Cuba and ALA: Part III

Part III of Walter Skold's four part series on ALA's tepid reaction to the Cuban regime's crackdown on independent libraries is available at Frontpage Magazine:

After he was released from jail under Batista, the young Fidel Castro wrote that "In prison, there were no rifles for training, no stone fortresses from which to shoot. Behind those walls, our rifles were books. And through study, stone by stone we built our fortress, the only one that is invincible: the fortress of ideas."

Castro later told author David Caute that he read voraciously from St. Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Knox, Milton, Rousseau, Tom Paine— anything he could get his hands on.

By 1971, eleven years after “liberation,” he was pointing that ridiculous but dangerous finger of his at a convention of “culture” workers and declaring "Sometimes certain books have been published, the number does not matter. But as a matter of principle not a single book of such kind should be printed, not a single chapter, not a single page, not a single letter!"

In a speech that could have been given last week, he railed against Cuba’s critics by saying “And they think that this nation's problems can be the problems of two or three stray sheep which may have some problems with the revolution because they are not given the right to continue to sow poison, insidiousness, and intrigue in the revolution.”


Castro's Library Pass (Part III)