[Marxism] The EU position on Cuba

[Brian Shannon <brian_shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Walter Lippmann sent the URL of this Militant newspaper article on  
the attempt of the U.S. government to turn librarians into critics of  
the Cuban government to the U.S. SWP Yahoo site.

It should be posted here too. I have included some extracts focusing  
on the role that the official social democracy of Europe plays.  
Undoubtedly these are the same people that the Bush government is  
counting on to push aggressively for a united EU position against Cuba.

We should get some names here and see if there is any link with  
Joanne Landy's transmission belt of attacks on Cuba and Iraq. In any  
case the Landy list signers should be called upon to denounce the  
European Social Democracy, with whom they have various links.  
Hopefully, they can do this without fawning introductory caveats of  
"We are critics of Cuba, too."

Brian Shannon
_____________________________

> Congratulations to THE MILTANT for its work in defense of Cuban  
> libraries: the real ones, not the fake ones, and for that terrific  
> article by Jonathan Silberman which is much appreciated here in  
> Cuba. It was picked up and distributed by Cubarte, an important  
> newsletter on the island's politics and culture which is widely  
> distributed. Readers insterested in Cuba might want to subscribe to  
> their highly informativeweekly bulletin where this article was  
> reposted. - Lippmann

At the January 22nd midwinter meeting of the American Library  
Association (ALA), held in San Antonio, Texas, featured speaker  
Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-born poet and commentator on National  
Public Radio, launched an attack on Cuba, describing it as ¨the  
Romania of my growing up¨. He called on the ALA to condemn the  
revolutionary government for supposedly banning books and imprisoning  
librarians.
. . .
Promoters of the anti-Cuba campaign have had a hard time proving  
their charge that the Cuban government ¨considers books a powerful  
enemy,¨ to quote Ramón Colás, the self-proclaimed founder of the  
¨independent libraries¨ effort, now living in Miami.

In Colás´s home town of Las Tunas, the ¨independent" libraries¨ have  
not been able to recruit a single librarian or win over library users  
as they had hoped,¨ said librarian Carmen Velásquez Quintana. She was  
interviewed in the March 3rd issue of Librínsula, the online magazine  
of Cuba´s National Library.

In Las Tunas, a city of 186,000 inhabitants, more than 86,000 people  
used the provincial library last year, Velásquez reported, checking  
out some 234,000 books. The provincial library also has a network of  
113 ¨minilibraries,¨ 44 neighborhood ¨home libraries,¨ and 3 prison  
libraries across the province.

In an interview in the April 21st Librínsula, Argentinean librarian  
Silvia Fois reports on her recent trip across Cuba visiting the  
public library system. ¨What moved me was finding so many people  
[using the libraries]-children, teenagers, youth, housewives, the  
elderly. Moreover, they´re truly cultural centres, with displays,  
exhibitions, workshops, courses. In other words, you can feel the  
community participation in them.¨

Fois reported, ¨I found literature of the most diverse genres and  
authors.. Orwell, Martin Luther King, Octavio Paz, Cabrera Infante,  
Vargas Llosa.¨ Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a well-known Cuban author,  
was a long-time exiled opponent of the revolution; Octavio Paz of  
Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru are prominent writers with  
anticommunist views.
. . .

Discredited by the exposure of such facts, proponents of the  
¨independent libraries¨ are seeking to revive their campaign.

On December 14th, the Spanish daily El País published an article by  
Theresa Bond, later reprinted in the Le Monde of Paris, in Il Diario  
of Milan and Dagens Nyheter in Stockholm, alleging the creation of  
¨clandestine libraries¨ in Cuban prisons.

FULL AT
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z2EB13C3D

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