Criminalizing Librarians

Is Victor Arroyo a 'Traitor to Cuba'?

Comments (0) By Nat Hentoff Tuesday, Dec 23 2003

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So too should there be support from the American Library Association and those of the rest of us who do not romanticize dictators. A member of the ALA's policy-making governing council, Mark Rosenzweig, says patronizingly that "we cannot presume that all countries are capable of the same level of intellectual freedom that we have in the U.S. Cuba is caught in an extremely sharp conflict with the U.S. . . . I don't think [Cuba] is a dictatorship. It's a republic."

The internationally respected Cuban journalist and poet Raúl Rivero disagrees with Mr. Rosenzweig. Before being put in Castro's gulag for 20 years, Rivero wrote in the Argentinean newspaper La Nación, "No one can make me feel like a criminal, or an enemy agent, or someone who does not love his country. . . . I am only a man who writes. And writes in the country where he was born, and where his great-grandparents were born."

Paul Kitagaki Jr./Sacramento Bee

American librarian Marie Bryan, free to defy Ashcroft

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And where, at 57, Raúl Rivero is very likely to die in a prison cell in Castro's "republic." His wife, Blanca Reyes, adds: "What they found on him was a tape recorder, not a grenade."