Nat Hentoff, old-style leftie and no friend of conservative politicians, continues to cry out on behalf of jailed activists and independent librarians in tormented Cuba. The American Library Association, self-satisfied champion of the Freedom to Read, continues to duck the issue while demonizing John Ashcroft over a theoretical and largely imaginary threat from the USA Patriot Act.
Ask your local librarian what she (or he) thinks of this painful double standard while we Americans gulp down unlimited information, safe inside our homes as well as within those citadels of unfettered inquiry known as libraries.
A drive is under way to gather a million signatures by May 4 in support of bills in Congress to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. The bills seek to restore the privacy safeguards in the Constitution that John Ashcroft eliminated by giving the FBI the power to get bookstore and library records through the compliant secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, without informing readers, book buyers, the press, or anyone else.Posted by Alan at March 7, 2004 08:54 AMHarvesting these protesting signatures are 40 organizations and 81 individual companies, including libraries, bookstores, book publishers, as well as writers, and other ardent advocates of everyone's freedom to read. Among them:
The American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, PEN American Center, various state library associations, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Barnes & Noble, New York University Press, Random House, and Simon & Schuster.
So far as I know, in this congregation of freedom-to-read activists, not one on the list—except for PEN—has said or done anything about the torment that 10 independent librarians in Cuba are undergoing in Fidel Castro's gulag, along with 65 other pro-democracy dissidents rounded up in the dictator's crackdown in April last year.
The governing council of the American Library Association, an organization on the list, disgraced itself in January when it overwhelmingly rejected an amendment to a final report at its mid-winter meeting telling Castro to let the librarians out. Apparently there are members of the council who romanticize Fidel, as do some Hollywood celebrities.
On February 14, Kevin Sullivan of the Washington Post foreign service gave details of the hell that is Castro's gulag. One of his sources is Oswaldo Paya, organizer of the Varela Project, which gathered signatures of more than 10,000 courageous Cubans calling for democratic reforms. Castro tossed them aside.
Kevin Sullivan reports that Paya and other activists said "that about 20 of the jailed dissidents were suffering from such serious health problems as kidney disease, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and extreme weight loss.
"The State Department and human rights groups have appealed to Castro's government to immediately release the most gravely ill prisoners, 'but it's been a complete stonewall by the government on this issue,' said Eric Olson, the Americas advocacy director for Amnesty International in Washington." Just like the American Library Association stonewalled.
Paya adds that many of these gravely ill prisoners are getting no medical treatment in what he calls "medieval cages." He says: "I would like to make an appeal to the world's conscience. It seems like there is a lot of indifference about the reality of human rights in Cuba."
I am hoping that the library associations in individual states, along with journalists, authors, and book publishers who are engaged in collecting the million signatures, will join Oswaldo Paya in demanding the release of the imprisoned Cuban librarians. After all, Ashcroft has not put any American librarians in "medieval cages."
Is there no concern among these groups and individuals about this alarming news from an actual police state?
When Castro admirers on the ALA council refused to tell him to release the dissidents, the council's final report merely mewled "deep concern" for those left in prison.
During National Library Week (April 18 to 24), I hope rebellious rank-and-file American librarians, ignoring their governing council, will speak for the release of their brothers and sisters in Castro's three-feet-wide and six-feet-long cells. The International Red Cross is forbidden to visit, as it has been by Castro since 1989.
Via the Village Voice