Library group hit on Cuba stance

The American Library Association (ALA) is under fire for inviting Cuban government librarians to its upcoming annual convention, while ignoring colleagues from independent libraries in Cuba who were recently sentenced to prison terms of up to 27 years.

"After years of silence, double talk and coverups by the ALA, the current vicious attack gives the ALA no excuse for failing to take action," said Robert Kent, founder of Friends of Cuban Libraries and a librarian at the New York Public Library.

*** One of the board members, Mark Rosenzweig, is chief librarian of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, the archive of the Communist Party USA. He is also a leading figure in the ALA's Social Responsibility Round Table, one of the most vocal factions in the ALA supporting the Castro regime. "If justice is harsh in Cuba, it is because Cuban independence is threatened by the machinations of the hostile U.S. administration, trying to create the conditions for a puppet government to take over," Mr. Rosenzweig wrote in a recent e-mail.

...........Another ALA board member, Ann Sparanese, is a member of the Venceremos Brigade, a radical Marxist group that dates to the 1960s. "They are not librarians," she said of the imprisoned Cubans in a brief telephone interview yesterday. ***

The American Library Association.

Feb 11, 2002 - Private libraries turn page in Cuba: Book lenders offer variety, draw scorn of Castro regime***HAVANA -- The faded tomes of Rogelio Traviso's independent library spill out of two small bookcases in his home's tiny back office, sharing space with an ancient Olivetti typewriter and a decrepit love seat piled with out-of-date foreign newsmagazines.

"I'd like this to be bigger but I don't have the money for more shelves," the 55-year-old political dissident said. Since 1999, Traviso has been welcoming neighbors, fellow opposition members and anyone else who is interested into his home to borrow books--the ones that he says Cuba's public libraries do not offer.

………… The founders of the independent library movement, Berta Mexidor Vazquez and her husband, Ramon Humberto Colas, immigrated to Miami in December after losing their jobs and their home, and seeing their daughter removed from her school.

Other independent library heads say they have been jailed briefly or had security agents search their collections. ……

…. That's not to say that at least some of the same things aren't available at Cuba's expansive network of state libraries. The National Library in Havana has 4 million titles, and while most are dated--one of the "International Who's Who" copies is from 1995--the big wooden card catalog is full of authors considered controversial in Cuba, from Mario Vargas Llosa to George Orwell.

Critics point out that such books are not available to all patrons, whose type of library card depends on their jobs or other affiliations, and that most Cubans would hesitate to go on record asking for controversial titles.

Most of the library's books are in closed stacks. Patrons must ask for them by filling out a form with their own name and the title, which is then handed over to librarians. ***

At least we need to identify their politics and broadcast their ideology. They are generally given a pass and afforded respect without any real insight into who is running these institutions.

Jeff Jacoby: Keeping hope, conscience alive in Cuba (Part II)***HAVANA ''THERE ARE NO banned books in Cuba,'' Fidel Castro declared in February 1998, ''only those which 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 when Ramon Humberto Colas, a psychologist in Las Tunas, heard Castro's words, he 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 men and women 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 across the country, 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 `Nineteen Eighty-four.''' It does not come as a surprise that readers in this hemisphere's only totalitarian outpost hunger for the greatest antitotalitarian novels ever written.

The Castro regime boasts 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.***

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