The propaganda campaign, backed by Washington, falsely claims that the Cuban government bans books available in other countries—including works by Mark Twain, George Orwell, and Cubans abroad who do not support the revolution.

The U.S.-based “Friends of Cuban Libraries” and its spokesperson Robert Kent, who works for the New York Public Library, have made sensational accusations that the Cuban police routinely seize such books and arrest and beat up those seeking to make them available through “independent libraries.”

At the January 22 midwinter meeting of the American Library Association (ALA), held in San Antonio, Texas, featured speaker Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-born poet and commentator on National Public Radio, launched an attack on Cuba, describing it as “the Romania of my growing up.” He called on the ALA to condemn the revolutionary government for supposedly banning books and imprisoning librarians.

The ALA has so far rejected calls to support the “independent librarians” in Cuba, as have other major librarian organizations internationally. At last year’s congress of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) in Oslo, Norway, the propaganda campaign failed to win enough support to pass any motions condemning the Cuban government.

Librarians who oppose the propaganda campaign have pointed out that the “independent librarians” are, in fact, members of small political groups, financed by Washington, that oppose the Cuban Revolution. Robert Kent’s “Friends of Cuban Libraries” has received money from Freedom House, which is funded by the U.S. government.

“They are neither libraries nor independent,” Eliades Acosta, director of Cuba’s José Martí National Library, noted in a recent broadcast of the Cuban “Roundtable” TV program.

Promoters of the anti-Cuba campaign have had a hard time proving their charge that the Cuban government “considers books a powerful enemy,” to quote Ramón Colás, the self-proclaimed founder of the “independent libraries” effort, now living in Miami.

In Colás’s home town of Las Tunas, the “independent” libraries “have not been able to recruit a single librarian or win over library users as they had hoped,” said librarian Carmen Velásquez Quintana. She was interviewed in the March 3 issue of Librínsula, the online magazine of Cuba’s National Library.

In Las Tunas, a city of 186,000 inhabitants, more than 86,000 people used the provincial library last year, Velásquez reported, checking out some 234,000 books. The provincial library also has a network of 113 “minilibraries,” 44 neighborhood “home libraries,” and 3 prison libraries across the province.

In an interview in the April 21 Librínsula, Argentine librarian Silvia Fois reports on her recent trip across Cuba visiting the public library system. “What moved me was finding so many people [using the libraries]—children, teenagers, youth, housewives, the elderly. Moreover, they’re truly cultural centers, with displays, exhibitions, workshops, courses. In other words, you can feel the community participation in them.”

Fois reported, “I found literature of the most diverse genres and authors…. Orwell, Martin Luther King, Octavio Paz, Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa.” Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a well-known Cuban author, was a long-time exiled opponent of the revolution; Octavio Paz of Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru are prominent writers with anticommunist views.  
 
A visit to an ‘independent library’
Fois contrasts this experience with her visit to one of the so-called independent libraries in Havana. “Arriving at the address, I found a house with no indication that it might be a library, and the person who greeted me didn’t understand what I was looking for. Then, when ‘the penny dropped,’ she invited me in and explained that there was a library there but it was run by her parents, who were now in Miami.

“She asked me not to speak in front of her guests—they were celebrating her birthday—because, according to her, ‘in Cuba you can’t talk to just anyone about censorship.’ [She] finally showed me ‘the library’: a three-shelf stand in the kitchen-dining room, with one shelf full of Bibles. I didn’t see a single title that was not available in other Cuban libraries.”

Discredited by the exposure of such facts, proponents of the “independent libraries” are seeking to revive their campaign.

On December 14 the Spanish daily El País published an article by Theresa Bond, later reprinted in the Le Monde of Paris, in Il Diario of Milan and Dagens Nyheter in Stockholm, alleging the creation of “clandestine libraries” in Cuban prisons.

In February, the Czech embassy in Sweden sponsored a conference in Stockholm on “democratic change in Cuba” together with representatives of the Swedish Liberal and Social Democratic parties. Ramón Colás was a featured speaker.

In recent months the librarians’ associations of Latvia and Lithuania adopted almost identical resolutions on “imprisoned Cuban librarians” for presentation to the upcoming IFLA congress in August. The resolutions protest “the ongoing persecution of independent librarians in Cuba.”

These charges will not go unanswered at the IFLA congress, to be held in Seoul, south Korea. On February 6, representatives of national libraries and librarians’ associations from eight countries—Iran, South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and Malaysia—formed an IFLA Third World Caucus at a meeting held in Havana during the international book fair in that city. The national library directors from Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, who attended the meeting—Eliades Acosta, Fariborz Khosravi, and Aristides Medina, respectively—were commissioned to register the caucus with the international federation.

The day before the meeting to launch the caucus, Acosta and Medina shared a platform at an event at the Havana International Book Fair. The Venezuelan representative paid tribute to the “mass culture of reading” that he had witnessed on his visit to Cuba.

Acosta described the campaign alleging systematic book censorship in Cuba as a “colossal swindle.” Unfettered access to literature is “a social right,” he said. “No one in Cuba is ever told what they may and may not read.”

He recalled Cuban president Fidel Castro’s words expressing the revolution’s approach to culture: “We don’t tell people ‘believe.’ We say, ‘read.’”  
 
 
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