suddenly to impose an economic embargo on trade and investment in the Western Hemisphere.”

The former American ambassador to Venezuela who served as assistant secretary of state for the Western hemisphere under President Bush, Otto Reich, ridiculed Mr. Coatsworth’s assessment. “The Cuba that this man describes is a Cuba that exists in the minds of academics only. It has nothing to do with the Cuba of centralized planning, of complete political repression, of hundreds of thousands of people dying in the straits of Florida trying to flee over the last 40 years,” Mr. Reich said.

“Anyone who reads this preface, you can tell this person is biased in favor of Marxist-Leninism,” Mr. Reich said. “He is a dean? Give me a break.”

Several Cuban scholars questioned the objectivity of the book, which includes essays by American professors and academics employed by Cuban universities, including the University of Havana.

“The University of Havana is paid for by the government,” a professor of history at the University of Miami and a former director of the University of Miami’s Research Institute for Cuban Studies, Jaime Suchlicki, said.

Employees of a state-controlled institution, Mr. Suchlicki said, are not free to express critiques of the government. “If you’re working in Cuba, you’re not going to criticize Fidel or Raoul Castro,” he said.

At least one Cuban professor described Mr. Coatsworth’s introduction as “self contradictory.”

“By definition, economic development is an ascending and sustainable movement of the economy,” a professor emeritus of political economy at Florida International University, Antonio Jorge, said. “Therefore, if there had been economic development, then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc should not have brought about the collapse of the economy, as the dean writes.”

A resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Falcoff, said Mr. Coatsworth’s writing reflected predictable themes: “Everything that’s good in Cuba is the result of Socialism; everything that’s bad is the result of the embargo.”

Mr. Falcoff described Mr. Coatsworth’s appointment as “appalling,” on the basis of the dean’s statement regarding Hitler.

Several Columbia professors and students said they oppose Mr. Coatsworth’s appointment because of his role in Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit, and because of remarks he made during an interview on Fox News, in which he said he would have invited Adolf Hitler to campus.

An Israeli student at SIPA who voiced strong opposition to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit, Liat Shetret, said she opposed the appointment based on Mr. Coatsworth’s record on Israel. Last week at SIPA, she said, posters advertising events to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary this week were torn down, while posters for “naqba,” the Arabic term for catastrophe that also is used to describe Israel’s founding, were plastered all over campus. “It was a perfect opportunity for him to step up,” she said.

Last month, another student, Christian Kim, posted an opinion piece online in which he argued, “For an elite policy institution, SIPA’s dialogue concerning the Middle East conflict seems strangely one-sided, heavily favoring the Palestinian cause.”

Reached by telephone, Mr. Kim declined to comment on Mr. Coatsworth’s appointment. He said he wrote the piece in defense of his Jewish and Israeli friends, who “don’t feel comfortable talking about their support for Israel.” Speaking in measured tones, he expressed compassion for the “average Palestinian,” but applauded Israel’s existence. “Let me put it this way: I have a lot of compassion for all people, but I’m definitely for Israel’s right to exist,” he said.

According to a co-president of SIPA’s Student Association, Bernardo Navazo, Mr. Coatsworth edged out two other candidates for dean. Mr. Navazo said that the students who participated in the search for their new dean did not ask Mr. Coatsworth about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit. “The issue didn’t arise,” he said.

Mr. Coatsworth did not respond to a message seeking comment.

A spokesman for Columbia said President Bollinger’s appointment of Mr. Coatsworth “was duly approved by the University’s Board of Trustees,” but declined to provide further details.