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Jeff Jacoby. Posted on Mon, Apr. 29, 2002 in
The Miami Herald
HAVANA -- ''There are no banned books in Cuba,'' Fidel Castro declared in
1998, "only those that we have no money to buy.''
Of course, books are banned in Cuba; just try to locate one that criticizes
Castro. Bookstores and public libraries here carry works exalting Marxism, but
you won't find The Gulag Archipelago or Darkness at Noon on their shelves.
So upon hearing Castro's words, Ramón Humberto Colas, a psychologist
in Las Tunas, and his wife, Berta Mexidor, decided to put them to the test. They
designated the 800 or so books in their home as a library and invited friends
and neighbors to borrow them for free. And so was born the first of Cuba's
independent libraries -- independent of state control, of censorship and of any
ideology save the conviction that it is no crime to read a book.
The people who run these humble libraries risk government retaliation;
several have been threatened, interrogated, raided by the police -- or worse.
Colas and Mexidor were evicted from their home, denounced in the (state-owned)
press and repeatedly arrested. Their books were confiscated. They were fired
from their jobs. Their daughter was expelled from school. Government persecution
eventually drove them from Cuba, but the seed they planted bore fruit. Today
there are more than 100 independent libraries in homes nationwide, each one a
little island of intellectual freedom.
In Gisela Delgado's library in Havana, visitors can borrow Spanish
translations of Adam Michnik's Letters from Prison, Vaclav Havel's The Power of
the Powerless or the speeches of Martin Luther King. On her shelves are
everything from art to philosophy, but when I ask which books are the most
popular, she doesn't hesitate: Animal Farm and 1984. It does not come as a
surprise that readers in this hemisphere's only totalitarian outpost hunger for
the greatest anti-totalitarian novels ever written.
The Castro regime boasts, justifiably, of having wiped out illiteracy. That
makes it all the more unforgivable that it has turned the lending of books into
an act of defiance. Dissent in Cuba takes many forms, but there is none that
shames the regime more than this one.
Like most communist countries, Cuba is plagued with shortages of everything
from food to electricity, but political dissidents it has in abundance. The
government maligns them as malcontents and traitors -- ''all these people are
financed by the United States,'' sneers Fernando Remírez, Cuba's deputy
foreign minister -- but the dissidents I met here uniformly come across as men
and women of integrity and courage.
I visited Oscar Espinosa Chepe, an economist who lost his job at the
National Bank of Cuba -- and whose wife was fired from the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs -- when he began calling publicly for economic reform. Bluff and
good-natured, he describes himself as a former true believer who gradually came
to realize the truth about Castro.
''He turned out to be someone who did everything for his own power,''
Espinosa says. "Life in Cuba is a mixture of Stalinism and caudillismo'' --
rule by a caudillo, a Latin dictator -- "and there are no parties, no
opposition, no elections, no choices.''
Another one-time true believer, Martha Beatriz Roque, was a professor of
statistics at the University of Havana who fell out of favor for praising
glasnost and perestroika. In 1997, she and three other dissidents released a
report criticizing Cuba's communist economy and urging a peaceful transition to
democracy. For that offense, they were arrested on charges of spreading ''enemy
propaganda'' and convicted in a one-day show trial that was closed to the
public. Roque and two of the others spent nearly three years in prison; the
fourth, Vladimiro Roca, is still there.
Roque has been detained by the police 17 times; her home has been broken
into and searched; she assumes her phone is tapped and her visitors spied on.
But she doesn't fear for her safety. Well-known dissidents -- Elizardo Sánchez,
Oswaldo Payá, Ricardo González, Espinosa, Roque and others -- are
protected by their international reputations. If something happens to them, says
Roque, "people outside Cuba will make a big noise.''
What worries her more is the fate of dissidents who aren't as well known.
Juan Carlos González, for example -- the blind president of the Cuban
Foundation for Human Rights, who was abducted by the security police and
battered badly. Or 70-year-old Juan Basulto Morell, a dissident journalist who
was beaten bloody with a club as his assailant yelled, "This is for being a
counter-revolutionary.''
In Cuba, as in all dictatorships, the dissenters are the ones who sustain
hope and keep conscience alive. On this tormented island, they are the bravest
and the best.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. | 
