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Help Send Books and a Bookmobile to Cuba!

Debb | 20.06.2007 11:15 | Education | Repression | Social Struggles | Birmingham

The US embargo on trade with Cuba continues. This summer Pastors for Peace will again challenge the blockade with a friendship caravan. A fully stocked bookmobile will accompany it. Before the revolution there were only 32 libraries in Cuba. In 2002 there were 400 public libraries and 6000 school libraries. Cubans are avid readers and life long learners but Cuban librarians struggle to meet their needs under the blockade. We urge you join us in sending books to Cuba!

The US embargo on trade with Cuba and ban on American travel to the island except under license continues. This summer Pastors for Peace will again challenge the blockade with a friendship caravan to Cuba. Books for Cuba equals Libros para Cuba, a California-based group organised to support Cuban public libraries by donating materials, will take a fully stocked bookmobile on the caravan. The bookmobile will go into service in rural Granma Province. Cuban librarians chose the location and worked with Dana Lubow and Rhonda Neugebauer to develop the collection criteria used to stock the bookmobile. Dana and Rhonda, the American librarians behind the project, have met with librarians in Cuba on several occasions. In January 2007 Dana visited libraries in Granma Province. Despite great progress to date, they need our help.

The literacy rate in Cuba is an astonishing 97%. Cubans are avid readers and life-long learners who rely on their libraries. Before the revolution there were only 32 libraries in the Cuba. In 2002 there were 400 public libraries and 6000 school libraries. These libraries struggle to obtain the materials they need. Cuba is a still-developing country long handicapped by an illegal and immoral US-imposed economic blockade. As a result, it has little money to support its nonetheless highly valued libraries. While it is possible to work around the blockade, the costs of doing so are prohibitive. Moreover, a paper shortage in the 1990s paralyzed the Cuban publishing industry, which is only now recovering.

Many people outside Cuba do not realize that, while Cuban librarians must use the most creative means to even marginally meet the needs of their clients, US operatives generously support a network of "Independent Libraries" and pay their dissident "librarians" for "services rendered." The Independent Libraries Project is just one of many tactics used by the US State Department in its effort to destabilize the revolution and otherwise interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign Cuba. For more information about Cuba's public libraries and the so-called Independent Libraries see "'Payment for Services Rendered': US-funded Dissent and the 'Independent Libraries Project' in Cuba" by Rhonda Neugebauer. You can read it on-line at  http://www.pit.edu/~ttwiss/irtf/cuba.payment.html.


WHAT YOU CAN DO

Donate money for the bookmobile and its maintenance and repairs.

To ensure the lowest transfer fees and best possible exchange rate, we need to pool the donations for transfer to the US. If you want to contribute to the fund, please make your cheque payable to Cuba Solidarity Oxford care of Carol Stavris, 120 Loyd Road, Didcot, Oxon, OX11 8JR.

Donate books in Spanish to help fill the bookmobile.

You may purchase new and used books at  http://www.alibris.com by clicking on "Donate a Book" at the top. Then search for the bookmobile Wishlist by entering  danalubow@hotmail.com. This is a simple and efficient way to donate books as they will go directly to Dana in the US. The list of books is long and impressive. It includes titles for all ages, and covers all topics and price ranges.

If you have books in good condition in Spanish that you want to donate please let us know. Two Oxford CSC members may be traveling to Los Angeles in June. If so, they can hand deliver a limited number of books that meet the collection criteria. The bookmobile also needs a few books in English suitable for language learners. If you think you may have suitable books, please contact any of the people listed below.

Spread the word.

This is a worthwhile endeavour in its own right. But it also illustrates clearly both the means used by the US State Department to destabilize the Cuban government and how the blockade impacts ordinary Cubans. We can use this opportunity to build wider support for Cuba and foster critical discussion of American foreign policy. The exterior of the bookmobile will feature design elements contributed by Gerardo Hernández, one of the Miami Five. Gerardo now awaits justice in a southern California prison. His artwork should provide an opening to expand public awareness of that compelling issue.

Dana has given us an excellent A4 leaflet for use in our campaigning. To get a copy, email Carol at  cubasolidarityoxford@yahoo.co.uk or Debb or Mike at  d.buchholtz@virgin.net. All three can answer your questions.

You can contact Dana at  dana_lubow@yahoo.com and Rhonda at  rhondaneu@charter.net.

Debb
e-mail: cubasolidarityoxford@yahoo.co.uk

Debb
- e-mail: cubasolidarityoxford@yahoo.co.uk

Comments

Hide the following 13 comments

Help Cuba

20.06.2007 12:53

Cubans may well be denied the right to travel overseas, form political parties, the right to association, unlimited Internet access and a choice of alternative Presidential candidates, but at least they can can go to the 400 libraries and read about it in other countries.

Cock Robin


Robin you're a cock

20.06.2007 15:57

Surely we're not going to have that same old argument about Cuba along the lines of -

access to internet - blocked by US therefore severely limited access - restriction NOT imposed by Cuban government

political parties - what like Conservative and Labour? Republican and Democrat?

elections - Cuba has them and they are more democratic than ours

travel - thousands of doctors and other workers around the world, Cubans in all parts of the globe, just not flocking to Blackpool beach - take a look at a Cuban beach and your surprise will fade..

Surely not again...?

communista


communista

20.06.2007 17:51

youve just said the biggest load of bollocks ive ever heard....
hahahaha
cuba is a dictatorship. doesnt matter how tropical and revolutionary it looks, its a fucking dictatorship.

anarchist


Not true communista

21.06.2007 07:40

Access to the Internet has been restricted by Cuba on the basis of 'protection'.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3386413.stm

Bill Gates


And...

21.06.2007 12:45

so-called 'anarchist' and aptly-named Bill Gates, where are the places in the world you find more democratic, more egalitarian than Cuba. I'm interested.

The world is at it is. Cuba is not perfect but is struggling towards a better society. Most places are far worse. If you don't agree, cite some facts - not just 'Cuba is a dictatorship'.

communista


how about...

21.06.2007 14:38

the fact your imprisoned and tortured for being gay in your beloved Cuba?
Daft commies do my fucking head in.

anarchist


You're not an anarchist - you're a fascist and not even a well-informed one

21.06.2007 15:07

Gay people are neither imprisoned nor tortured in Cuba. Havana has a thriving gay scene.


This is just bollox. Try again. Or better still, don't and fuck off.

communista


modernize you, dear anarchist...

21.06.2007 16:27


poor anarchist... his news about Cuba comes from a very very old epoch... maybe if he had now the chance of going to Cuba and walk along the Malecón... but probably he prefers to persist thinking the same way the cuban revolution enemies "thinks"...

Modernize you, my dear anarchist

F Espinoza


anarchist

21.06.2007 22:00

haha, i'm a 'fascist'? because i dont believe in pseudo-revolutionary dictatorships? and what kind of response is putting up a picture of some smiling cubans? thats naive propaganda at its best theyre ya daft fucker....its like finding a picture of some smiley folk from nazi Germany era and saying 'look, see how great it was, theyre all dead happy....'
please, read up on your little stalinist shithole before commenting. i've travelled to Cuba, its full of rich american tourists and starving locals who beg outside the restaurants and cash machines.
I bet your nothing but a daft middle class prick who thinks hes a revolutionary for wearing a fucking che guevara t-shirt.
no borders, no leaders, no states.

anarchist


modernize, ya daft commie twat

21.06.2007 22:08

When Cuba adopted Soviet-style communism it also adopted Soviet-style prejudice and puritanism. Ever since Stalin promoted the ideology of “the socialist family” and recriminalised gay sex in 1934, communist orthodoxy dictated that homosexuality was a “bourgeois decadence” and “capitalist degeneration”. This became the Cuban view. “Maricones” (faggots) were routinely denounced as “sexual deviants” and “agents of imperialism”. Laughable allegations of homosexuality were used in an attempt to discredit “corrupting” Western influences, such as pop music, with the communists circulating the rumour that the Beatles were gay.

In the name of the new socialist morality, homosexuality was declared illegal in Cuba and typically punishable by four years’ imprisonment. Parents were required to prevent their children from engaging in homosexual activities and to report those who did to the authorities. Failure to inform on a gay child was a crime against the revolution.

Official homophobia led, in the mid-1960s, to the mass round-up of gay people, without charge or trial. Many were seized in night-time swoops and incarcerated in forced-labour camps for “re-education” and “rehabilitation”. A few disappeared and never returned.

One gay man recalls: “We were taken to Camagüey, at the other end of the island. It was a camp surrounded with barbed wire, with watchtowers manned by guards with machine guns.”

The camp inmates included not just homosexuals, but also criminals, students, Catholics and political dissidents. They were set to work at 3 a.m., cutting sugar cane with machetes. It was backbreaking labour on meagre food rations. The gay prisoners were often beaten, and occasionally raped, by criminal gangs in the camps. Some gays were killed; others committed suicide.

At the First National Congress on Education and Culture in 1971, the cultural repression of homosexuality intensified. It was decreed that homosexuals were “pathological”, “antisocial” and “not to be tolerated” in any job where they might “influence youth”. Widespread anti-gay purges followed in schools, universities, theatres and the media. Gay professors, dancers, actors and editors ended up sweeping roads and digging graves.

The repression did not begin to ease until the mid-1970s and even then it was not because the Cuban leadership recognised their error. They halted mass detentions and reduced prison sentences largely because they were shamed by international protests – some organised by the newly-formed gay liberation movements in the US and Europe, and others by left-wing intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, in defence of persecuted gay writers and academics.

A more significant softening of official attitudes took place in the early 1990s. With the advent of AIDS, the Cuban authorities initially cracked down hard, quarantining everyone with HIV in special sanatoria. But, by the early 1990s, the authorities felt compelled to adopt a more liberal approach, abandoning their detention policy – partly because it was costing too much! More significantly, Cuban health officials realised that they had to show greater tolerance towards the homosexual community in order to win their trust, confidence and support for safer sex.

Another factor that influenced changes in government attitudes was the secondment to Cuba of East German doctors and psychologists during the 1980s. They viewed homosexuality as a natural minority condition, and this eventually prompted more enlightened thinking among Cuban medical staff and health educators.

It was not until 1992 that President Fidel Castro finally declared that homosexuality was a “natural human tendency that must simply be respected”. He has, however, never apologised or expressed remorse for his past homophobia and persecution.

Today, the legal status of lesbian and gay people in Cuba is still ambiguous. Amnesty International regards the lack of clear, categorical civil rights for homosexuals as being tantamount to illegalisation.

While the 1979 penal code formally decriminalised homosexuality, gay behaviour causing a “public scandal” can be punished by up to twelve months’ jail. This vague law, which is open to wide interpretation, has often been used to arrest gay men merely because they happen to be effeminate and flamboyant.

Discreet open-air cruising in public squares and parks is nowadays mostly tolerated, although often kept under police surveillance. Most gay bars are semi-legal private house parties and are subject to periodic police raids. In 1997, Havana’s biggest gay bar, El Periquiton, was closed down by the police. One organiser of an unofficial gay bar, Lorenzo, confides: “The police can knock the door down at any moment and arrest everyone here ... instead of sending you to jail, these days they just fine you.” A typical fine for those who run gay bars from their homes or courtyards is about 1,500 pesos, which is nearly seven months’ wages. The police also usually confiscate the lights, sound systems and record collections.

Homosexuals are still deemed unfit to join the ruling Communist Party, because being gay is supposedly contrary to communist ethics. This can have an adverse impact on a person’s professional career in a society where all senior appointments depend on party membership.

Lesbian and gay newspapers and organisations are not permitted. The Cuban Association of Gays and Lesbians, formed in 1994, was suppressed in 1997 and its members arrested. Gay Cuba?

anarchist


Cuba

21.06.2007 22:26

So I'm not an expert on Cuba at all, but I recently saw this film:

The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
 http://www.powerofcommunity.org/

Get it via bittorrent if you don't want to buy it:

 http://onebigtorrent.org/details.php?id=1777

It's really good, so good it made me think, wow, I'd quite like to move there, rather than living in a state commited to a global programme of Imperial Genocide (the UK)...

Another film on Cuba that looks good is:

638 WAYS TO KILL CASTRO
 http://www.638waystokillcastro.com/

 http://onebigtorrent.org/details.php?id=1375 (though seeders are needed)

Oh and reposting rants from Peter Tatchell isn't very impressive...  http://www.galha.org/glh/213/cuba.html he doesn't have such a good track record...

Chris


Please, my dear anarchist...

21.06.2007 23:15


I propose you to inform yourself a little more about the Cuban ideas and practice related with sexuality, diversity and other human rights.
Don't try to repeat inconsistent lies extracted from some not updated "Black Book" dedicated to the Cuban Revolution, published in the CIA headquarters.


 http://www.cenesex.sld.cu/

 http://www.cenesex.sld.cu/webs/cenesex.htm

 http://www.cenesex.sld.cu/webs/diversidad/diversidad.htm

F Espinoza


Tatchell is neither credible, nor anarchist

22.06.2007 09:01

In 'modernize, ya daft commie twat ' "anarchist" provides us with an unattributed c+p from Peter Tatchell - former Labour Party candidate, Green Party member and purveyor of distorted reporting on all things gay.

 http://www.galha.org/glh/213/cuba.html

I reckon its the cubaphobic simon myself.

anarchist?