Yesterday, I went to the library, and later to a bookstore, and I must confess that I took it for granted.
I took for granted the unfettered ability, the freedom, I have — that all Americans have — to visit these repositories of knowledge, and to explore the stories and ideas just waiting to be mined from the shelves. The public library, especially, is a citadel of democracy, providing equal access to those treasures to all, and housing ideas that have shaped the past, and could change the future.
Few understand that power better than the Cuban dictatorship, which de facto has banned independent libraries, and saved some of its worst repression for librarians like Jose Miguel Martinez Hernandez and Victor Rolando Arroyo.
Cuban police routinely raid libraries, which usually are housed in private homes, and seize books and other materials. After one such raid last week, librarian José Antonio Mola Porro was jailed and ordered to complete a two-year prison term that had previously been suspended.
All of that and still, new libraries are opening all the time.
Payo Libre has news on two of the newest ones:
— Jóvenes del Escambray (Youth of Escambray) Independent Library, in Manicaragua, Villa Clara province. Library director Miguel Boza Becerra said the library has about 250 books.— Eusebio de Jesús Peñalver Mazorra Independent Library, in Arroyo Naranjo. Librarian Vivian Santana Barreto, who also is a spokeswoman for the Cuban Pro-Human Rights Party, said the library has about 300 books. (Peñlaver, who died earlier this year in Miami, fought alongside Fidel Castro in the revolution, but later spent more than 30 years in a Cuban prison.)
It is easy to tell whom a dictator fears. Their prisons are filled with people brave enough to stand up to them and bear witness for freedom, and for the truth.
In Cuba, some of the worst spots, in some of the worst prisons, are saved for librarians.
If you are the dictator, you cannot take them for granted. They are truly to be feared.
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For more on Cuba's independent libraries, and how American librarians have not always been sympathetic to the cause, visit Friends of Cuban Libraries.
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