CUBAN LIBRARIES SOLIDARITY GROUP
PRESS RELEASE

19 July 2003
"Cuban Libraries: the Interview Waiting for CNN"
Eliades Acosta Matos
Director of the National Library “José Martí,” La Habana, Cuba
translated by Dana Lubow

A real Cuban librarian, in the flesh, is a person, almost always a woman
that seldom is of interest to the ever-expanding quantity of journalists and
related others that claim that they dedicate themselves to saving the Cuban
reality in their writings. If the true reality of the islands seldom seems
appears reflected with medium objectivity in the great press that calls
themselves “free and professional”, it should not astonish us that little or
nothing is known of the more than twelve thousand information specialists
that maintain this important social service in a poor, harassed, and
economically blockaded country by the greatest power in human kind’s
history, as if it were a criminal country, a nation that shelters a mortal
illness for the rest of the nations: demonstrating that another better world
is possible.

It is odd to answer that in spite of this vile criminalization of an entire
people, for this grim persecution against a social project that deeply
revolutionized the structures of exclusion and injustice that the largest
majority of the Cuban population had suffered under, the truth is that Cuba
shows the greatest index of schooling for all of the Third World, above,
including that of many developed countries; it doesn’t suffer from
illiteracy; it has the greatest world per capita of teachers and is
recognized by UNESCO as possessor of one of the educational systems that is
of highest quality in preparing its graduates. None of this has true
importance for those that criticize and accuse Cuba.

It's not important that no Cuban child has to beg on the streets in order to live, nor that education is free and universal from preschool through the university, as well as health care. This of course in fact, is irrelevant, since the Cuban children and youth also don't shoot one another in the schools, or kill their teachers in their own classrooms.

It’s not important that from the month of September of this year, in the
Cuban schools one can count a teacher for very twenty students, a ratio only
approximately achieved in Denmark, where the classrooms can count a teacher
for every twenty-five students. It’s not important that in our network of
schools there exist six thousand school libraries, nor that they have within
them for 2002, fifty thousand computers, televisions, and VCR’s, including
those close to 1000 rural schools that can’t count on electric service and
that use provided solar panels, even when said schools were among 173 that
open each day in order to take in only one student, because they live in
very remote regions. But none of this is really important.

It’s not important that we can count a higher ratio of public libraries in
Cuba than in Italy; that this complies with the recommendations of UNESCO
and almost three books per person are available for the user’s disposal;
that in the past year more than eight million people have received services
in our network of a total population of eleven million, and that in the
country they can buy the cheapest books in the world. And that all of this
is achieved in order to serve all of Cubans, not the privileged elite, nor
those that have the greatest purchasing power, they have less importance,
none of it is important, since none of these achievements, that the Cubans
are proud of, have been developed in the middle of a war that has lasted
already forty three years.

The recent restrictive measures of the government of the United States for
the plan of the interchange of ideas and academic projects has confirmed
that the blockade doesn’t recognize borders and that their affirmations to
the contrary are pure rhetoric. The prohibition of traveling to Puerto Rico,
a territory of the United States, of the Union of Cuban Librarians that need
to participate in professional courses and conferences, adds up negatively
to Cuban cultural organizations, like Cubarte and the National Library, that
are not able to subscribe to databases about literature, like SAFARI
(safari.oreilly.com) and OCLC. There can be no doubt: under the laws of the
blockade it is impossible to develop a normal life, and such a reality
nobody escapes.

Effectively, for almost half a century we Cubans have lived in exceptional
conditions. Those of us, like I, who are less than fifty years old, have
been born and have grown up under the blockade, and we have had children and
grandchildren that also have been born too under the blockade. The threat of
experiencing a foreign military aggression to experiment on our own flesh
never has abandoned us in all this time. Meanwhile, a great part of the “the
free and objective press” has been dedicated itself to scrutinize the nooks
and crannies of our lives, to demolish without pity the gigantic work of
social justice that we have developed in conditions so adverse, and to
create a virtual Cuba that is the worst of the worst sites of the planet.
Recently, particularly viciously and with an unusual display of scandalous
lies, a section of this infernal artillery has concentrated on the work of
the libraries and the Cuban librarians.

Of what are we accused? Which are these serious mortal sins that we
committed and that has earned us the most severe sentences of these
relentless judges?

Cuba is the only country that of almost the two hundred that compose the
United Nations that has deserved, in the eyes of FAIFE of IFLA (Committee
for the Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression), a
differentiated analysis and two special reports, one in 1999 and the other
in 2001. We have had the honor to receive on our soil, in that same year, a
large delegation of ALA and FAIFE which freely traveled around the nation
and its libraries, the real and the false ones, and interviewed all the
people that they wanted, among them, writers, librarians, booksellers and
people of the town. While Mrs. Susan Seidelin, Director of FAIFE, traveled
around the stacks of our libraries with a list in her hand searching,
fruitlessly, for the promised absences with regards to “censured” titles and
authors, an English scholarship holder, Mr. Stuart Hamilton, traveled
“incognito”, reminiscent of the characters of Graham Greene, the streets of
Havana, meeting those they classify with that delightful euphemism of
propaganda and psychological war against Cuba that they are calling
“independent librarians.”

In spite of that suspicious fixation with Cuba, as if this were the country
where the worst treatment of liberty and intellectual rights occurs; as if
Cuba were, and not the United States, the nation that appears the most
frequently denounced on the web page of FAIFE for scandalous violations of
such rights and liberties; as if in some place in Cuba they burn and
prohibit the books of Mark Twain, Alice Walker and Isabel Allende, as it
occurs in some places of the United States and as it were a relevant part
of the national debate whether or not to have “Harry Potter” on the shelves
of the libraries, the Resolution about Cuba approved with 86% of the votes
cast to the General Assembly of IFLA, celebrated in the summer of 2001 in
Boston, is worth remembering, proposed in an exemplary way unified manner by
North American and Cuban librarians, secured in an unequivocal way the
position of the world community of information with respect to those
so-called “independent librarians”:

“To exhort the United States government to widely share the materials of
information with Cuba, especially with the Cuban libraries and not only
with “nongovernmental independents individuals and organizations” that
represent the political interests of the United States.”

There is no doubt, for the delegates in Boston who voted for the passing of
this Resolution, one can’t be independent, while one represent the political
interests of a determined state, it’s not important if it is the United
States of the Kingdom of Tongo.

Precisely, what does one wants to emphasize with the use of the adjective
“independent” together with the noun “librarian, when it is applied to the
Cuban case?

In the first place, it’s taken for granted that all of the rest of the Cuban
librarians, that is, the thousands that studied for years and took exams in
order to practice their profession; that work daily under very adverse
conditions, using an admirable creativity and spirit of sacrifice in order
that our country is, as it is, one of the most educated on the planet, they
are “oficialista*” librarians, for the simple fact of receiving a salary
from the government. Following this same logic, what then to call the
immense majority of the librarians of the world that work in the public
sector of their respective countries, that is, that receive salaries from
their governments, when these, as one knows, are under conditions of making
it, and are not being forced to make spending and budget cuts, as it is
occurring, right now in the libraries of the richest country on Earth?
On the other hand, if the decisive criteria in order to call some librarians
“oficialista*” and others “independents” depends on who pays for their
services, then the latter can’t be called thus, since they don’t work for
the Cuban state, but for the United States, as it has been reliably
demonstrated, including the “independents”, as they themselves have declared
to the foreign librarians that have visited them. They know, and irrefutable
proofs exists, about the rates for their services, about the equipment that
they receive, the books that have arrived at their houses directly in the
cars of the United States Office of Interest in Havana, and of the generous
visas that they and their family members receive in order to emigrate, when
they are rewarded for services rendered.

In the second place, if the criteria in order to distinguish some and others
depend on the ideological affiliation of each one, then it complicates the
matter even more. The enormous majority of the Cuban people support the
Revolution. If this were not so, it would not be able to resist so many
years of siege, blockade and aggressions, that go from terrorist attacks,
like the one of 1973 in Barbados to invasions as far as the Bay of Pigs, in
1961, the nuclear threats, in 1962, and the introduction of plagues and
illness. The Cuban librarians and their professional organizations support
the Revolution, and we say this out loud and clearly since it fills us with
pride, it is a right that we exercise to the light of day and it doesn’t
shame us. Not one important intellectual, not even one information
professional, nor one writer has been able to be recruited for this
subversive campaign, Are those “independent librarians” able to demonstrate
that they don’t work in order to overthrow the Revolution; that they don’t
receive political orders and millionaire funding of the entities of the
government of the United States charged to subvert the Cuban institutional
order, as is the case of “Freedom House” and the USAID, to cite only what
has been made public, and that more than librarians act as conspirators that
violate the laws of the country at the service of a foreign, hostile power?
Incidentally, the U.S. Code, Section 180 established sentences of ten years
in prison for those that work within any part of the country or territories
for a foreign power hostile to the United States, as has demonstrated in a
recent article by James Petras. In the Cuban laws, as in those of the United
States, the figure of the “intrusive professional” appears as a punishable
infraction: that, and no other thing, is to proclaim oneself the “director”
of a library and to fraudulently invade the terrain of a profession,
receiving from them monetary retribution. These “brave and struggling
freedom fighters”, as their defenders like to call them, earn in one month,
in their houses, without working, 2.2 times what I earn monthly as Director
of the National Library of Cuba, charged in giving daily services to close
to 400 users and conserving a collection of more than 3 million documents.
Are we in the presence of a professional topic, one of those that is
connected with the general principles that we all share in our noble
profession or, on the other hand, of a political discussion, related to the
action of political activists at the service of the total war declared by 10
successive administrations of the government of the United States against
the Cuban Revolution?

If we agree that one doesn’t discuss here the applications and updating of
the Dewey Decimal System, nor metadata, nor the questions bound with the
preservation of the bibliographic or digital heritage of the nations, nor of
the paths needed to strengthen the collaboration among the librarians of
Cuban, Canada, and United States, then, what shall we discuss when in spite
of the accord in Boston, one persists in calling them “independent
librarians” which they aren’t; when on behalf of principles that don’t
require the government of the United States, that which violates a free flow
of ideas and of information with their laws that relate to Cuba, condemns
the victim, because it is small and weak, instead of condemning the
executioner, because it is large and powerful?

There isn’t the slightest doubt: we aren’t in the presence of a professional
topic, but political one, therefore I wonder if the professional
organizations, like those that have convened this Conference, must move away
from its professional mission adopting political positions in one or the
other direction. And I add: would it take a some position with relation to
the internal situation of Cuba untieing it from its external determinants,
in the first place, from the blockade and its renewed harassment that it
suffers by the United States government? Would these organizations be
prepared, from this precedent, to express declarations and to take clear
positions about the innumerable problems that corrode the modern world?
Would they do it, for example, with relation to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, or to the not-concluded war against the Iraqi people? Have they
done it in order to condemn a war, as this, that causes not only thousands
of innocent victims among the civil population for the benefit of the
interests of the military industrial complex and the oil transnationals, but
also the destruction and plundering of the National Library, the National
Museum and dozens of other important centers that were the heritage of
humanity?

These days the campaign against Cuba has as a final objective the creation
of a favorable climate of isolation and discredit in order to attack it
militarily. It isn’t in vain that the reactionary circles of exiled Cubans
in Miami worked frenetically to make a reality the loaded orders of hate and
frustration that flourished and was fulfilled as the only public act
celebrated in the world in support of the war against the Iraqi people:
“Iraq now, Cuba later”. One military aggression against Cuba, they say, is
the only way possible in order “to resolve” the Cuban problem, by doing
this, they situate themselves at the same juncture as the United States
government when it reduces still more, those already reduced cultural and
academic interchanges with the island and also with the European Community,
to practically prohibit them: it is the tacit recognition of their defeat in
the exchange of ideas with Cuba, in the people to people interchange. What
remains to them, then, after having used, without any success, all the
possible methods, but the bombings and the invasion, even when this will
provoke the loss of thousands, maybe millions of human lives, and not only
Cubans?

Since those distant days that Cubans fought practically alone for thirty
years for their liberty, we are a country that doesn’t wait for other
governments, but for other people. We know well that through all of history
we have received much courage and solidarity from the people of the United
States and Canada: it is what we wait for in these tragic moments, full of
danger, when the destiny of humanity is yet again being played in a
Caribbean island.

This is what we hope from the colleagues that are attending this Conference.
That what the thousands of real Cubans feel and desire, librarians that
never have been nor will ever be interviewed by the large, informative
media, but that at this moment, are helping our children discover the
unforgettable pleasure of their first book.

* oficialista = a term used by the anti-revolutionary Cubans to refer to
someone who works for the government. There is no translation into English.

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