Book Report

Nat Hentoff finds a library in South Dakota that is shipping books to an independent Cuban library, one of more than a dozens that Fidel Castro's thugs raided in 2003, confiscating all the books that the dictator didn't want people to read, and burning them.

Yes, burning them. The government still burns books in the Cuba Che Guevara made, while we make movies apotheosizing Che as a liberator. At least, in this one case, they didn't throw the librarian in jail for 20 years, too.

On Nov. 18, the Vermillion Public Library Board of Trustees voted to sponsor the Dulce Maria Loynaz Library in Havana, Cuba, which, like other imperiled independent libraries in that country, offers public access to books not obtainable in Cuba's censored "public" library system.

They sent down Spanish-language editions of Harry Potter and Mark Twain; not a bad place to start over. What's so remarkable, though is that Vermillion, S.D., is "the first, and only, American public library to stand up to Fidel Castro."

In January 2003, the governing council of the American Library Association, the largest such organization in the world, expressed rhetorical concern for the 75 imprisoned Cuban dissidents, but shamefully rejected a motion calling for the immediate release of the librarians who are among the 75, all of whom Amnesty International has rightly called "prisoners of conscience."

This decision by the American Library Association's governing council to not overly displease the Cuban dictator was due to Castro admirers on the council who laud him, for instance, for providing health care for his subjects, but who also ignore his contempt for Cubans who think for themselves.

And in Castro's prisons -- as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative Christine Chanet has reported -- at least 20 of the prisoners of conscience have been suffering from hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and other ailments with little or no medical attentions (since 1989, Castro has barred the International Red Cross from his prisons).

I don't understand why not one other American library has joined Vermillion in sponsoring a sister independent library in Cuba. This country's librarians have been among the most publicized dissenters to the Patriot Act provision that allows the FBI -- on the authorization of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, without probable cause -- to find out which library patrons are reading which books.

Yet, librarians here will be in no danger of being imprisoned by showing solidarity with beleaguered courageous Cuban librarians. And it's not as if the Vermillion library's action is little-known. Steve Marquardt, dean of libraries at South Dakota State University, has informed every U.S. state library association newsletter about it.

The librarians of America, of course, can be bothered to go to bat for the real victims of repression, such as Michael Moore:

BUZZFLASH: Now specifically, a little bit about your book [Stupid White Men]. You've written in your columns that after September 11th, your publisher was going to deep-six the book unless you took out critical comments on Bush. You held firm. Is it true that the librarians of America came to your defense and saved the day?

MICHAEL MOORE: That's what it looks like. I mean, I didn't know who any of these people were. They -- this one librarian found out about it, and she got in a, I don't know, library chat room. Or she sent a letter out to a list of librarians, and they sent it out to a bunch of people, and the thing kind of mushroomed from there. So, I'd say it's a combination of these librarians and the Internet, because they started sending letters to Harper-Collins, and Harper-Collins saw that it wasn't gonna be a good thing to ban the book. But I'm really happy about it. I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.