CUBAN LIBRARIES SOLIDARITY GROUP

The Cuban Libraries Solidarity Group would like to draw your attention to the following article which appeared in Granma International on 3 August 2003:

"Following the money" by Philip Agee

[extract]

"Whatever the amounts of money reaching Cuba may have been, everyone in Cuba working in the various dissident projects knows of US government sponsorship and funding and the purpose: regime change. Far from being "independent" journalists, "idealistic" human rights activists, "legitimate" advocates for change, or "Marian librarians from River City", every one of the 75 arrested and convicted was knowingly a participant in US government operations to overthrow the government and install a different, US favoured, political, economic and social order. They knew what they were doing was illegal, they got caught and they are paying the price. Anyone who thinks they are prisoners of conscience, persecuted for their ideas or speech, or victims of repression, simply fails to see them properly as instruments of a US government that has declared revolutionary Cuba its enemy. They were not convicted for ideas but for paid actions on behalf of a foreign power that has waged a 44 year war of varying degrees of intensity against this country.

To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil society is absurd, for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent in the least. The civil society they wished to create was not just your normal, garden-variety civil society of Harley freaks and Boxer breeders, but a political opposition movement fomented openly by the US government. What government in the world would be so self-destructive as to sit by and just watch this happen?

Those interested in understanding how US promotion of "independent civil society" works in one sector, private libraries, can find an excellent report presented in November 2002 by Rhonda L. Neugebauer, Bibliographer, Latin American Studies, University of California, Riverside, at the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, East Los Angeles College. The report is the result of extensive research, visits to private libraries in Cuba and interviews with their owners, and a study of the Cuban state library system. Included are descriptions of the US NGO system backing private libraries, their funding by AID, and the misleading information put out by this system".

A people's sovereignty and dignity is not up for debate by Fidel Castro

[extract]

"The statistics tell us that in 1953, a total of 807,700 people were illiterate, meaning an illiteracy rate of 22.3%, a figure that undoubtedly increased during the seven years of Batista's tyranny. In the year 2002, the number was a mere 38,183, or 0.5% of the population. The Ministry of Education estimates that the real figure is even lower, because in its thorough search for people who have received literacy training in their sections or neighbourhoods, by visiting homes, it has been very difficult to locate them. Its estimates, based on investigative methods even more precise than a census, reveal a total of 18,000, for a rate of 0.2%. Of course, neither figure includes those who cannot learn to read or write because of mental or physical disabilities."

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