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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. | 
