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CUBAN LIBRARIES
SOLIDARITY GROUP
Nat Hentoff is a living national treasure. I'm deeply grateful for his decades of hard work as a guardian of civil liberties. Nevertheless, as one of the "librarians in the trenches" for whom he presumed to speak during your October 1 program, I must take firm exception to some damaging distortions in his comments. He said that the "officials" of the American Library Association oppose the idea of posting warnings about USA PATRIOT Act surveillance powers; one several month ago spurned his suggestion that we do so. This is absurd. Demonstrably so. Elected ALA Councilor Jessamyn West last year posted on her website a widely reproduced set of signs for alerting library patrons to risks posed by the USA PATRIOT Act. (See "Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library," http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html ). Hentoff also mentioned Cuba, and asserted that many librarians are "angry at their officials in the library association" for their refusal to condemn the imprisonment of "independent librarians," he called this a "scandal." In fact, there is a division of opinion among rank-and-file librarians on this issue. I for one am glad that Dr. Mitch Freedman refused to cave to the demands of dubious "human rights advocates" financed by USAID and other anti-Castro groups both governmental and private. The issue of the "independent" librarians is complicated by the recognition that they are not independent at all. An investigation reported at http://www.libr.org/CLSG/article6.html found that "their 'libraries' are stocked with materials supplied by Freedom House, an anti-Castro organization which has received $500,000 in US government funding (via USAID and the US Information Agency) and the Center for a Free Cuba, which has received $400,000 in US government funding. It is out of line for Hentoff to liken US librarians to subsidized Cuban "librarians" committed to the overthrow of their nation's government. In the US, the DOJ is pressuring librarians who are not promoting a coup d'etat and whose book collections are *not* financed by foreign enemies of the Bush regime. It's known that Hentoff has been seduced by a notorious group called Friends of Cuban Libraries. FCL is supported by Freedom House and the Center for a Free Cuba, which are in turn funded by the U.S. government under Track 2 of the Torricelli Act. What's more, that FCL distorts reality is not in question; I myself was victimized by a transparent lie advanced by the group (reported at http://www.sol-plus.net/82.htm#14 ). By the way, one of the most effective debunkers of FCL fictions has been Ann Sparanese, the New Jersey librarian who is credited with launching the movement that led to the rescue and publication of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. Hentoff is certainly voicing genuine concern for jailed political prisoners, and I don't fault him that. However, the circumstances are not as clear as he would like your listeners to believe. And I repeat: the analogy between library surveillance under the current DOJ, and the punishment of those fourteen so-called librarians under Castro, is preposterously false. Bruce Jensen
flaco@sol-plus.net
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