Posted on 01/18/2004 2:12:12 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
U.S. librarians are turning their backs on fellow librarians now suffering imprisonment in Castro's jails. At its national meeting in San Diego this week, the American Library Association,(ALA) the nation's largest organization of U.S. librarians, chose not to demand that Castro release Cuban librarians jailed by Cuba's communist government last spring despite their association's previous vote to support an investigation of the incarcerations by United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the Washington Times reported. Resorting to a technicality that the Cubans who operate private libraries consider themselves "political dissidents" and not librarians, the notoriously liberal ALA omitted language that would have called for their release. "Today marks a tragic date in the history of the American Library Association," Robert Kent, head of the New York-based advocacy group Friends of Cuban Libraries told the Times. "They failed to live up to their highest ideal, which is a support for intellectual freedom as a universal human right." John W. Barry, a former ALA president and head of the group's international relations committee that was involved in writing the report, told the Times yesterday that the ALA did act, but avoided stronger language because of internal opposition. It was a "contentious issue within our association," he said. "Several people felt that it was not our place to go there." As reported by NewsMax.com Librarians Silent on Castro's Clampdown the ALA has a record of failing the jailed librarians who are part of an underground movement in Cuba defying Castro's ban on a wide variety of books, ranging from works by poets and writers advocating human rights to volumes on free market economics or religious freedom. The movement is run by Cuban dissidents who have set up an interconnected community of as many as 200 independent libraries located in private homes across Cuba. The private free libraries had been established when the Castro regime arrested and jailed about 75 dissidents nationwide last year. Among them were 14 independent librarians who, the Times reports, are facing a collective 196 years in prison for challenging their government's laws regarding what books people are allowed to read. The ALA is ignoring the plea of jailed librarians in Cuba and missing an opportunity to support a fledgling movement of intellectual freedom on the communist island, the group's critics say. The report adopted by the ALA does urge Cuba "to eliminate obstacles to access to information imposed by its policies," and calls on the Castro government "to respect, defend and promote the basic human rights" as defined by the United Nations, but does not come to the aid of the imprisoned Cubans because they aren't considered to be librarians as defined by the ALA.
196/14 = 14 years per person. My guess is that Castro will spend a lot more time in Hell, beginning a lot sooner than 14 years from now.
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