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Mark
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 Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2008 8:31 pm Post subject: A Tale of Two Librarians |
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A Tale of Two Librarians
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/...ona/2008/07/a-tale-two-librarians
Excerpt:
My acquaintance with the library began several years ago when I was visited by two L.A.-area librarians who, along with others across the country, were supporters of Cuba’s libraries and of their Cuban colleagues. Their professional association, the American Library Association, was plagued by the impertinent demands of a New York City library employee named Robert Kent, who had made a few trips to Cuba in the late 1990s in support of a small number of paid dissidents who claimed to be independent librarians. Kent wanted the ALA to condemn Cuba for allegedly harassing these noble employees of the United States government and proclaim its institutional support for them. As ridiculous as the whole thing seems on its face, some actually allied themselves with Kent, including Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice and some Eastern Europeans—especially the professional anticommunist Vaclav Havel.
One problem Kent had was that he was finally caught with a fake passport, instructing one of the dissident librarians (an undercover agent) to take photographs and study the security of the house of Cuba’s first vice president, Carlos Lage Dávila. The agent, Aleida Godínez, is not, as Kent claimed, a dubious file of Cuba’s intelligence services, but a flesh-and-blood person who is willing to tell the story to anyone who cares to listen (see www.counterpunch.org/barahona06182005.html)
To set the record straight once again, Cuba has 413 public libraries, in addition to its 600 school libraries. They are so advanced that they offer special services to the disabled, such as talking books, books in Braille and others. There is also some Internet access for patrons to do research and programs created by professionals for children as young as three years to introduce them to the joys of reading.
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dyfet
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Joined: 26 Apr 2008
Posts: 15
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| Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2008 6:45 am Post subject: Re: A Tale of Two Librarians |
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| Mark wrote: | A Tale of Two Librarians
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/...ona/2008/07/a-tale-two-librarians
Excerpt:
My acquaintance with the library began several years ago when I was visited by two L.A.-area librarians who, along with others across the country, were supporters of Cuba’s libraries and of their Cuban colleagues. Their professional association, the American Library Association, was plagued by the impertinent demands of a New York City library employee named Robert Kent, who had made a few trips to Cuba in the late 1990s in support of a small number of paid dissidents who claimed to be independent librarians. Kent wanted the ALA to condemn Cuba for allegedly harassing these noble employees of the United States government and proclaim its institutional support for them. As ridiculous as the whole thing seems on its face, some actually allied themselves with Kent, including Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice and some Eastern Europeans—especially the professional anticommunist Vaclav Havel.
One problem Kent had was that he was finally caught with a fake passport, instructing one of the dissident librarians (an undercover agent) to take photographs and study the security of the house of Cuba’s first vice president, Carlos Lage Dávila. The agent, Aleida Godínez, is not, as Kent claimed, a dubious file of Cuba’s intelligence services, but a flesh-and-blood person who is willing to tell the story to anyone who cares to listen (see www.counterpunch.org/barahona06182005.html)
To set the record straight once again, Cuba has 413 public libraries, in addition to its 600 school libraries. They are so advanced that they offer special services to the disabled, such as talking books, books in Braille and others. There is also some Internet access for patrons to do research and programs created by professionals for children as young as three years to introduce them to the joys of reading. |
I for awhile was involved in library programs, especially to setup programs for enabling accessibility for the blind. It was something I started as a national project in Macedonia near the end of their civil war. I have also invited at the time to visit other countries, like Trinidad, there was interest and soon active projects to accomplish these things, and to further spread access to knowledge in general.
In the U.S., they are simply concerned poor people who have no other forms of access to information might view and learn about political things, or if it is to be believed, somehow choose to engage in viewing pornography in public. These filtering efforts are clearly about control, after all why else is the online site for the collective works of Marx, or the IWW, banned on these same filters claimed for pornography?
For libraries and learning in general in "modern" America it's not that people can read that matter, it's those who control the filters and what they can read that matters.
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