The American Library Association last week became the first large national group to hold a convention in flood-ravaged New Orleans. As usual with ALA, highlights and lowlights were hopelessly intermingled, notably in one event: a muddled keynote address by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, someone who ought to be smarter and savvier than she actually is.
Addressing the opening general session of the biggest convention to come to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright mildly chided the American Library Association on Saturday for what critics consider its feeble condemnation of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's assaults on intellectual freedom in his nation. But she won her loudest applause for oblique slaps at President Bush.The thrust of Albright's speech, like that of her new book, "The Mighty & the Almighty," was that religion has long been, and will remain, a flashpoint in international affairs that can quickly turn bloody. But before warming to that theme, she reminded her listeners that freedom should not be taken for granted at home or abroad.
"Cuba is a country where basic freedoms have been denied," Albright said, including the Caribbean island on a list of notorious human rights violators such as North Korea and Syria.
Attempts to condemn Castro's imprisonment of independent librarians and burning of books have been defeated at past ALA conventions, so for Albright -- who became the nation's first female secretary of state during the Clinton administration -- to criticize the Cuban regime before the group was potentially explosive. But she did not dwell on the history of the organization's attitude toward the Castro regime....
The ALA's unwillingness to criticize publicly a governmental act against what in the United States would be considered core rights infuriated some intellectuals across the political spectrum. Among them was Andrei Codrescu, a New Orleans writer and commentator who excoriated the ALA's position at a later convention.
Similarly, journalist Nat Hentoff wrote several columns in The Village Voice, a New York weekly paper, that were sharply critical of the ALA directors' stance. Eventually, in 2004, Hentoff renounced the Immroth Memorial Award for Intellectual Freedom that the ALA had bestowed on him in 1983 "for courageous and articulate advocacy of the First Amendment." He said the ALA's attitude toward Castro made a mockery of the award.
Saturday night, however, Albright said the organization should be proud of whatever anti-Castro stance it took, and then quickly turned to a call for lifting the United States' economic embargo against Cuba.
Her audience at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, numbering in the thousands but impossible to count in the dark hall, applauded. The crowd also cheered her attack on the controversial provision of the Patriot Act that allows the government to review citizens' library activity, as well as her criticism of those she said question the patriotism of people who speak out against the Iraq war.
So, a smart-aleck intellectual and a leftie jazz critic, as well as sci-fi grandmaster Ray Bradbury, are more muscular advocates for freedom than an experienced Secretary of State. Unfortunately, not a surprise.
Activist librarian Robert Kent, crusading leader of Friends of Cuban Libraries, shared the following over-the-top reaction from a Castro mouthpiece to Albright's soft-sided criticism.
PRESS RELEASE The Friends of Cuban Libraries July 1, 2006, FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATIONCuba Attacks Albright for Speech to Library Group
The June 30 issue of Librinsula, a weekly magazine published in Havana, contains an article by Cuban National Library director Eliades Acosta attacking Madeleine Albright for a speech she delivered on June 24 at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans. Acosta serves as Cuba's spokesperson on library issues.
In her speech at the New Orleans conference, former Secretary of State Albright called on libraries to be "laboratories for freedom" and defended the right of Cubans to loan books and to open independent libraries free of government control.
Some observers believe Albright's June 24 comments implicitly criticized the ALA for failing to condemn the Castro government's repression of a citizens' movement to establish libraries offering public access to uncensored books. Many of the independent libraries founded in Cuba have been raided by the secret police. According to Cuban court documents, the existence of which has not been acknowledged in ALA reports on the situation, among the library books seized and ordered to be burned in Cuba are classics such as George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. About a dozen of the Cuban librarians, condemned to 20-year prison terms, have been named as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International.
Critics of the ALA, such as the Friends of Cuban Libraries organization, charge that the ALA's governing Council has inattentively approved reports by ALA committees, allegedly controlled by a pro-Castro faction, which ignore library repression and book burning in Cuba. Some ALA members accuse the independent librarians of being agents of the CIA.
When Madeleine Albright's turn to speak came at the New Orleans conference, "this bitter and elegant woman" charged Eliades Acosta, spoke in a manner she had allegedly cultivated during her period as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, where she reportedly delivered speeches with a "scornful grimace, in the style of Betty Davis [sic]."
Albright's speech before the ALA, Acosta charged, was intended to "convince American librarians, traditionally friendly toward their Cuban colleagues, that they should 'convert their institutions into laboratories for freedom.'" While discounting Albright's criticism of the Bush administration, dismissed by Acosta as "a hypocritical fig leaf designed by Versace," the author said Albright then "launched directly toward her objective: a call to support the misnamed 'independent libraries', a delicious euphemism with which the CIA has denominated this particular version, in the Imperial style, of the battle of ideas [to overthrow the Castro government.]"
Acosta also charged Albright with a commercial motive for delivering her speech at the ALA conference in New Orleans: "Waving her pedigree as an anti-Communist Czech emigre, Ms. Albright concluded her performance by making astute propaganda for her latest book [on religion and politics] before an audience which has, among its other functions, precisely the task of acquiring books.... I leave it to the readers' sagacity," continued Eliades Acosta, "to imagine the manner in which this pious personage concluded her speech, elevating her eyes toward heaven, as if her well-coifed head, the pride of Washington hair stylists, were surrounded by the divine splendor of a halo, exactly as appears in the paintings of El Greco."
"Ms. Albright failed to achieve her objective," concluded Eliades Acosta, which was allegedly "to poison relations between Cuban and American librarians, despite having employed all of her histrionic skills in the New Orleans theater. There was no change whatsoever made in the traditional position of the ALA toward Cuba." Outside of the hall where Albright delivered her speech, Acosta noted approvingly, members of the ALA's "Radical Reference" group handed out leaflets denouncing the Clinton Administration's ex-Secretary of State as a war criminal.
Apparently even a half-hearted punch can hurt a bit when it hits a guilty spot.
Posted by Alan at July 2, 2006 10:34 AM