Castro's Willing Librarians

When the American Library Association met for its annual convention in Toronto last week, the organization had no trouble issuing a denunciation of the Supreme Court's June 23 decision to uphold the Children's Internet Protection Act, which enables Web-filtering on library computers. Bully for the bookworms. But when it came time to criticize Fidel Castro for jailing 10 independent librarians as part of his brutal April crackdown on dissidents, the ALA passed. It gets worse, according to this L.A. Times op-ed by Charlotte Allen.

Adding insult to injury, the ALA held a panel discussion at the convention on libraries in Cuba. All five Cuban delegates to the panel were representatives of Cuba's state-owned public library system, including Eliades Acosta Matos, head of the Jose Marti National Library, a government-controlled enterprise. Acosta Matos is on record as calling the independents "traitors," "criminals" and "mercenaries." A pro-independents activist, Robert Kent, a librarian with the New York City Public Library, tried to persuade the ALA to add to the panel Ramon Colas, a co-founder of the Cuban independent library movement who recently fled Cuba after repeated detentions and confiscations of his books. The ALA turned down the request, contending that because Colas lacked a degree in library science, he was not a professional librarian.

One particularly adamant ALA official was Mark Rosenzweig, chief librarian of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, which maintains the archives for the Communist Party USA. Rosenzweig's explanation is appalling:

"There was hardly even the pretense that these people were librarians," Rosenzweig said in a telephone interview last week. "I have got books in my apartment too but that doesn't make me a librarian. These are people who have been dissidents for many years. They're pro-U.S. They have connections with the Miami dissident groups."

More coverage of ALA's Cuban cowardice can be found in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.