American Library Association and Cuba

Poet and commentator Andrei Codrescu was the keynote speaker at the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association.  He went off-script. 

It was with a great deal of dismay that I learned that the American Library Association had taken no action to condemn the imprisonment of librarians, the banning of books, the repression of expression and the torture of dissidents only 90 miles away from our shores, in Cuba. In March 1988, two residents of Las Tunas, Roman Colas and Berta Mexidor, opened a private library in their home, dedicated to offering Cubans books not officially available. The Felix-Varela Library was the first of a network of private libraries that were established by the volunteers in Cuba to bring light to the oppressive darkness of Castro’s police state.

103 libraries and 182,000 registered patrons were affiliated with the expanding Independent Libraries Project by the end of 2002. From the very beginning of their existence, the private librarians were subject to threats, harassments, evictions, arrests, police raids, and the seizure of book collections, books that disappeared so quickly they could only have been burned. In November 1999 Ramon Colas was arrested. Amnesty International declared him a “prisoner of conscience.” Hundreds of other librarians were arrested not long afterward, and their libraries and collections were confiscated. The ALA’s International Rights Committee looked, rather late, into the dire situation of the Cuban librarians. On January 13, 2001, the Latin American subcommittee of the IRC conducted a hearing of the ALA Midwinter conference in Washington where reports on the worsening situation in Cuba were presented by witnesses. . . . Amazingly enough, the final report of the ALA declined to recognize the new Cuban libraries as “libraries” and the librarians themselves were referred to as “individuals associated with these collections.” Since then, those “individuals” have been subject to brutal imprisonment and their books have disappeared.

The ALA councilors have remained silent on the issue to this day. Am I hallucinating? Is this the same American Library Association that stands against censorship and for freedom of expression everywhere?

There seem to be two forces working here.  One is that the ALA guards the privledged status of degreed librarians with a tenacity that would make a Medieval guild look generous.  But that is not enough to explain what was said in the exchange after Codrescu's speech.  From Library Journal:

[ALA President Michael] Gorman said there was a dispute about whether the activity of lending books "is being a librarian" and that "there is some dispute about the funding of these people who claim to set up libraries."

People are being thrown in jail and the ALA is concerned that they aren't authentic.  The part about the funding of "these people" is a reference to a rumor that the Independent Library Movement is funded by the CIA.  In fact, the ALA has a soft spot for Castro.