Castro, Literature and Libraries

Authored by Michael Pate on January 6th, 2004 at 7:06 PM

He had never really studied American literature, he said, and knew very little about it. This admission seemed strange, given Hemingway’s iconic position in Cuba, with his home a veritable holy site. In fact, it made one wonder whether for Castro there was something almost forbidden in the idea of the enemy’s even having a literature, or for that matter a spiritual life, at all. As Styron, unprepared for this display of Castro’s remoteness from the culture he was unceasingly castigating, tried to improvise a brief lecture on American literature’s high points, I wondered whether Castro might have been as remote from his own country as from ours. One is forever attributing informed wisdom to power, but in the face of the privation around him, should not a wise ruler who even in a free election would doubtless be re-elected, nevertheless recognize that after almost fifty years in supreme control the time had come to make way for a regime with new people and possibly more effective ideas? - Arthur Miller

Ann Sparanese, a member of the governing Council of the American Library Association, has written a letter to the Voice criticizing my columns about Fidel Castro’s prison sentences of 20 and more years for 75 Cuban dissenters, including 10 independent librarians. To her credit, she says, “I don’t have the right to speak for the entire American Library Association.” She is exercising her First Amendment right to speak for herself�the basis for the intellectual freedom, including the freedom to read, that until now the ALA has considered fundamental to people everywhere. - Nat Hentoff