[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Cuban Libraries Under the Embargo



Although this was directed at our librarian cousins, I think it is close enough to our area of interest to be worth posting.
Greg LaMotta
____________
Moveable Type Volume 9, Issue 1 (Fall 2001) 
> Cuban Libraries Under the Embargo
> By Eliades Acosta Matos 
> It is difficult to express how a person such as myself feels, having lived
> in Cuba for all my life under a U.S. trade embargo, a blockade that has
> informed and affected my daily life since I can remember. Throughout my
> entire life, from birth to adulthood, through my childhood and my school
> years, during all the moments of joy or sadness, private or public, in
> family or work life, like all Cuban citizens, I have felt the weight of a
> powerful external force that decides, not only our destiny, but every
> moment of our existence. It may help you, the readers of Moveable Type, to
> understand the significance and the consequences of the U. S. embargo upon
> our lives, the lives of all of us who live in Cuba, to consider that this
> country is less than 45 minutes by direct flight from Miami, or three
> hours from New York City. 
> At 42 years of age, I have no memories that have not been shaped by the
> limitations and the financial constraints imposed by the embargo. The
> difficulties involved in trying to make a telephone call, buy a pair of
> shoes or school notebooks for the kids, go to work or to the beach, treat
> a cold, or feed one's family three meals a day, rise before me like an
> invisible wall, a wall much higher and more formidable than that of
> Berlin.
> How do I explain to you that on the seventh of February 1962, at 12:01
> a.m., when President John F. Kennedy's Proclamation 3447 establishing the
> Cuban blockade first took effect, the life of a entire nation, the lives
> of millions of human beings, changed so completely? How can I explain, how
> can I make clear to you, what it means to live under an embargo for almost
> 40 years, in such onerous conditions, conditions that are not experienced
> by most of the rest of humanity? How can I explain how two nations, Cuba
> and the United States, that share the same geographical space and the same
> human needs, cannot trade with each other either directly or indirectly,
> cannot buy or sell a pound of sugar, an aspirin, or even a book of poetry
> by Walt Whitman or José Martí?
> Until 1998, the cost to the Cuban economy of this embargo, enforced by
> nine successive U.S. administrations, has been calculated at 67 billion
> dollars. However this figure cannot reflect the spiritual cost, the pain
> and suffering, caused to a whole people deprived of the most elemental
> means of living, when they are manipulated through hunger and sickness. 
> The cost of the embargo to the cultural life of the Cuban nation is
> immense and difficult to reduce to numbers. Still, it can be gleaned from
> the difficulties we face in acquiring the paper we need to print books,
> magazines and journals, and in obtaining the oil we need to generate the
> electricity that ensures, for instance, that our public libraries are not
> forced to reduce their evening hours. The embargo also makes it necessary
> for those who wish to donate books to Cuba-geography books, history books,
> children's books, dictionaries, encyclopedias or novels-to send them
> through Canada or Mexico. Of course, other technologies as well,
> computers, photocopy machines, microfilm readers, television sets or music
> players, items essential to the daily operation of any library, also face
> these same travel-related restrictions. And how could there be a normal
> and fluid exchange between Cuban and American colleagues when U. S.
> citizens face a fine of up to 250,000 dollars and ten years imprisonment
> if they travel, for instance, to a library conference in Cuba without
> first obtaining a license from the U. S. Treasury Department?
> Last May, Havana hosted a successful conference of the Association of
> Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL), a
> professional organization that brings together librarians from research
> centers, universities and institutions throughout the Caribbean. As is
> customary at these events, an information fair was organized where
> different businesses and information centers might promote their products
> and services. Yet the U. S. Treasury Department refused to allow the
> Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a well-known U. S. company that
> provides an international database and other products vital to library
> resource sharing and bibliographical verification, from exhibiting. The
> foreign delegates, including the delegations of the American Library
> Association (ALA) and the International Federation of Library Associations
> (IFLA), headed by ALA president John Berry and IFLA general secretary Ross
> Simón, were astonished to learn this news. None of the Cuban librarians
> present showed any surprise at all: they were used to it.
> Recently, the 67th annual IFLA conference was held in Boston, with the
> participation of some 5,000 delegates from 157 countries. Of the six Cuban
> librarians expected to attend, only three were granted U. S. visas.
> Because the U. S. government delayed issuing these three visas, the first
> Cuban delegates arrived the day after the Conference began and the last,
> Dr. Martha Terry, president of the Cuban Association of Librarians
> (ASCUBI), arrived barely three hours before it ended. 
> In spite of these overtly hostile acts, the IFLA General Council approved
> an historic resolution that strongly condemns the U. S. embargo for the
> damage it causes the culture, the education, the libraries, and the rights
> of both the Cuban and the American people to be informed. This resolution
> is a clear expression of the growing rejection of a policy considered by
> the majority of the nations of the world to be illegal and detrimental to
> an entire culture. At the United Nations, a recent Cuban-introduced
> resolution condemning the American embargo received, with a few
> abstentions, 157 votes in favor and three opposed: those of the United
> States, the Marshall Islands, and Israel.
> Yet in spite of all of the aggression and all of the suffering, there is
> no hate, no resentment, in the hearts of Cubans against the American
> people. We have attained a high level of cultural development; free
> education is available to us from preschool through university, and we
> demonstrate respect for the best of all cultures and all literatures,
> including those of North America. Thus, all Cubans, from a child on the
> street to a taxi driver, are imbued with a profound knowledge of history,
> a knowledge that helps prevent us from making mistakes of judgment and
> from treating others unfairly. We know that governments are to blame, not
> the citizens who defend noble causes: sovereignty, liberty, independence,
> and culture.
> In spite of being a small underdeveloped country living under a stringent
> embargo, Cuba today has the largest number of teachers and doctors per
> capita of any country in the world and its child mortality rate is only
> 7.2 per thousand live births. The life expectancy at birth is 76 years;
> 99.1 percent of all children ages six to eleven, and 98.2 percent of all
> children ages six to fourteen, attend school. There is no illiteracy in
> Cuba, and we have more than 6,000 school libraries and almost 400 public
> libraries.
> The cost of the embargo to Cubans and their libraries is a bitter reality,
> yet our country's successes in education, culture, health care, and even
> sports, are clear proof that an embargo can be overcome. Our
> accomplishments also suggest that, were it so inclined, the U. S.
> government could use the tax money that maintains the embargo to eradicate
> the illiteracy that afflicts some 32 million of its own people.
> (Translated from the Spanish by María D. Blanco-Arnejo, Associate
> Professor of Spanish, Willamette University. The original Spanish-language
> version of this article is available at:
> http://library.willamette.edu/home/publications/mt/
> <http://library.willamette.edu:8082/perl/move/mt_full.pl?art_number=63&i=9
> 1>
> Lic. Eliades Acosta Matos is director of the José Martí National Library,
> Havana, Cuba, and author of 1898-1998: Cien respuestas para un siglo de
> dudas (La Habana: Editorial Pablo de la Torriente, 1999). E-mail:
> eliadesa@jm.lib.cult.cu <mailto:eliadesa@jm.lib.cult.cu>

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>