Independent Libraries in Cuba Defy Government's Lock on Information

Matthew Gaylor freematt at coil.com
Fri Jun 8 00:09:49 PDT 2001


http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i39/39a04001.htm

Independent Libraries in Cuba Defy Government's Lock on Information

The movement faces poverty and repression as it collects books from 
the outside world

By MARION LLOYD

San Juan y Martínez, Cuba

The smattering of Catholic journals, poetry books, and yellowed 
Newsweeks that make up Valentin Almiral's provincial library seem an 
unlikely catalyst for revolution.

But in a country where the government wields nearly absolute control 
over information, the former biology teacher's private collection 
represents a significant challenge to state authority.

Mr. Almiral's Love, Peace, Democracy, and Freedom Library, housed in 
a concrete shack on the outskirts of this tobacco-growing town in 
western Cuba, is one of dozens of independent libraries that have 
opened in Cuba over the past three years to give scholars and other 
Cubans access to books that they can't always obtain elsewhere. Most 
of the libraries are little more than a bookshelf in the back room of 
somebody's home. But their content -- ranging from light fiction, 
like detective novels, to hard-core anti-Communist treatises -- and 
the long list of dissidents involved in the movement have made the 
Cuban government uncomfortable.

"It's hard not to have the feeling that these people are conspiring 
with a superpower that has been plotting against Cuba for more than 
40 years," says Eliades Acosta, the director of the state-run 
National Library, referring to the United States. He notes that the 
vast majority of the independent librarians are active members of 
opposition political parties. In addition, he says, many openly 
receive money from Miami-based exile groups to support their 
dissident activities, as well as help in coordinating book donations.

The movement's founders, Berta Mexidor and Ramon Colas, deny that 
they have political motives, but acknowledge that the U.S. government 
helps the libraries with book donations. Both Ms. Mexidor and Mr. 
Colas, who are married, used to be professors. They say they are 
merely trying to supplement the offerings at state-run libraries, 
which have few texts critical of Communism.

Scholars who want access to controversial texts at those libraries 
must be affiliated with a university and get written permission from 
administrators in their department, according to diplomatic sources 
and academics who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Access to controversial books is further restricted by the 
university-admissions process. In order to be admitted to a 
university, students must prove that they have not been active in any 
dissident movement -- a requirement that screens out many Cubans 
interested in such books.

New books of any kind have been hard to come by since the collapse of 
the Soviet Union, in 1991, which deprived Cuba of its main supplier 
of textbooks and paper. "The latest books don't make it into the 
country," says Noedis Pita, an engineering student at the Jose 
Antonio Echeverria Polytechnic Institute, on the outskirts of Havana. 
Although the university -- like the University of Havana -- has an 
extensive main library and separate libraries in each department, she 
says her professors had to request copies of newer texts and then 
make photocopies of selected passages for their students. She studies 
at central Havana's century-old Masonic Library, which has an 
impressive stock of 36,000 books, but most date to before the 1959 
Cuban revolution.

Ms. Pita says censorship does not tend to inhibit the study of 
engineering, but friends in political science complain about their 
lack of access to books on subjects such as capitalist theory. "Many 
of the books are there, but only certain students can get access," 
she says. Students skirt the problem by requesting books from family 
members abroad. Then, if the books somehow slip by the censors who 
inspect incoming packages, the students circulate them secretly.

Ms. Mexidor, who used to teach economics at the University of Las 
Tunas, in eastern Cuba, says that what the independent librarians 
want is freedom from censorship, so "ideology doesn't define what a 
person can read." She and Mr. Colas say they got the idea for the 
independent libraries from a remark Fidel Castro made in February 
1998, during an international book fair. The Cuban president insisted 
that "there are no banned books in Cuba, just no money to buy them."

The couple took those words at face value and began soliciting book 
donations from Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Today, 
they say, more than 80 such libraries operate around the island, with 
new ones opening almost weekly.

In the process, however, the movement has attracted attention from 
the government, always a risky proposition. Soon after the couple 
opened the first library in their home, in March 1998, Mr. Colas, a 
former psychology professor, was fired from his job as director of a 
psychiatric hospital in Las Tunas. The couple were later evicted from 
their state-run housing in Las Tunas and sent to live on a nearby 
government farm -- a move that shut down their library. They later 
moved in with Ms. Mexidor's family, in Amancio, a farming town 60 
miles from Las Tunas.

Their story is typical of the other independent librarians, most of 
whom are academics or journalists who were fired from government jobs 
after becoming involved in opposition politics. In the past year, the 
police have detained half a dozen independent librarians, according 
to reports by the independent CubaNet news service and Amnesty 
International, and supporters say at least a dozen more have been 
threatened and harassed. In December, Julia Cecilia Delgado, a 
librarian and president of the Association for the Recovery of Human 
Values, a human-rights group, was sentenced to one year in jail for 
"disrespect," in what supporters assert is punishment for opening a 
library in her Havana home.

In mid-March, five men said to belong to the government's Rapid 
Response brigades -- groups of young Communist Party activists who 
investigate "counterrevolutionaries" -- attacked Mr. Almiral's 
library here in San Juan y Martinez, ransacked the bookshelves, and 
beat up several patrons. After Mr. Almiral complained to the police, 
he says, the men returned the next night and threw sacks of excrement 
on the walls of the shack.
Following appeals from independent librarians, the International 
Federation of Library Associations sent a delegation to Cuba in June 
1999 to investigate the alleged human-rights abuses. In a September 
1999 letter to President Castro, the organization concluded that "the 
Cuba government has responded to the independent libraries with a 
campaign of threats, intimidation, detentions, evictions ... and has 
deprived these people of their jobs." The letter urged Mr. Castro to 
respect freedom of information and freedom of expression, which it 
described as "the right of citizens in all countries of the world."

Cuban-government officials say they have no knowledge of any attacks 
on independent libraries. They also deny any connection between the 
arrests and the library movement. But they are keenly aware of the 
movement's potential to attract unwanted international attention.

"We're in the presence of a carefully disguised campaign, which has a 
big appeal in the world today under the guise of free access to 
information," says Mr. Acosta, the National Library director. He 
charges that the movement is based on the false pretense that certain 
books are unavailable at state libraries. "I challenge you to find a 
book on [the independent libraries'] shelves that I don't stock," he 
says.

Critics note that even if a book is listed in the National Library's 
catalog, that does not mean it is available to the public. A Cuban 
college student who recently requested a copy of a novel by the 
exiled writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante was refused by the librarian, 
who said the book was "counterrevolutionary." George Orwell's classic 
anti-authoritarian novel 1984 is not listed in the library's card 
catalog.

Mr. Acosta blames a budget crunch for the absence of certain books, 
saying that with limited funds he chooses to stock only those texts 
that "contribute to upholding the moral fabric of the Cuban state." 
He also justifies the need to restrict access to anti-Communist texts 
by saying, "We are in the midst of a war [with the United States]. 
These are not normal times."

The debate over whether the U.S. trade embargo warrants the Cuban 
government's clampdown on information was the subject of an article 
in the April issue of American Libraries, the magazine of the 
American Library Association. The article took the form of a debate 
between Robert Kent, a humanities reference librarian at the New York 
Public Library and a leading advocate of the independent libraries, 
and Ann Sparanese, a librarian at the Englewood Public Library, in 
New Jersey, and a member of the library association's Social 
Responsibilities Round Table.

Ms. Sparanese defended the Cuban government's position, arguing that 
the independent librarians were more interested in waging politics 
than in promoting reading. "This is not about libraries; it's not 
even about intellectual freedom," she argued, adding that none of the 
people involved in the movement were trained librarians.

She also challenged Mr. Kent's assertion that book censorship is 
commonplace in Cuba, noting that the government did not confiscate 
any of the 4,000 books recently delivered to the island by Jarrett T. 
Barrios, a Democratic lawmaker in Massachusetts.

Mr. Barrios notes, however, that most of the January shipment 
comprised children's books and medical texts with no political 
content. He says he was not aware of the independent libraries before 
his trip. But by going through official channels, he says, he ensured 
that the books would reach the widest audience. "We have strong 
feelings about politics, but we also want to encourage democracy from 
within," he says.

U.S. officials in Cuba take a different view. The U.S. Interests 
Section in Havana, the only official representative of the U.S. 
government in Cuba, has actively supported the independent libraries, 
which officials say will broaden Cubans' knowledge of the outside 
world and help prepare them for life after Mr. Castro. The office 
makes monthly book deliveries to independent libraries around the 
island and weekly deliveries in the capital.

The Martin Luther King II Library, an other independent library in 
San Juan y Martinez, recently received a shipment that included Tom 
Sawyer and a set of how-to texts on raising children. Alina Alvarez, 
the librarian, says she has since requested English-language primers 
and American-history texts. The books are in high demand in a country 
where nearly everyone either is planning to emigrate to the United 
States or is receiving money from relatives already there.

The U.S. Interests Section also distributes books -- including 
Orwell's Animal Farm; The Power of the Powerless, by the president of 
the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel; and politically neutral textbooks 
-- to 1,200 people throughout the country. Many of the recipients are 
Cuban-government officials hungry for outside information, according 
to a diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. Within its guarded 
compound, the U.S. office has also started offering free Internet 
access to a select group of Cuban dissidents. In Cuba, only 
government officials and academics usually have access to the 
Internet, and then only to certain sites.

Still, the founders of the library movement say the bulk of their 
support comes from private contributors, not the U.S. government. Mr. 
Cabrera Infante, a former Cuban diplomat and winner of Spain's 
prestigious Cervantes literary award, helps coordinate donations from 
his home in London. The movement has also caught the attention of 
several delegates to the European Union, who have proposed shipping 
books en masse to the independent libraries.

"We never expected the project to take off like this," says Mr. 
Colas. "But we have one big advantage. The project is concrete, and 
you can see the results, the books."

The librarians complain that many books sent from abroad never make 
it past Cuban customs officials, who are charged with confiscating 
any material deemed a threat to the state.

Francisco Perez Delgado, the son of Ms. Delgado, the jailed 
librarian, shows a half-empty box of books that arrived recently from 
Miami. He says the family received a notice from the government 
outlining which books it had confiscated as "counterrevolutionary." 
Most of them involved political theory.

But other books manage to slip past the censors. His mother's library 
-- sitting on sagging wood shelves in the front room of the family's 
dingy, three-room Havana house -- includes titles like The End of an 
Era in Havana: In Whose Name Can a Revolution Cheat a People?, an 
anti-Communist tract by a pair of French journalists; On Liberty: The 
Voice of the Church in Cuba: 100 Epistolary Documents, by Friedrich 
A. Hagel; and the standard collection of poems by Jose Marti, Cuba's 
idolized martyr.

The eclectic collection is typical of the independent libraries, 
which their directors insist are primarily designed to offer literary 
options, not to indoctrinate. They also note that not all of the 
independent libraries stock controversial books.

The Martin Luther King II Library is one such example. "We don't have 
anything here that's banned," says Ms. Alvarez, whose husband is a 
well-known dissident. "They're mostly children's books. How can that 
be dangerous?"

But other librarians acknowledge their political motives.

"No book can start a war," says Mr. Almiral, who was fired from his 
teaching job after becoming involved in opposition politics. "But if 
we can open people's minds, they might start thinking certain 
thoughts, and that will inevitably lead to change."

------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Page: A40

Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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