Except in Cuba, where Colas was forced to leave 2˝ years ago after the communist government arrested him several times for starting the island's first independent library movement.

One would think the ALA would embrace Colas' agenda of free speech for all. Certainly for the sake of consistency one can't rail against the Patriot Act's potential excesses here at home and then look the other way when it comes to the real threats to freedom to read in Cuba. It particularly irks me because I've been a big supporter of the ALA and haven't missed an opportunity to criticize the Patriot Act's tactics post 9-11.

The act, passed in a rush after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, lacks the checks and balances that any nation that values democracy should embrace. Allowing the government to check on any library patron's reading habits is simply un-American.

The Patriot Act allows searches based on what amounts to a hunch, and it's ripe for abuse. It's illegal for librarians to dare tell their public boards if the government has sought any records, even without naming names. That's how far the Patriot Act goes on the pretense of keeping us "safe."

It's the same kind of argument that totalitarian regimes use to put a lid on dissent, which is why Colas' plea to the ALA to condemn Cuba for imprisoning dissidents, among them as many as 17 people who ran independent libraries from their homes, is so compelling. And the ALA's response of a mealy-mouthed resolution supporting the end of the embargo and expressing "deep concern" about Cuba's long prison terms for dissidents smacks of hypocrisy. Deep concern doesn't begin to cover it.

Writers, journalists, civil libertarians and even left-wing glitterati from Europe and Latin America have come forward to condemn Cuba outright for its crackdown on 75 dissidents, writers and librarians who received sentences averaging almost 20 years each in 2003. Their big crime was to stray from government-approved thinking.

Colas, a psychologist, notes that independent libraries in Cuba carry all sorts of books, from those written by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin to those penned by the former Czech President Vaclav Havel, whose The Power of the Powerless is every freedom fighter's bible.

Apparently, ALA members don't want to be seen as taking a position that appears to side with the Cuban exile community. But Colas isn't asking the ALA to do anything other than condemn a government attack that no free-thinking person would accept.

The embargo shouldn't even be an issue, as far as freedom to read goes. Not when Castro himself made a big to-do in 1998, just after the pope's visit to Cuba, saying on government-controlled TV that Cuba didn't ban books, it simply didn't have money to buy books.

Colas took the comandante at his word and started a movement of home libraries that today get hundreds of free books from visitors to the island from as far away as Sweden, France and Spain. For Castro to call the independent libraries, which also get books from the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, part of a plot to end his regime is to admit that his regime hangs on a thread of lies. What's to fear from sharing different points of view, wherever they come from, if you can defend your point with the facts?

"It's lamentable that throughout the world famous people and writers have come out to criticize the regime in Havana and condemn its actions, but this nation's librarians, through their organization, have remained silent," Colas told me Wednesday. "The concept we are defending is very basic and universal. Let people read what they want without intervention, without political or ideological impositions."

If America's premier organization for defending free speech can't make that connection, it loses all credibility on the Patriot Act.

To send this page by e-mail follow these steps:

1- CLICK HERE to open a new windows.

2- Write the e-mail address in the blank.

3- Push SEND THIS URL buttom.

HOME