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Cuba's Jailed Librarians Get No Succor From ALA
By Mary Anastasia O'Grady

The Wall Street Journal

June 20, 2003. At the American Library Association annual meeting in Toronto this

weekend there will be a Cuba program. But there won't be any panel

debate about intellectual freedom in Fidel's tropical paradise.

 

Efforts to include Cuba's independent librarians -- considered enemies

of the Revolution -- on the ALA program have failed. That means that

only employees of El Maximo Lider will be featured speakers. That

should be downright riveting.

 

The Toronto event might be a non-event if not for the fact that only a

few months ago, Castro's goons raided 22 independent libraries and

threw 10 librarians in the slammer for up to 26 years. The brutality

of the crackdown against unarmed civilians is more evidence that what

Fidel most fears is the free exchange of ideas. Press reports quoted

Vladimir Roca, the son of the late Cuban Communist party bigwig Blas

Roca and now a prominent critic of the government, making just that

point. "What kind of a hunter uses a cannon to kill a sparrow," he

asked.

 

A group called Friends of Cuban Libraries led by Robert Kent, a

librarian with the New York Public Library, is pleading with the

association to speak up. They want the ALA to pass a strong resolution

in Toronto calling for the release of the librarians and pledging

solidarity with their cause.

 

Joining that chorus is Nat Hentoff, a columnist for the Village Voice

and a prominent civil liberties proponent. "It would be astonishing --

and shameful," Mr. Hentoff wrote to Mr. Kent, "if the American Library

Association does not support -- and gather support for -- the

courageous independent librarians of Cuba, some of whom have been

imprisoned by Castro for very long terms for advocating the very

principles of the freedom to read and think that the American Library

Association has so long fought for in this country."

 

That fight has featured some extreme positions over the years,

including refusing to back efforts to block Internet porn sites in

public libraries on the grounds that "access to information" is

sacred. Yet strangely enough, the ALA's Cuba position heavily favors

state-controlled libraries.

 

Ramón Colas and his wife Berta Mexidor began Cuba's Independent

Library Project in Las Tunas in 1998. They were emboldened by a Castro

speech proclaiming that, "In Cuba there are no prohibited books, only

those we do not have the money to buy." The idea of the project,

according to the founders, is "to promote reading not as a mere act of

receiving understanding, but to form an opinion which is individually

arrived at without censorship nor obligation to one belief."

 

Thinking outside the box got Mr. Colas and Ms. Mexidor into lots of

trouble with Fidel, including multiple detentions, loss of employment

and expulsion from their town. They fled Cuba when their daughter

began to suffer unbearable harassment at school but they left behind a

fledgling independent library system. At the other end of the island,

Roberto de Miranda, who is also the founder of Cuba's largest

independent teacher's union, initiated a similar movement in July 2000

in Havana. He is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

 

On April 16 Michael Royal, a student at the University of Virginia Law

School and Director of the Human Rights Study Project, testified

before Congress about a research trip he took to Cuba. In his remarks

he spoke of Victor Rolando Arroyo, an independent librarian and

journalist in the town of Pinar del Rio who was active in the Varela

Project [a Cuban democracy movement].

 

Mr. Arroyo wrote for the Union of Independent Cuban Journalists and

Writers, according to the testimony. For his work he earned the

Hellman-Hammett grant by Human Rights Watch. "Arroyo's crimes were

writing news stories and running a private library and his sentence is

26 years in prison," said Mr. Royal.

 

The ALA claims that it disqualified the independent librarians from

its Toronto program because the funding grant stipulates

"professional" exchanges. According to Michael Dowling who heads the

ALA's International Relations Committee, the ALA could not include

those who are not "professionals," presumably anyone lacking Fidel's

imprimatur. Yet the lack of "professional" training won't keep Eliades

Acosta, Cuba's director of the Jose Marti National Library, off the

program. When I mentioned to Mr. Dowling that Mr. Acosta is not a

librarian, he said: "Well, neither is the librarian for the U.S.

Library of Congress." That answer contradicts the ALA assertion that

the librarian title is crucial to library work.

 

All of which suggests that the ALA's attitude toward the Cuban

independents has more to do with the politics of some of the ALA's

activist members than with professional credentials. A January 2001

report on Cuba by the ALA's Latin American subcommittee relies heavily

on the testimony of Ann Sparanese, who "asserted that she has seen no

evidence of censorship or confiscation of books on her many visits to

Cuba." The operative word here is "many" since Ms. Sparanese, who is

influential in ALA policymaking toward Cuba, is a longtime member of

the Venceremos Brigade. U.S. brigadistas have been traveling to Cuba

for 32 years to promote Fidel's agenda.

 

Rhonda Neugebauer, another ALA member and an important source for

subcommittee findings, testified in the report that she saw no

government censorship in Cuba either. Last month she signed Fidel's

May Day petition designed to counter criticism of his crackdown on

dissidents from such former loyalists as Nobel Prize winner Jose

Saramago.

 

A third activist ALA council member is Mark Rosenzweig, who is also

the director of reference for the Center for Marxist Studies in New

York, the repository of documents of the Communist Party U.S.A. Mr.

Rosenzweig staunchly opposes ALA support for the independent libraries

and has accused Mr. Hentoff of seeing the problem through "the eyes of

the imperialist power," meaning the U.S., of course. In a telephone

interview this week he told me: "We cannot presume that all countries

are capable of the same level of intellectual freedom that we have in

the U.S." After all, he added, "Cuba is caught in an extremely sharp

conflict with the U.S." And finally, "I don't think [Cuba] is a

dictatorship. It's a republic."

 

In the U.S., unlike Cuba, contrarians aren't slapped in jail. But I

thought the ALA's 64,000 dues-paying members might like to know who's

setting policies in their name.

 

Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street  Journal © 2003

   Dow Jones & Company. All rights reserved.

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