Cuba's Jailed Librarians Get No Succor From the ALA

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
The Wall Street Journal / The Americas

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.

Updated June 20, 2003

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