Cuba beats many nations in the number of books per capita, but maybe it would have still more if it didn’t burn some. Fidel Castro’s flunkies sentenced an independent librarian—-collector of the incinerated books–last April to 20 years in prison. Embarrassingly, however, the American Librarian Association has refused to speak out against Cuban repression. ALA members would do well to complain to President Carla D. Hayden. A September 28 item from the Friends of Cuban Libraries leads me to think that ALA is in dire need of a few Winston Smiths:

The court papers published on the Internet detail a March 19 raid on the home of Julio Valdés, during which he was arrested and the contents of his library were cataloged and seized, along with medicines, photographic film, an audio cassette and radios. Among the “subversive” library materials cataloged in the trial proceedings were copies of “Cuba’s Repressive Machinery” by Human Rights Watch, issues of TIME magazine, pamphlets on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Catholic periodicals, “Letters from Burma” by Aung San Suu Khi, and the text of speeches made by various persons during the European Parliament’s ceremony awarding the Sakharov Prize, in absentia, to Cuban dissident leader Oswaldo Payá. The court condemned Julio Valdés for “accumulating books, magazines and pamphlets by counter-revolutionary authors in foreign countries, principally in Miami, Florida, United States of America, which exhort civil disobedience, twisting historical events and the achievements of illustrious thinkers and revolutionary patriots…” in order to “provoke the destruction of the political, social and economic order now existing in Cuba….”

After sentencing Julio Valdés to twenty year in prison, the presiding judges in his case also decreed: “As to the disposition of the photographic negatives, the audio cassette, medicines, books, magazines, pamphlets and the rest of the documents, they are to be destroyed by means of incineration because they lack usefulness.”

Memo to the ALA: Stop being PC and join Amnesty International in standing up for freedom of expression in Cuba. I don’t care if Valdés isn’t a professional, Castro-blessed librarian. ALA’s Banned Books Week (“Celebrate Your Freedom to Read”) will lack full credibility if the organization continues to wimp out. This year’s Week ended on September 27, a day before Friends of Cuban Libraries reported new details about Valdés case. “Banned Books”? And burning doesn’t count? Just a quick airplane flight from our shores? Talk about hypocrisy. As columnist Charlotte Allen wrote, “It’s always 1984 in Cuba”; and yet ALA is aggressively mute. Look, I can understand if Mark Rosenzweig, a Marxist librarian, sits on the ALA’s Social Responsibility Round Table. But should he and his ilk be so influential in setting the tone for ALA? And shouldn’t ALA biggies like ex-president Mitch Freedman worry more about freedom and less about the feelings of Cuban delegates to ALA gatherings?

The TeleRead take: This is one reason the TeleRead proposal envisions independent national libraries, not a single globally funded world collection, even though links ideally could exist from one library system to another. Despite outrages like the DMCA, no small abstraction to me, the U.S. still has more freedom of expression than the likes of Cuba. Let’s nurture it and expand it.

In that vein, TeleRead would let independent bookstores and grassroots library organizations such as Project Gutenberg flourish rather than entrusting all to librarians. As a group, librarians strike me as nicer, more tolerant people than stockbrokers or whatever, but it would be sheer folly not to allow for the PCness that sometimes manifests itself within librarydom in the ugliest of ways.

(Valdés info found via LIS News.)

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